Berkeley Talks: Michael Brown’s family on keeping his memory alive

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

[Music fades out]

Leigh Raiford: Good afternoon.

Audience: Good afternoon.

Leigh Raiford: For those of you who’ve come before, you know I start with a quote, and today I’m going to start with two. “Within the veil he was born, said I, and there within shall he live, a Negro and a Negro’s son. Holding in that little head, ah, bitterly, the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny dimpled hand, ah, wearily, to a hope not hopeless but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright, wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie. I saw the shadow of the veil as it passed over my baby, I saw the cold city towering above the blood-red land. I held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the star-children and the twinkling lights as they began to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced terror of my life.” W. E. B. Du Bois, Of the Passing of the First Born from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.

And my second quote, “What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying, to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death. It means work. It is work, hard, emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living.” Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being from 2016.

Welcome to the Black Studies Open University, the spring event series of the Abolition Democracy Fellows Program of the Black Studies Collaboratory, housed in the Department of African American Studies here at UC Berkeley. Today’s program, “Ferguson Rises: Black Grief, Insurgent Memory and the Politics of Transformation” has been curated by Abolition Democracy Dissertation Writing Fellow Rashad Arman Timmons, and it’s the fifth of nine events in our Black Studies Open University spring series.

My name is Leigh Raiford. I’m a professor of African American Studies and along with Dr. Tianna S. Paschel, co-director of the Black Studies Collaboratory. The BSC is a three-year initiative to explore and amplify the world building work of Black studies, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures initiative.

We have over the course of the first two years of this grant, welcomed artists, activists, archivists, and elders into the campus community. We have produced a robust event series in partnership with units on campus around the bay and across the country. We’ve awarded more than 40 grants of about $5,000 each to students, faculty, and staff, supporting innovative Black-centered collaborative projects. More than a third of which involve collaboration with off-campus partners.

We have supported the research and development of more than two dozen Black feminist scholars around the country and across the globe. And we are building long-term partnerships with Black-centered Bay Area organizations that are doing phenomenal work in health, education, art and food justice. You can find out more about our work at our website, blackstudiescollab.berkeley.edu.

We are here at the Berkeley Art Museum at the threshold of the UC Berkeley campus and the city of Berkeley. Cited on the territory of the Huichin, the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community, both town and gown, has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1868. In acknowledging the Ohlone history of this land, we acknowledge that the Ohlone people are thriving members of the Berkeley community who are actively imagining more just futures and engaging the tools that are needed to do that imaginative work.

One way to make concrete such acknowledgement is through the payment of Shuumi Land Tax, a material way for non-indigenous people living in the East Bay to participate in the repatriation of land to indigenous people. And you can find out more about Shuumi through the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. This series, the Black Studies Open University, is an effort to better understand the history and future of Black life on stolen lands. Today’s panel and series of related events so thoughtfully curated by Rashad asks us how we continue to insist Black life into the wake. That is the aftermath and ongoingness of anti-Black violence. The Black Studies Open University is a commitment to Black studies as a public good. We are inspired by the legacy of community campus pedagogical partnerships like the Afro-American Association Reading Group of the 1960s and the undergraduate-led democratic education at Cal, Decal courses.

We are inspired by SNCC’s Freedom Schools and the political education classes of the Black Panther Party, as well as the Oakland Community School, which we’ll be looking at turning to next week. And we take our name from the Open University in the UK spearheaded by Stuart Hall, whose work provides an example of the pinnacle of intellectual pursuits performed for the public good and in the public interest.

So, too, is the Black Cities Open University a recognition that knowledge is produced, circulated, and put into use in a range of locations. From the kitchen table to the seminar room, from the street corner to the concert stage, from the prison cell to the lecture podium. Above all the Black Studies Open University is an invitation to a mode of study that is always social and necessarily collaborative. It’s an invitation to dream together, to fight together, and to practice together for new more just ways of living. It’s great to see so many folks who’ve been here before. It’s great to welcome people who are here for the first time. We hope that you will continue to join us throughout the series. Before I introduce Rashad, who will be moderating today’s panel, I want to thank the beautiful collective of people who’ve made today in this series possible. The fantastic staff at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. BSC, project manager extraordinaire, Barbara Montano, BSC graduate student assistants, Franchesca Araújo and Alexandra Gessesse.

The Department of African American Studies helmed brilliantly by chair and professor, Nikki Jones, with incredible staff support from Sandy Richmond, Lindsey Villarreal, and Maria Heredia. Our ASL Interpreters, Kat and Alina from Pro Bono ASL, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Today’s panelists Michael Brown Sr.

We thank you for making the time to join us. We want to thank the ancestors who are with us always. We thank you for joining us today.

And I want to thank abolition democracy dissertation writing fellow Rashad Arman Timmons for thoughtfully curating this conversation today. Rashad Arman Timmons is a community builder, a keyboardist, a writer and Black feminist educator from Detroit, Michigan, a beloved child of factory workers, urban gardeners, prayer warriors and musicians, Rashad is a lifelong student of the ways Black folks manipulate and adorn the built environment to envision freedom. Rashad is a doctoral candidate in African diaspora studies and new media studies here at UC Berkeley. Rashad’s dissertation explores urban infrastructures as critical sites where the lived social relations that come to define blackness are enacted, visualized and challenged. Specifically, he engages how Black subjects in Ferguson, Missouri reorder sentimented geographies of power by seizing infrastructures as sites of Black political insurgency, wake work, tactual disruption and sabotage.

Rashad’s work and care make clear the practice that care is the antidote to violence. So Rashad has a special event for us today. This program will end probably at 2:30 p.m., and we will need to vacate the theater right after. But we invite folks to continue the conversation in the atrium just outside the theater. And with that, I hand it over to Rashad Arman Timmons.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you, Professor Raiford for introducing me and making space, and thank all of you for being here today. This is, y’all don’t even know. This is remarkable. I’m so appreciative. I hope that as we gather today you’ll reflect on the life and memory of Michael Brown and Jr. I hope that you will reconnect with your grief, and I hope that you will feel held in it. Thank you for sharing this moment with me. It’s one that I’ve dreamed of and envisioned for a long time, and it feels so joyous and purposeful to be sharing in it with you.

I could spend the entire two hours of our time today thanking folks in this room, and even then there wouldn’t be enough time. And so if I may, I want to take the time to extend just a few thank yous.

First, I want to thank Mike Sr. And Cal for traveling here to be with us, for sharing your light and your pain with us, and for trusting me particularly to convene this way. I know that the work y’all do is work that y’all have done every day since Aug. 9, 2014, and each day it does not get any easier and I don’t take that for granted. So I just love you all and appreciate you so much for trusting me to be here and for sharing space with us.

I want to thank the Black Studies Collaboratory for making this vision possible, for creating a space for me to dream a radically different world than the one that we have and have inherited. And for creating the conditions for me to live and learn and study in ethical relation with people I love and care about deeply. Thinking, learning, feeling, laughing, eating, all of the things with you all has been one of the greatest lessons of my life and every day I’m so thankful and honored to share it.

Finally, I want to thank my partner, [inaudible], for making space for me to grieve, for grieving with me hard and for loving me even harder. I love you so much and your companionship means everything to me. And anytime I get a platform to share it publicly and loudly, I will.

