Michael Brown and the Twisted Hagiography - Part 1

By Patrick Hall

It has been over eight years since the death of Michael Brown in a confrontation with law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri. This event gave birth to the “Hands-up-don’t-shoot myth,” which led to the riots in Ferguson. The same choreography would be repeated in many urban communities around the nation, where a routine police stop morphs into a tragic killing of a suspect. Michael Brown to Freddie Gray, from Breonna Taylor to the unnecessary death of George Floyd were all calamitous. However, the complexity of policing and maintaining a “semblance” of order within many crime-ridden urban areas was lost among the loud voices in black communities and the corporate media, who immediately screamed racist law enforcement.

 Young black men were being murdered by the police, went the refrain.  It was the secular doxology, repeated over and over again. Black organizations like the NAACP, NAN, Congressional Black Caucus, and BLM skillfully manufactured an almost hagiographic narrative whenever black suspects die at the hands of supposedly racist cops. It was anything but!

In the case of the death of Michael Brown, his untimely demise was not a story of martyrdom, as the black political class, BLM, and the Defund the Police catechumenate would have us believe.

Mr. Brown roughed up a convenience store operator and took some cigars. Officer Darren Wilson, who was on patrol in the neighborhood, spotted Mr. Brown. A confrontation ensued, where Michael repeatedly sucker-punched Officer Wilson in the face and tried to take his service revolver. Officer Wilson, who struggled with Mr. Brown for his gun, shot the “so-called unarmed black suspect” several times. However, the deification of Michael Brown’s “hands-up don’t shoot” lie became a cause de jure for Defund the Police sectators, professional athletes in the NFL and NBA, as well as black politicians like Cory Booker(D-NJ) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA).  Of course, the only problem with the story of an innocent black teenager being gunned down by racist white policemen was that it was all fabricated. Once more, it was a bald-faced lie.  It wasn’t even a believable lie once authorities reviewed events, which subsequently led to the acquittal of Officer Wilson.  BLM and other members of the Black political class were outraged at the verdict.  Black politicians like Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and Hakeem Jefferies (D-NY) seemed to be surprised when a young black thug went up to a policeman, cold-cocks him repeatedly in the head, and tried to relieve the officer of his firearm. The police officer may shoot you.  Duh!

However, in the twisted world of many within the black community and their advocates, black men are being murdered like the martyrs in Pre -Nicaean Christendom. It does not matter that today, the most significant danger to young black men is other black men. While high-profile (yet rare) incidents of police employing deadly force against a black suspect receive wall-to-wall coverage. Nothing is said concerning the thousands of black-on-black homicides that have occurred since the death of Michael Brown. While it is true that members of any group, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian, tend to commit homicide within their constituency. Blacks comprise approximately 13% of the United States population and are responsible for over 53% of all murders nationwide. According to DOJ and FBI statistics, in 2020, there were 9913 black homicides. Many of these murders were blacks killing other blacks. But these numbers are met with a loud silence from the Democratic Black political class and their supporters. Juxtapose this with police killings of blacks during the same period numbered less than 22. However, too many within the black community and their political enablers have a vested interest in propagating the false dogma, a socio-cultural writ, that the police are indiscriminately killing blacks.

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, National Catholic Reporter, Freedom's Journal Magazine, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]