’14 Fellow Kima Jones Interviews ’14 Fellow Brian Gilmore for THE RUMPUS
THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN GILMORE
As the events in Ferguson, MO unfolded this August, I joined millions of other Americans to watch it play out on Twitter. This is all we knew: a young unarmed black man was shot, repeatedly, by a white police officer. The young man’s body laid dead in the street for four hours before he was taken to a coroner. No ambulance was called. No attempts to save his life were made. None of us will soon forget the grainy photo of a dead boy in a gray sweatshirt and khaki short pants, his navy blue underwear or his head turned eternally left. In the days after Mike Brown’s murder, we would watch the police descend on the people of Ferguson like a biblical plague. Protesters were harassed, arrested, shot with everything from tear gas to rubber bullets. Journalists began protecting the protesters until even the journalists weren’t safe from the human rights violations.