Before we move forward, I want to acknowledge the ancestors, those who are no longer with us physically, but always powerfully present. Given where and why we gather today, I want to lift up three ancestors in particular, Kayla Moore. Kayla Moore was and is a beloved daughter, an aunt, a sister and friend whose life was stolen right here in Berkeley by the Berkeley Police Department in February 2013. Kayla, we love you. We see and adore you, and we feel you all around in the room.

Oscar Grant III. Oscar Grant was and is a beloved son, a father, a nephew, and friend whose life was stolen by Bart Police on New Year’s Day in 2009. When I first moved to Oakland in August 2017, I took Bart from Fruitvale Station to this campus every day and every evening on my way back home. Oscar was always with me on those commutes, and Oscar is still with me and with all of us. Oscar, we love you. We see and adore you, and we feel you all around in the room.

I made this tweet more than eight years ago after a grand jury in St. Louis County concluded that Darren Wilson’s theft of Michael Brown Jr.’s precious life did not warrant any investigation. In many ways a lot remains the same. My heart is still heavy. Sometimes the tears still fall. I’m still striving to move toward a world truer than this one. And I’m still trying my best to stand with Mike Junior and those who feel his absence the most.

But today also feels different. Today even as the grief feels palpable, I feel full among you all. My 21-year-old self is in delightful disbelief. The young man who authored the tweet that y’all see on the screen could not have imagined a gathering like this one here.

Mike Sr. and Cal, when we first met, I told y’all the truth. I’ve spent the last eight years aspiring to be in meaningful community with you all. And you being here now and trusting me to convene this way feels like a dream. But I know that this is reality, and specifically a reality where your nightmare has already happened and continues to happen again and again. It is a reality that Audre Lorde writes where it’s open season on Black children and our worst lullaby goes on over and over and over. And so I want to say in this public space, in this often nightmarish real life to you here on the historical record, that I am embedded, I am honored, and I’m ready. I vow to antagonize this world with you. I vowed to be a vessel and a comrade in grief and a struggle, and I mean that with everything that I have.

And to Mike. Mike, a beloved son, a brother, a caretaker, a friend, and someone who without even knowing me, has changed my life radically. Despite all those who’ve tried to desecrate your memory, we all know the truth. You are cherished and beautiful. The world knows your name and we hold it sacred today and always. We will defend you by refusing this world. We grieve you, which is another way of saying that we care for you and we love you in the present tense. We remember you and we cannot forget you, Mike. Mike, we love you. We see and adore you, and we feel you all around in the room.

A note on grief. We grieve because we care. We grieve because we love. And we grieve because we remember. I feel a responsibility to say this, to acknowledge grief for what it truly is, an ethical act of care, a radical act of love, and a persistent triumph of memory. When we grieve the Black dead and dying, we enact an urgent care for them. We profess a vigilant love over them and nurture a commitment to remember them. Christina Sharpe in her beautiful theorizing calls the unison of these practices wake work. “Wake work,” she writes, “describes how we attend to physical, social, and figurative death, and also to the largeness that is Black life, or Black life insisted from death. Wake work describes how we imagine, defend and care for Black lives always already threatened in our present or the future that chattel slavery made possible.”

My research examines how Black grief, our commitment to care, love, and remember Black life compels us to imagine a different world. It is broadly concerned with the past and the present and how the built environment around us shapes our experience of race and vice versa. In particular, I study the racial politics of infrastructure. I observe how things such as the pipes that route water into our places of shelter, the cables that carry our energy and information, and the roads that organize our daily movement, all shape our experience of geography and race. To put it plainly, my research suggests that by observing how infrastructure functions, when and where it breaks down, when and where it violates or constrain life, we can also observe how race functions in a spacialize in society.

And we know this relationship well. Some of the most devastating racial and environmental catastrophes in popular memory were onset by crises of infrastructure and geographic marginality. Does anyone in the room have a sense of where this photo might have been taken and what it might be a picture of? You can call it out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m hearing Katrina. Yeah, Ninth Ward, New Orleans. Right, so this is an image that was taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2005. How about this one here?

Audience: Flint.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Flint. Yeah. Flint, Michigan. This photo was taken in Flint, Michigan, at a hospital actually in 2014 during the Flint water crisis. So, our ability to recognize these images suggests that we are familiar with when and where infrastructures fail and who suffers when they do. It reveals how deeply we understand infrastructural violence, or how in this case corroded pipes violate Black life and how broken levees facilitate Black premature death. This relationship explains why infrastructure persists as an object of Black political attention and activity across time. Thus, my research also examines how Black people perform wake work in and against the built environment. How we disrupt urban infrastructure to reimagine space, and reappropriate it to honor and defend Black life. Wake work transforms the transit station into a site of memory. Wake work transforms the street intersection into a monument to stolen life. And wake work transforms the street corner into a place of prayer.

Wake work or the performance of Black grief alters the prescribed functions of infrastructure. And in turn, it disrupts the dominant functioning of race and space that forces us to accelerate and move past Black death. Black grief, in other words, brings the anti-Black world to a halt. And so a key argument of my work maintains that Black grief is a geographic endeavor that demands the transformation of racial and spatial order.

The second chapter of my dissertation examines how Black grief transforms infrastructure and geography in Ferguson, Missouri. It explores how Black grief reorganizes space and becomes embedded in the built environment. So much so that satellites in space can identify scenes of lethal violence and re-memory.

Scenes of lethal violence and re-memory. And in exploring this, my beloved panelists have been the best interlocutors and teachers, and I’m excited to ask them about some of these themes today. Michael Brown, Sr. is a husband, father, transformative public speaker, forgiveness coach and co-founder of the Michael Brown Sr. Chosen for Change Organization. After the devastating murder of his son, Mike Brown, Jr. in 2014, he embarked on a mission to provide care and support to families processing unthinkable loss. Turning his own pain into power, Michael has dedicated his life to transforming inner city communities through youth empowerment and strengthening mournful families through collective healing. Michael is especially committed to offering radical aid to ailing fathers, because their experiences of parental grief are often minimized and discounted by society. Toward this effort, he convenes the organization’s Chosen Fathers program to provide a compassionate gathering space for fathers who have lost children to state and police violence. Michael loves to eat Cal’s cooking, Michael loves working on cars, Michael loves spending time with family and friends, and Michael loves creating meaningful change with his village. I want to welcome Michael Brown, Sr.

Cal D. Brown is a wife, a mother, a community healer, a change agent, and a co-founder of the Michael Brown Sr. Chosen for Change Organization. She is a passionate advocate for families across the world grieving the loss of a child to violence. A firm believer that community care can help parents cope, heal, and reinvent themselves. After tragic loss, she co-leads grief support circles, resource drives, advocacy campaigns and youth mentoring programs. These initiatives strengthen heartbroken families and build safer environments for marginalized youth to live freely. Cal loves to cook, she loves spending time with friends and family, and above all, she loves spreading light in her community. Let’s please give Cal D. Brown a round of applause.

