Marchers started assembling in the morning hours in downtown St Louis, where later in the day the Cardinals baseball team was set to host the San Francisco Giants in the first game of the National League Championship Series.
Spurred by a national campaign dubbed Ferguson October, a diverse crowd joined forces. Vietnam-era peace activists, New York City seminarians and hundreds of fast-food workers bused in from Chicago, Nashville and other cities marched alongside local residents. Four days of events are planned. They started Friday afternoon with a march outside the St Louis County prosecutor’s office in Clayton and renewed calls for prosecutor Bob McCulloch to charge Darren Wilson, a white officer, in the August 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black, unarmed 18-year-old, in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson. Wilson remains free and on administrative leave while a St Louis County grand jury weighs whether Wilson should face criminal charges. The US department of justice has opened a civil rights investigation of Brown’s shooting which led to a nationwide dialogue about interactions between minorities and police. ‘We still are knee deep in this situation,’ said Kareem Jackson, a St Louis rap artist and community organizer whose stage name is
Tef Poe. ‘We have not packed up our bags, we have not gone home. This is not a fly-by-night moment. This is not a made-for-TV revolution. This is real people standing up to a real problem and saying, `We ain’t taking it no more.’ The downtown march came hours before the Cardinals game at Busch Stadium.