Real spirit of St. Louis seen in protesters

ST. LOUIS — You could see the Gateway Arch, and you could see Busch Stadium. Standing in Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis six hours before the first pitch of the NLCS, you could also hear this from the locally bornand-raised rapper Tef Poe:

“We’ve lost another brother to the hand of the beast!”

Tef Poe was standing on a stage, shouting into a mic, earning cheers from those assembled. Then you looked over to the sidewalk to notice the first trickle of Cardinals fans filing toward the ballpark. A few stared and squinted; one guy rolled down his car window, asked what was happening and shook his head when I told him.

The organizers of FergusonOctober did not know that their weekend of protests would coincide with the annual celebration of fall baseball, but here it was, two worlds in an uneasy convergence (“Red October meets #FergusonOctober,” as a St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline put it).

“It’s sort of allegorical to what’s happening in the world,” said FergusonOctober spokesman Mervyn Marcano.

Just as the Cardinals are launching their latest playoff run, their city has become America’s epicenter of racial unrest. The town has simmered since August, when violence hit nearby Ferguson, Mo., following the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson – and this weekend it threatens to boil over again.

Coming days after St. Louis police shot and killed a black teen under different circumstances (Vonderrit Myers Jr. allegedly fired first at the officers, though relations are so frayed between police and the black community that members of the latter group expressed skepticism about that claim), FergusonOctober brought demonstrators from across the country to the feet of Busch Stadium.

One officer estimated that about 2,000 people marched downtown toward Kiener Plaza in the late morning, and attended an afternoon rally. The purpose of these actions, Marcano said, was to raise awareness about police brutality.

“We want to encourage people to go back home and start organizing in their own communities,” he said. “The question of police and police brutality has for a long time been the third rail of racial politics. With the ubiquity of smartphones, we’ve been in a different moment now.”

The reference to smartphones recalled a New York tragedy, when Staten Island man Eric Garner died of a heart attack in July, after an NYPD officer placed him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes. The incident was captured on video, which led to increased scrutiny and unrest.

Garner’s death is one of many stated reasons for this weekend’s demonstrations, events that have angered some Cardinals fans. In the division series, fans were caught on camera chanting “Africa! Africa!” and other racist bile, and at least one man affixed a homemade “I am Darren Wilson” nameplate to the back of a Cards jersey.

Prior to the NLCS, Barney’s Sports Pub, a 15-minute drive from the ballpark, planned to sell homemade “I am Darren Wilson” Cardinals merchandise on Saturday. When I walked into the place, a quiet, dark bar, a little after noon, the bartender declined to give his name, but said, “We aren’t doing that anymore.”

Barney’s had already been ridiculed on Deadspin, but its reasons for cancelling are unclear. When I asked to speak with the owner, the bartender refused to give me his contact info, willing only to take my name and number. The owner never called.

MLB spokesperson Matt Bourne later told me that the league intervened, because the shirts that read “Go Cards Darren Wilson” represented an unauthorized use of MLB “team names, logos and/or any other marks or graphics associated with any Major League Baseball team.”

Back in Kiener Square, black and white people alike held signs reading, “JAIL DARREN WILSON 4 MURDER.”

With every conversation in and near the ballpark, the depth of these issues became more apparent. An African-American stadium worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of his job, said, “The young people are angry at the cops, and that’s not going to stop. This boy (Brown), it was an execution.”

Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, whose team is deeply important to many here, expressed hope that baseball could facilitate unity.

“Baseball has done a great job of being… sometimes a distraction, sometimes a force that unifies,” Matheny said. “We have some hurt in our community right now, and hopefully this playoff baseball, and baseball in E general, can help that healing process.” lse where, healing seemed a distant, perhaps unattainable goal. In Kiener Plaza, a demonstrator who identified herself as Cheyenne said, “We want St. Louis to know in front of this arch that we aren’t going anywhere until you stop killing us.”