We will transition into the panel conversation. And I want to start off this section that I’ve titled Black Grief and Insurgent Memory, which is a way for us to think about not only Black grief, but our commitment to keeping Michael Brown Jr.’s name and legacy alive and uplifted, right? Racial domination, as I mentioned yesterday, in its most intimate sense, is an insult on our memory, right? It tries to introduce a pain so large that we don’t want to remember or that we plead to forget, or that our minds reach a limit where we cannot remember, right? And so insurgent memory is a way to call in an assault to that kind of order, right? How we continue to keep these names uplifted, how we continue to call in the memory of our loved ones. I want to begin with a question about Mike Jr.’s life. It’s so important for us to remember that Mike Jr.’s life and the lives of other folks who have been stolen by state violence are not reducible to the fatal encounter that made them famous, right? Before they were famous, Mike Jr. was beloved and dear to you all first. And so I want to open with just creating space for you all to share who Mike Jr. was, what did he cherish and hold dear? What do you love about him? How did he show up in the world for his community and for his family?

Michael Brown, Sr.: Mike was always a big guy growing up. He was very good with his hands. He was a jokester. It’s one joke that tickled him to death before he passed in 2014 on April Fool’s Day, really didn’t realize it was April Fool’s Day because I was working and moving around, but this guy called me and told me he had a baby on the way and hung the phone up. He called me and told me he had a baby on the way and hung up the phone on me. I was at work at the time when he called me. I had to have that feeling that whole day until I got off work. Because I called him back, he wouldn’t answer the phone.

I’m like, it got to be real. If he ain’t answering the phone, he just feel like he got it off and he don’t want to talk about it no more, but we going to talk about this. I end up talking to him later on that night and like, “What’s up boy? What’s this about you got a girl pregnant?” He like, “Man, daddy, it’s April 1. It’s April Fool’s Day.” I’m like, “What?” He got me all day in my feelings and he just Jeffing. We used to have water fights in the house, water everywhere. We had fun. When Mike was a big dude, we had a pool in the backyard and he was just jumping in, water just splash all over the kids just standing around the pool. Because he was 6’4, 290. He was a big guy.

He definitely had his own role as far as his life. Mike wanted to be a rapper. I told him, “Shut that down. You ain’t being none of that shit.” But I told him, overall, “Let’s get some schooling and just look at that as a hobby.” And the day he said that, we were out to eat after he graduated and I went to the restaurant and he told Cal that the world was going to know his name and he was going to come back and shake the world. And God dammit he did it. He did it in a way that I didn’t even understand that that’s what overall that was going to be. But he definitely impact the world. He said he was going to be bigger than Pac and Biggie. The world do know his name, I will say that.

But in finding himself, he did working with his hands. He wanted to go to Vander Rock and do heating and cooling. He had his own plan and sadly was taken away from him, but he was a good guy, man. That was my best man in my wedding. He the one that gave me my rings to give it to her. We don’t wear rings no more, but he gave us the ring to pass on. And a lot of people, you never really heard of someone’s son being their best man in they wedding. That just lets people know the relationship that we had or that we still have because I think about them all the time. I still talk to him. People might think that’s weird, but I don’t care. He’s still in the presence of me. But that’s just a little bit of him from my perspective. I don’t know if you want to say something. You want to say something?

Cal D. Brown: I do.

Michael Brown, Sr.: OK. Go ahead.

Cal D. Brown: It make me a little emotional just hearing about him. I didn’t get the privilege of having Mike in my life for 18 years. I only got him for three years, and in those three years, he truly made a big impact on my life. Within the first few months I was diagnosed with heart disease and I was six months pregnant, and my heart was functioning at less than 25%. I had to have my daughter, my seventh child at 28 weeks. And they told me that I could never work again, and I was a nurse at the time. Our life completely got turned upside down. Mike had to be the breadwinner, and because he had to go back to work, he sicced his son on me.

Because I was deemed to not do anything but just take care of myself. And Mike would tell Mike, “Mike, I got to go to work and I need you to make sure Cal cool.” And of course me being me, I’m hardheaded. I want to move around and try to do things. He like, “Hey, my daddy said you not supposed to do nothing.” I would go in the bathroom and try to have a moment. And here he come, do, do, do. “Yes?” “What you doing?” “I’m in the bathroom.” “But you’ve been in there too long.” And then I would try to go to the mailbox. He like, “No, you can stand in the door and watch me go to the mailbox.” And I just remember him being so overprotective of me. And when the summer came, the kids were in summer camp. Me and him got to just spend a lot of time together. And me and Mike, we connected on a spiritual tip.

Of course, I told him about the things that I went through in my life and he like, “How do you continue to serve God the way that you do?” And I said, “Well, one thing I learned a long time ago is favoring prayer.” And God has continued, no matter what I’ve been through, he’s continued to show up over and over again. And so he was appalled by my faith after going through so much. And me and Mike read the entire Bible together. And about 60 days before his death, we finished it and Mike began to speak the gospel to his friends. That was actually the stories that they told us when we were standing out there Aug. 9. They was like, “He was telling us all about God.”

I remember when we lost Mike, we were homeless. We had lost everything in a fire a few months before. And we went and stayed at my sister’s house and he called us and he was like, “What y’all doing?” We like, “Nothing. We just over here chilling.” He was like, “I got something to show you. I fixing to text you something and when you get the picture, call me back.” We looked at the picture and it was a picture of a beautiful sunset. And it had been raining for a couple of days and it’s just after it rain how beautiful it is. He called back and he was like, “Y’all see it?” And we was like, “See what?” And he was like, “You don’t see what’s going on in the picture?” And we like, “We see the sunset, we see the trees.” He like, “Nah, if anybody should see it, Cal, I would think you would see it.”

Me, him, my mama, the kids, we standing around and we all looking at this picture on the phone like what is he talking about? And he was like, “Look in the right-hand corner. He said, I see the devil chasing an angel into the eyes of God.” 10 days later, he lost his life. And the week that Mike was killed, I was in the hospital and he called and Big Mike answered the phone and they talked for a brief minute and he was like, “Daddy, I got something to tell you.” And he was like, “What, son?” He was like, “I don’t think Cal going to make it.” His dad got upset with him and got off the phone with him. And when I came in the room from testing, Mike was all upset and disgruntled and I’m like, “Babe, what’s wrong?” And he was like, “That boy, your son.”

And I was like, “What’d he do?” He was like, “He going to tell me he don’t think you’re going to make it.” And I said, “Did you ask him why?” He was like, “No, I got upset and I got off the phone.” I said, “Well, Mike not the type of guy that say something and not have a reason for it.” That was a Tuesday. That Thursday they were discharging me from the hospital and Mike called as I was getting discharged and he like, “Hey.” I’m like, “Hey, how you doing?” He’s like, “I’ve been calling you for days and you’ve been out or whatever.” His phone was broke actually, the picture I just told you about, after he showed us that picture, that brand new phone never worked again. And he like, “My daddy upset with me.” And I said, “Well, why?” He said, “I told him I didn’t think you was going to make it.” And I said, “Well, why you say that?” He said, “Because I keep having dreams of death. I see bloody sheets hanging on the clothes line.” And when we went out there Aug. 9, he was under a bloody sheet.

Yep. But Mike was a good kid. He was respectful, he was humble. He had love and empathy for anything that had life. The way that he treated his grandmothers, you would’ve thought they was his girlfriends. He checked up on them all the time. He made sure they had what they needed. He commuted back and forth from both of them and just the love and the time and the attention that he showed his siblings was just unbelievable. Mike tried to make sure everybody was all right. That’s why when I hear the things that the officer says, it’s just absolutely unbelievable to me because that’s not the person that I know.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you all so much for sharing that and giving us a… Like I tell y’all all the time, so many ways that we’ve had an entry point into learning or knowing about Mike Jr. has been from people who never knew him, right? So much about what was written about him, all of the ink spilled, all of the broadcast footage ran were from people who didn’t know his name before Aug. 9, 2014, right? It feels truly deep and special for us to get an invitation into knowing him in a different way through you all, right? I want to ask y’all about, yeah, because the things that took place on Aug. 9, 2014 and losing Mike had been scripted and narrated by so many people who did not know him. That has been what has dominated about how we come to understand those events. And I want to ask y’all if it feels comfortable and safe to speak to, what are some of the things that you wish people knew about that day or perhaps what you wish people knew about y’all’s family and y’all’s community in the aftermath of that tragedy?

Michael Brown, Sr.: Well, I would say definitely that they tried to demonize Mike as a human, and tried to portray him as just this bad person and this giant-

Cal D. Brown: Monster.

Michael Brown, Sr.: Monster or whatever you want to call it, this demon, right? The lawyer actually found footage that was hidden, right? When the officer wanted to put out the narrative that they wanted out there for the public to see as far as Mike Strongarm, the owner at the Ferguson Market, what the lawyer did was actually got the same footage because it happened to get on YouTube and he went through it and he rewinded the tape. And what he come to find was Mike was in the store at 1:30 that morning and he like, “What the hell?” That’s like a jewel though. It basically explained why Mike was there, right? It was a trade between some weed and some blunts that people was to see or check out Ferguson Rises.

I mean Stranger Fruit, I’m sorry, Stranger Fruit was on the Starz app, right? It shows the whole coverup. If the world just knew that it was an explanation for people that are known for bartering, because that’s basically what that was, that’s what they do. They come in our community and if we can’t afford certain things, we barter with them. It is just been since they’ve been coming in our community, right? And we’ll note that truth as far as why later on that day, because that’s already AM when they closed and they open back up in the AM, right? People would know that the owner actually didn’t know what the nephew and the son does at night. He was just only going back for what he was owed, and he was going to get that. And it looked real bad when he was getting it, right?

Just the actual truth on that because when they actually put that out there and really didn’t have any facts on why he was stopped or anything, they threw that out there to paint the picture of the person that they want the world to see and want the world to understand that this guy was bad, so why are y’all standing up in the street for him? That was actually a distraction to shut it all down. And what it didn’t do was it didn’t do what they wanted to do. All it did was fuel it. Yeah, that’s why I want the world-

Cal D. Brown: Especially when the police chief says that Darren Wilson stopping Mike had nothing to do with the supposed Strongarm robbery. Darren Wilson didn’t even know about what happened in the store. They obtained their video days after.

Michael Brown, Sr.: Mm hmm.

Cal D. Brown: That’s why they withheld his name because they wanted to try to find something tangible to stop what was going on. Yeah.

Michael Brown, Sr.: And the whole time, Mike never had a police report. His police report is empty. There’s nothing on it.

Cal D. Brown: But there is a report on the supposed Strongarm robbery.

Michael Brown, Sr.: That nobody knew about.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank y’all for sharing that. I appreciate that. Yeah. I think I’m going to wait one second. Sorry. Yeah. I think it feels important for me to ask y’all what y’all wish people knew, right, instead of what we’ve been received and given. To close out this section of questions, I want to ask a final one. And I want to read this one so I make sure I get the quote right. I once heard one of your community members, I want to say it was Tory Russell. Yeah. He said that “Ferguson taught the world how to fight back,” right? “And Big Mike, I’ve heard you talk a lot about, and you too Cal, learning how to turn your pain into power,” right?

“I think both of those processes, using grief to fuel or compel your will to fight back or turning your pain into power is something I think Black folk and marginalized folk and oppressed peoples all across the world are trying to practice and figured out how to make sense of.” I’m wondering if y’all could talk for a moment about how grief has informed your power. And I know y’all have days where it just ain’t happening. It’s like this, it’s not going to happen today, but y’all keep showing up for the fight, right? And so I’m curious what the role of grief has been in keeping you all committed to healing, committed to justice and committed to a different world.

Cal D. Brown: Grief has forced us in the spaces that we are in. We didn’t have a choice. That’s the difference. We didn’t choose this, it chose us. There’s a lot of days that there’s pushback from both of us, but because the position we are in, it’s a must that we continue to show up for the community and show up for people who know the pain that we go through. We didn’t really get to begin to grieve until about the fifth year, to be honest. We were pushed and pulled in so many different ways that we really couldn’t keep up mentally, but physically we kept going because we thought that was what was needed to seek justice and to keep Mike’s name out there.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. But again, I’ll say we’ve been forced to grieve, forced to take action, and most of all, we want to show up because we don’t want anybody else to ever have to feel like this. This is something that you wouldn’t even wish on your worst enemy. There’s not a book on how to grieve, there’s not a book on how to cope, to heal and or reinvent yourself. But we show up in those spaces and we try to teach the people who are in our community to the best of our ability. Even on our worst days. I do a grief support series called Cookies and Convo, and I’ve took every class there is on how to deal with grief. And I put an agenda together and I be excited. And I get in there in the room with all of those mothers and fathers and it’s literally like kryptonite.

He’ll tell you, I have everything planned out, food, the whole nine. And I get in that room and I see those broken hearts and those somber faces and it’s literally like kryptonite. It drains me. And then I have to pass a task on to the next person and the next person. But I done spent weeks putting this together. My next Cookies and Convo is March 16th. I have everything down to a T, but the minute I walk in that room, it just takes everything for me. But it’s something we have to do because who else is going to do it? Someone who has not been through what we’ve been through cannot lead spaces like that. It happens. Is it effective? In some ways, yes. But people like Mike and people like Uncle Bobby are not so receptive to it because they like, “You don’t know what I’ve been through. You don’t understand my pain.” Yeah.

Michael Brown, Sr.: I don’t know. Every day still different for me. I get in the mood and just say, “I ain’t doing nothing. Don’t bother me, leave me the fuck alone.” And I feel that I am deserving of that. And I feel like I don’t owe nobody nothing. And I feel like I have to still take time off of myself so I can be a better, and I don’t ever want to push agenda of me not being in the right space that day and then still trying to, because I don’t want to spaz out. You know what I’m saying? Then the mission, we lose and I don’t want them to win. That’s my whole biggest thing. I don’t ever want them to win, to get two licks off my family like that. You know what I’m saying? And that’s why I take-

… and that’s why I take a lot of time to myself like that because at one point my health had changed. Man, I was so angry. I’m serious. I was looking for this guy. And I ain’t scared to tell the world I was looking for him. And in the way of not finding him and being so angry and waking up, it started taking a toll on my body. So when my body started trying to calm down from being so amped and mad, my body like, “Hold on. I ain’t felt like that in a long time. What is this?” Because it was so round up, like, “Hold on. What’s this?” So I started feeling pain in my chest. I say, “Oh, yeah? He think he going to win like this?” So now I have to get myself together. So if I’m not in the right space, I don’t want to overwork myself and end up passing out, dying. And guess what he does? He wins. So…

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you all so much, man. You all please get him a round of applause. We’ll transition to.

Michael Brown, Sr.: Rashad did say this was raw and uncut, so I’m giving it to you.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Sorry, you all. There we go. OK. I want to talk a bit about Canfield and particularly, yeah, the importance you all feel or why it feels important for you all to continue to show up there. So every year, Mike and Cal with the Chosen for Change organization they organize was called the annual Michael Brown Jr. Weekend, which happens annually in August. And on Aug. 9 every year, the family convenes the community to come out to Canfield Drive and gather and build a memorial at the site where Mike Jr. was killed and left in the street for four and a half hours.

And so one of the things that’s been most just instructive for me is getting to learn from you all about the importance of ritual, the importance of commemoration and also you all’s commitment to very tangibly transforming the infrastructure on Canfield Drive, changing the streets, trying to create space to congregate and honor the life and memory of your son. And so I want to ask a few questions about that. The first one I want to ask is, I think just that question. Why has it felt important for you all to show up in the space, the space and the site of tragedy, to continue to go to that place every year, to convene and gather you all’s community there? Yeah.

Cal D. Brown: First and foremost, we don’t want them to forget. The minute we stop showing up in Canfield, they think it’s over. So every year, as long as we have the ability and breath in our body, we going to shut west Florissant down, we going to shut Canfield down, we going to disrupt and be disobedient in every way that we can. We have always been respectful of the people who reside in Canfield and we’ve always been respectful of the owners. And we go and we sit down with them and we tell them exactly what we going to do. And at this point, they understand that is in their best interest to agree, because if we go back to the community and say, “They say we can’t come in Canfield,” or what is it called now? Pleasantview, Pleasantview, it is going to be a problem.

Every way possible in Ferguson, they’ve tried to erase what happened to Mike. They changed the name of Canfield. They’ve taken the tree down. At one point they burned a portion of the memorial. And the community came back and we have continued to show up every birthday, every Aug. 9. That’s a sacred space. If you’ve been out there, you know what it feels like to go stand in the middle of Canfield. It’s really a feeling that you cannot explain. You feel his presence there. So as long as his presence is there, our presence will be there. We call that ground zero. That’s an important space not only to us but to the activists in the community. Many of them slept in tents in the rain, sleet and cold out there. That is the place that they have congregated for years, show up in that space and shut shit down. And they understand that that is a place that we would like to change the name of the street and make it a beautiful space for the children, but of course we continue to get pushback over and over again.

And we actually laid off them for a while because after you do something so much, it gets tiresome. You get weary. But we got something for them this year. By the ten year, they’re going to make something happen in that space or we going to make something happen in that space.

Michael Brown, Sr.: So I do want to say if it wasn’t for the community, you guys would’ve never seen Mike laying on the ground for four and a half hours. My purpose for going over there… A lot of people don’t talk about the tanks either. It’s a lot of people who lost their livelihood, their jobs, where they stay at because they had to end up putting the curfew up there. And military uniform officers block both ends of the streets. So if they went in or got off their job at a certain time, they couldn’t even come into their home. So to just go back over there and had a chance to pay some bills at one time in November of 2014 and show our love and respect to the people that made this big, bigger than big, because if it wasn’t for them, I just probably would’ve found out Mike had got killed and that was it.

It was always the people that rises up and show love and support for people that they don’t even know and different in many ways. And that’s one of the ways that the world got a chance to see truth and we were able to make some big noise behind it and representation for all the other ones that has been killed in St. Louis that was thrown up under the rug. So for the community to stand up like that, that’s what we have to do. We have to stand with them. And I’m proud to be a part of them too. So I worked on stop.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I’m glad that you brought up that they were barricading the streets off because that’s something that people don’t know and it made it really difficult for people to leave and come in. And that’s get into some of the things that I was talking about earlier with this idea around infrastructural violence. You can literally control the infrastructure and really disrupt people’s livelihoods. And even in the design of the space. Yeah. I walk the same sidewalks that’s on Canfield and those sidewalks are not walkable. I talk with Dorian Johnson, Mike Jr.’s friend who was with him and he was like, “Man, we was just walking back from the store, chilling and kicking it.” And if we wanted to actually be able to chill and kick it and share a space with each other, we didn’t have enough space over there, we just walked in the street like everybody always do.

So those kinds of things, how the design of the landscape also facilitates these points of contact and encounter between police and Black people. So I love that you all have talked about, yeah, there are these ways that the space gets imposed on us in these kinds of ways, but we also get to show up and make sense of how this space works for us and how we get to live and inhabit it too. So I just am so appreciative for you all for sharing that.

And the final question I’ll ask in this section before we talk about Chosen for Change, I just want to ask and give you all a chance to talk about the vision that you all have for Canfield. Yeah. You all have been petitioning and demanding change to the infrastructure on Canfield since 2014. Right. And particularly you all had put together a petition right to the mayor and to the council members, one, to rename Canfield Drive two Michael Brown Jr. Boulevard, two, to install a permanent median in the section of the street where Mike Jr. Perished, that there would be a memorial place there and a marker place there. And then also at the intersection of Canfield and Caddy Field, which is diagonal to the site where he perished the installing of a green space and a roadside marker.

And when I learned about that and found out about that, I just thought that that was so deep and beautiful to think about how you all wanted to transform that space to be more accommodating of loving and honoring and celebrating him. Right. So I wanted you all to talk a little bit about the motivations behind some of those visions. Why change the name? Why install a median? What’s the significance of that? And you talked a bit about the pushback, Cal, but I hope you all could talk a little bit more about what’s the status of the vision and what are you all pushing for moving forward.

Cal D. Brown: More than anything, we wanted Canfield to be a safe space. You’ve been there before. They fly up and down the street and it’s just really not a safe space for the children. That be one of the reasons that Mike and Dorian were walking down the middle of the street. That particular summer, the trees was grown over over the sidewalk, so you would have to at some point go into the streets. The infrastructure aspect of it, we talked about that early on with people in the community and they all actually had input on what they wanted it to look like. We just wanted it to be a safe space, a beautiful space, something that was be fitting and the honor of Mike. Something so ugly happened in that space, so it only made sense to transform it into something beautiful.

We’ve had major pushback. We knew racist Nos wasn’t going to give us nothing. Actually, the prior owner of Canfield, Lipton, Lipton said… His exact words was, “Who the hell would want to live on Michael Brown Jr. Boulevard?” And we was like, “Wow. Really?” He was like, “Would nobody…” I said, “Why wouldn’t they? Look at what happened there.” And he was just like… He pretty much wanted to erase what happened in that space. And that’s one of the reasons he sold a property because he like, “I don’t really want to deal with them and I see that they’re not going to stop. They’re going to keep coming back every year over and over again.” So he sold the property and Lipton has owned it probably since the beginning, for decades. Yeah. So I feel like that was a success in pushing Lipton into selling.

The new owners are more receptive. There’s some pushback, but I think the pushback is more from the city, like the current Black mayor, Ella Jones, who say she’s for the people, but she ain’t for our people because Mike Brown Jr. got you in that place. There is no other reason why you was elected in that place and in that space and you’re going on with their years of agenda by not helping us do it. But she going to have a seat at our table because we going to bring the table this go around. Yeah.

Michael Brown, Sr.: So me personally, I feel like it’s very important because we have a lot of people that travel to Canfield and we don’t have the right information out there for people because we still do travel. So we used to have people call us like, “Hey. We just seen a busload of people going down Canfield. We know they’re fixing to help out. Where you guys at?” By the time, we out of town. And two, you have residents that’s there that will come out and act like they know what was going on and mislead the people. So we definitely do need markings and information for people that just want to know what this walk down this street was that day from A to Z and they can kind of relive it with the emotional point to understand.

Cal D. Brown: With the correct information.

Michael Brown, Sr.: The correct. Yeah. So that’s something that we definitely need to get done as soon as possible because like I say, people are in and out trying to just… And then it doesn’t have any type of contact information to even try to reach us to even try to have a conversation about those things. You know what I’m saying? Because we can send a representation person down there if we can’t make it, but we don’t really even know when they are even there. We will hear about it later. And I don’t think that that’s fair. So we have to do something for the community to be able to understand and get a vision of what that day was 2014.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you all. I’m going to take a second for them to transition, and I’ll click us to the next portion. So yeah, this space, I just wanted to open it up for you all to talk about the work that you all are doing with the Chosen for Change organization. I know we kind of mentioned some of the programs. I talked about Chosen Fathers in the introduction. I talked about Cookies & Convo. And so I wanted to talk about the work you all are doing to transform Canfield. So I wanted to open it up and give you all space to talk about the organization, its work, its mission, and ultimately how people can support and find their way into the work.

Cal D. Brown: We are the Michael Brown Sr. Chosen for Change organization. We provide care and support to fathers and family processing the unthinkable and abroad. We have a new program that we will be launching in May of 2023 called First 48. We feel like this program is very important. I know there are some people who briefly do the work here and there, but it’s something that needs to consistently happen because grieving families are constantly disrespected, disregarded and most of all mishandled in the most vulnerable time in their life. And I think that it’s unfair. And we were able to decide on doing this by the way that we were treated when we lost Mike.

A lot of the times people get so entangled in the person we’ve lost and they forget about the people who are left behind. And when you lose a child, you just about lose your damn mind. And you need people around you who are safe, who are honest, who have your best interests at heart, want to make sure you have the proper resources to make sure you’re being handled properly when it comes to law enforcement, because if I think back, Mike and Lesley didn’t even get to identify their son’s body. The next time they saw their son after Aug. 9 was two weeks later at the funeral because of the coverup and the lies and the lack of their other because there’s not a book on how to lose your child. Nobody knows what to do when they lose their child. So it has to be someone in the community that you trust who shows up, who is strictly there for you, not for their own agenda, not for all of that other mess. That is a very important and sacred space after you lose your child.

So the First 48 will deploy people who we trust and who have been trained in grief support in the community within the first 48 hours of someone losing their loved one. We focus on the parents losing their children, but a loss is a loss. So if you call us and somebody says you’ve lost someone, we’ll show up in those first 48 hours and do the things that I said prior. We will be there the first 48 days and the first 48 weeks because grief is something that does not get better over time. So if we go 48 weeks in, you’ve already went past your first year and the first year is the hardest year. If it is state sanctioned violence, we will stay with you until justice is served. Even though we have those key points, first 48 hours, first 48 days, first 48 weeks, that doesn’t mean we’ll leave then, but those will be the intricate times that we will be available to show up with the things that is needed.

As I said before, so many people get so tied up with the people that they lost and forget about those who are left here. Grief, it’s something else. And it doesn’t… Uncle Bobby and Aunt B can contest to that and many others in here. People say it get better in time. I don’t know who came up with that quote, but it’s a damn lie, because now you get time to miss them. “I missed his birthday. He liked Easter. He liked Thanksgiving. This was his favorite food.” So a year in, you really besides yourself, because it’s been a year that you have not had that person in your space and been able to be there for them.

So I challenge people to show up in a special way for these parents who have lost their children. So many people come with their own agendas and they raise money behind these people losing their children. Yeah. It’s absolutely disgusting how people do that. At the time, we not thinking about money because we want justice or furthermore, we want our loved one back. But you have people who have the time to do some of the most sickening and the disgusting stuff while people are vulnerable and grieving. I literally feel like it should be a law against that shit, for real, because we travel and we see this happen over and over and over again and nobody is stopping it.

But you know what? When we drop First 48, that’s how we going to pull up and people are going to be upset because we going to show them the door, like, “Why are you here? Why do you feel like you need to be in this space? What can you bring to this space to help? You feeling to put them in a hotel for the next 30 days? Her baby got killed in the house. She can’t dare walk back in the house. So what are you going to do to make sure it’s safe for them?” And one of the bigger reasons that we felt this was needed, there was a family a few years back who lost their child and they were absolutely furious with the activists. And the activists didn’t really know why. They was like, “We’ve done everything.” He said, “I can buy my own food. I can buy my own clothes. I got a home,” he said, “But what I needed was for somebody to go out there and clean my baby’s blood out that van that I got to drive my family to school and work with.”

Often when this happened, nobody asks, “What do you need? What is it that you specifically need?” Nobody asked her what we was needing. We was homeless with eight kids in a hotel. And where did you all visit us at? In a hotel. And nobody said, “What do you all need?” They gave us money. They put us up in hotels. They gave us little trinkets. But nobody knew we didn’t have a house to live in. And those are the important questions that need to happen right on. And we need to make sure that these people are not being mishandled and that they are safe.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s really important to me. I’m passionate about this. I didn’t lose my biological child, so I was able to take a step back and really pay attention to what was going on. My husband used to fuss at me, like, “Why do you always walk behind me?” Because I can see all the messed up shit. I could see how people looking at you. I could see the things that people saying. I could see the things that people doing. So I’m a lot more knowledgeable than Mike is because I stood in the background and he thought it was disrespectful because he feel like I should be behind you. No. I’m your reinforcement. I got your back. And that’s one of the things that I have did for the last eight and a half years, is to protect my husband at all costs. I ain’t have a lot, but I’m smart as hell. Yeah. And that’s what I got, the brains behind this. He got the pain and I got the brains. Oh, that kind of rhymed. That’s new. (Laughs)

We have another program called Chosen Fathers. We create a space for fathers to heal, brined and grow. And Chosen Fathers came from when we were in Cleveland after Tamir Rice and BLM brought all them families out there. But that’s another thing. They was walking down the streets in Cleveland and I was behind them as I always am. And I listened to each one of these Black men express their hurt and their pain. And I literally was walking down the street in Cleveland in tears. And Mike was like, “What’s wrong?” I was like, “Bro, you did not hear what I was hearing.” It was Mike, Uncle Bobby, Ron Davis, Andrew Joseph. I mean, it was a bunch of them. And I was like, “We got to do something.” I said, “You see how they’ve silenced you and they’ve pushed you to the back like your pain ain’t mattered? You ain’t the only one that feels like that.”

So we came up with Chosen Fathers. And we had the first retreat in…. No. 2016.

Michael Brown, Sr.: ’16.

Cal D. Brown: Yeah. In 2016. And we took 20 fathers to a secluded space in Union, Missouri. And when I tell you these men had the time of their life. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just was like I know what I thought felt good. I know what I thought that my husband needed and wanted. And if you could just see the video of these Black men when they opened the gifts, the gifts that really came from our heart, it was breathtaking. And a lot of them had never cried. Black men are told not to cry. So a lot of these men have taken that through their life. And one particular, Vonderrit Myers Sr., his son, VonDerrit Myers Jr., was killed about 60 days after Mike Jr. And he had never really grieved or cried over his son because he was so angry. And I don’t know if you seen in Ferguson Rises, a lot of people had on ties that had Mike Jr. face on them-

A lot of people had on ties that had Mike, Jr.’s face on them. And all the fathers kept saying, “I want one of them ties. I want one of them ties.” And I was like, “Why would I give them a tie?” I know why I would give them a tie with Mike on it, but a better gift would be a tie with their own son on it.

When I tell you, when these men, I put it in a little royal blue Chinese box. I always kind of color code things. So they looking at these boxes like, “This Chinese food boxes,” and they holding them, and they talking. And when they open the boxes and they pull these ties out, like, the whole room lit up. You had Kerry Ball, Sr. in the corner hollering, you had Ron Davis crying, Uncle Bobby. They was just like, “Oh my god.” And that’s just the type of space that I try to have for them, because our Black men, they carry the weight of the world. And then you got people that want to throw the moon and the stars and Jupiter on their back, as if they don’t carry enough. So I just try to get them a space of healing, a space where they don’t have to worry about being the man of the house or taking care of their everyday things. So we try to just give them three or four days where they can just be them, worry about them, have the space to just release. It is really an honor to be a part of that space. And it gives their wives a break for a couple of days, too.

We also have a program called the SWAT Team. It’s Mike, Jr.’s sisters. After they lost their brother, they wanted to be able to have a voice as well. So they go out in the community and they mentor, they do philanthropy, they show up and volunteer at events. They go to the nursing homes, paint fingernails, bake cupcakes. They really do their thing.

We took them to Essence in 2017, and it was quite impactful. They were able to tell people the things that they wanted to do and how they wanted to show up. We took 500 t-shirts to Essence, and within 24 hours, every t-shirt was gone. They like, “What we going to sell tomorrow?” And one of them was like, “Well, Cal, why don’t you do your lemonade?” So literally I was at Essence under a table, mixing the famous Made With Love Lemonade, and you had people coming up because it’s free lemonade and people were leaving tips and people would drinking it. They was like, “What is this?” And we like, “Made With Love Lemonade.” So it’s got its famous name, that crack juice, in which my 10-year-old currently has a business doing, and she is their little mascot for the SWAT Team. So they’re rebranding and restructuring, and they should be relaunching this, I believe, June.

And then we have grief support for children. Children are often left behind. People are so focused on the parents, they forget about the children who now don’t have their sibling that they grew up with anymore. So we have a program called COPES, Children Overcoming Painful Experiences with Support. So we will be launching that soon as well. Am I forgetting anything? I talked about Cookies and Convo.

Michael Brown, Sr.: Mothers of Angels.

Cal D. Brown: Mothers of An Angel. Mothers of An Angel St. Louis also creates a space for women to heal, bond and grow. I was forced into creating this space, because it just really wasn’t a space for the women in St. Louis and they was kind of jealous of the men. I heard about it all the time. They like, “They going on trips all over the world. What about us?” So two years ago, I launched Mothers of an Angel and it has been a successful program. I put a post out asking for… What was it, 40 women?

I actually ended up getting 336 names in a two-week period, and I said that just to show you the need that is there for those type of spaces. So, actually, our next Mothers of An Angel event is coming up May 7th. That is Bereaved Mother’s Day. A lot of people don’t know that the Sunday prior to Mother’s Day is Bereaved Mother’s Day. So if you know a mother who is bereaved, that is a day for you to show up for her. Take her some flowers, give her a phone call, take her to lunch, dinner, because that is the day that is specifically for them.

You said, how to support?

Rashad Arman Timmons: Yes.

Cal D. Brown: So you can go to chosenforchange.org. That’ll be our new website that we’ll be launching soon, and you can see all of our work. But if you want to see what we’ve done prior, you can go to the michaelbrownfoundation.org.

Michael Brown, Sr.: You already told my program. I’m the face of Chosen Fathers. The Chosen Fathers group was put together by me and Cal, first off. We thought of it. But I have local fathers and national fathers in this group. I seen the same pain in these fathers’ face that I had in mine, and I was always told that I was not selfless. So I’m always looking out for other fathers and families here. And so I brought a bunch of them with me on the journey to trying to heal or trying to have better days.

So we have a line, a text line that we talk on every morning. We tell each other good morning, give them any type of encouragement words, any type of information that’s coming up, we put it in there so we all can get it. So we do a lot of communicating. And the Mothers of An Angel got jealous about that. We had to come to some of their groups and show them how to-

Cal D. Brown: Grieve.

Michael Brown, Sr.: … grieve. So we’ll have one brother, Mike, start crying or something like that, and we all just come up and hug them. And these women would sit back and look at us like, “What the hell they doing?”

We’re sitting here teaching y’all what should be done when we’re going through something like that. You don’t just sit there and let your neighbor cry, and you just look at her. Y’all are sisters in the same fight. You get up, you hug and you console her. So we had to come in and show the women how it get done, which is cool because we all have to still heal together.

But yeah, that’s my program. It definitely helps me on bad days, good days. It’s just a light on all of my days going forward, if they good or bad. You heard talks about, “I ain’t having a good day,” in there, and then you just see all these floods of brothers just giving words of encouragement. We definitely need that, because like the wife said, we hold a lot of stuff on our back, and we will taught to take it, take it, take it, take it, take it. And how much are we going to take until we explode? So we have to get it out. So this is one way we are able to release.

Rashad Arman Timmons: I want to make sure that we have time for y’all to ask some questions, too. And so yeah, I think we’ll transition to audience Q&A. But before we do that, I do want to close our conversation first by just saying thank you. Oh my goodness.

Cal D. Brown: Thank you.

Michael Brown, Sr.: All love, brothers.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Oh my goodness.

Cal D. Brown: We met Rashad Aug. 9, 2022, and now he my road dog. Look, we’ve been talking, look, every week for some months. My Mondays are my depressed days. I try to decompress. Yeah, decompress. And I told Rashad the best days was Monday, so every Monday eight to noon, we talk. And we’d be in there laughing and talking, and Michael be like, “Who is you talking to?” I’d be like, “This is Rashad.” He’d be like, “Oh, yeah, they going to be on the phone for a minute.” We supposed to talk for what? 45 minutes. That has not happened yet, literally. And I’ve grown to love him. He just as sweet as he want to be, and I thank you so much for being passionate about the work. He said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to get y’all out to Berkeley.” And here we are. Yeah.

Rashad Arman Timmons: That’s funny. We definitely be on the phone cracking it. Before I close this part, I want to take 45 seconds to have y’all either silently or aloud, just be able to address Mike, Jr. Yeah. And that might be something that you want to say for the recording. It might be something that you just want to say internally to yourself, but I did want to close by opening space for y’all to address him and y’all to have a space to convene and talk to him.

Michael Brown, Sr.: I would say this, this boy always knew how I felt about him. Phew, man. That’s why it’s just I am talking to him. I am him. He is me.

I just want to tell you, man, you know how I feel about you. I miss you. I love you. I’m going to fight this fight till the day I die. It’s crazy. I still got your clothes, a lot of your clothes. I got to smell them, man. I got to feel your presence more than just spiritually. I got to smell it. So I still got your clothes, man. Got all the pictures. I got everything that was left behind. Sadly, you still not behind, but I’m working, boy, and I’m going to forever work and honor you. I’m going to definitely let these devils know that I ain’t stopping. And if they want their work, your daddy give them their work. So that’s my last talk, right here. I got to use the bathroom.

Cal D. Brown: We talk quite often. I fuss at him a lot, because he left me with a hell of a journey and he left me with this knucklehead. But I’m here for it. For a long time, I didn’t really understand what my purpose was and I didn’t understand a lot of the things that I went through in my life. And I soon figured out that it was to prepare me for this moment, to be able to be here for your dad and to stand up for you and to continue to push your legacy. I love you. I wish I could hold you and kiss you, but I know you’ll tell me you don’t do that gay stuff and give me some dab. That was an inside joke.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you all for doing that. Yeah.

Cal D. Brown: Thank you for giving us the space.

Michael Brown, Sr.: Yeah.

Rashad Arman Timmons: I think we have time for maybe two questions. OK. Here’s one here in the center.

Will: Hey, my name’s Will. I really appreciate your talk. And you said something at the start, Rashad, that grief reorganizes space. And as you were speaking, I was thinking about the classroom and how for a lot of young Black kids, the classroom is a political space. They get excluded from the classroom. They get segregated to special education. They get segregated to alternative education. They get punitive behavioral challenges, told they’re bad. And you mentioned the structural rumors around him, the trying to label him a certain way. You mentioned the term like his size, he’s a giant and whatnot. And I’m thinking a lot of this stuff happens when these kids are really young.

And so I’m wondering, we’re at a university now, where sa,dly but knowingly, there’s a complete absence of Black student population. And so I’m wondering, not necessarily how can we address that, but for you to speak to us. This is a brilliant opportunity here in Open University, but the rest of this space is vapid. It’s void, it’s violent. And so I’m wondering at this call as you are showing how human of a person your son was, I think you’re also showing how human and a person Black kids are in general. And I wanted to just hold that because I think it was really beautiful and it’s really needed. And that outside of this space, this whole place is void in it and we lose that. So thank you so much.

Cal D. Brown: Thank you.

Rashad Arman Timmons: You have a question here in the front? Yeah, yeah.

Audience 1: This is for Cal and Mike. But I know you talked about people coming in this space. How important it is and thank you, Rashad, for coming in, not wanting something, but to give something. I just want to say we work with a lot of families so we know how important it is. And so when we met Mike and Cal, it was the 10th of August.

Cal D. Brown: Aug. 11.

Audience 1: It was the 11th of August. Yes, it happened. Yeah, it was on a Monday. Right? We all clicked automatically. We’ve been here day one. But we all know that people come in the space and they always want something.

So how important it is and how was it that you were able to decipher that? Because we know that we have a lot of families that do not decipher there, and the trauma that you people put on these families by doing that, that’s one of the biggest causes for families to close up and not fight, is because people come in this space to use and abuse their pain. Let me talk about that.

Rashad Arman Timmons: How did you decipher between them?

Cal D. Brown: Well, we didn’t decipher right off. It actually took us some time. Because when you’re overcome with grief, you don’t really see the signs. I don’t know, how did we decipher?

Michael Brown, Sr.: So while we were grieving and going through things, it was people becoming millionaires off our pain. So the disrespect was slapped in our face when we weren’t ready for it. So the way we found out about it, we started trying to get domain names and stuff like that, names and Mike’s names. And come to find out these things had already been bought.

People were getting money off these names and stuff like this, and we were like how did people even have time to even research or do this? Of course they did. While the family is not paying attention, we’re going to go up under them and we’re going to rake this money in. So those are the things, some of the devilish things that people could come in and portray or infiltrate that they’re there for you and they coming to steal up under you. So we just want to have those be in positions like that for other families so they can be aware of vultures coming into their life when they going through pain.

Cal D. Brown: But we can’t leave them thinking that it is just everyday people do it that do it. Preachers, lawyers, leaders, they’re some of the main ones that we have to protect these grieving families from. Somebody like us and Uncle Bobby and Drew and them, people who are passionate and real, got to show up first to let them know that might not be the road that you want to go down. It’s people that we trust who end up being the ones, you know what I’m saying, that hurt us. So it is really important to have people in those spaces because when you lose, as I said before, you literally just about lose your mind. You don’t know your head from your tail and you need somebody there that’s going to guide you through those first moments and beyond.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you. Oh please, Uncle Bobby.

Uncle Bobby: Yes. Well, first I am Oscar Grant’s uncle, and I heard Mike say it’s uncommon or not elevated to the point where we have our sons be our best men. Well, Mike, after all these years. I didn’t realize that Michael, Jr. was your best man because for me, Oscar Grant was my best man. Wow. Along with my son, I can’t leave him out. But the point is this, the point is this, yeah, because this is on record and he’d be like, “Hey dad, I was there, too.” (Laughs)

But the significance of that is that we bonded sadly through the blood of our loved ones being murdered. But what has sustained us, I think, through the years is the fact that we love each other and we share a similar experience unbeknownst to us. Because even in Oscar’s death prior to his murder, like Cal, Oscar was on my spirit, let me just share this. And he was so heavily on my spirit on New Year’s Eve. Because I’m already in the bed, he’s out having fun. I texted him, I said, “Uncle love you, god loves you and God loves your family.” And an hour and a half later he was murdered. Had I had not responded in a text to him, I talk about how angry I was, I would still be in that anger today because I’d be mad at myself. We talk about forgiving ourselves, but I would’ve been mad at myself for failing that. So that’s just a message to all of us that if any loved one is on your heart or in your spirit speaking to you and you asking the question, “Why?” Respond. Because that may be your last opportunity to share that message of love.

So wow, thank you, Rashad for pulling that out of Mike and him revealing that to us. Because we’ve been on panels together, but somehow your spirit in the questions in the way that they were asked, pull stuff out of Mike and Callie, that’s been powerful. So thank you both.

Rashad Arman Timmons: Thank you, Uncle Bobby. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank y’all so much. We are getting close to 2:30, but before I invite Professor Raiford back up to close, I do want to close with an offering.

Mike and Cal, when we talked a few months ago, we had had a conversation and I told y’all that as Black people, our radical visions deserve to be brought to life, to come to life. And yeah, a month or so ago, I had a vision and a dream that the community of people that you see gathered here today would be here and be present, and to be able to verbalize and make tangible their support for you, their love for you, their commitment to you and to honoring the life and memory of Mike, Jr.

So at the outset of Black History Month, I launched a campaign to raise $10,000 in the recognition of the upcoming 10th anniversary of Mike Jr.’s death. And I was scared because I had never raised any kind of money like that before. But I knew, and what you all have shared and teach us so deeply, is that our community is greater than our fear. Right? Our community is the antidote to our fear. And so I’m so happy and honored to have all of these folks gathered in the room, many of whom donated and contributed to this campaign and realized this vision and made it real. And I’m happy and honored to be able to present y’all with actually more than $10,000. $10,708.33. (Audience claps and cheers)

Michael Brown, Sr.: Thank you all.

Leigh Raiford: We are just about at time. Y’all, I have nothing to add. Just, thank you. Gratitude. Thank you Michael Brown, Sr., Cal Brown for being here. Thank you, Rashad, for bringing us together in the most beautiful way. Community is the antidote to violence. All right, hopefully we’ll see you all next week for our panel. Let’s see if I can find it. Oops. There we go. Educate to Liberate: A Photographic Time Capsule of the Black Panther Party’s Community Education Programs Unveiled. 4,000 new photographs recently found, which we’ll be exploring next week. Thank you all, and please join us in the atrium.

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes with transcripts and photos on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.