Maybe you have seen this already, but in case you haven’t last night at a performance of the St. Louis Symphony, black and white people protested by singing as the symphony was about to resume its program after the intermission. Here’s the video:
Here is the link to it on YouTube.
May I suggest you watch the video, give it a thumbs up at YouTube, and share it on Facebook, Twitter (hash tag #RequiemforMikeBrown) and whatever other social media you use regularly. Thanks.
Pretty pleased with the folks in the audience. Only a few are visibly horrified. Great idea for a protest, and glad the audience was mostly accepting.
(I love the woman in the strapless black and white dress. Totally grossed out.)
Looked as if they received more support from the orchestra musicians than the audience.
The audience was a bit small (many empty seats), but there is a larger audience for the SLSO:
I fail to understand the point of the protest here. Is the audience composed of police? Did audience members shoot black kids? What is the point of a protest here?
The protest here is simply ridiculous. I do not support this kind of action. The point of a protest is to bring the issue to those causing the problem. The SLSO, its audience, and others related have nothing to do with Ferguson.
The orchestra is glad to see seats filled, I am sure. Classical music is a difficult sell today.
The point of the protest is to bring the issue to those who ignore it. Bad things happen when “good” people, or the people who enjoy privileges because they represent the majority in both wealth, power, and population refuse to listen to the grievances of the oppressed minorities.
In my view this was a perfect venue to protest, and likely to garner more positive attention than a protest on the streets of Ferguson among many whites in St. Louis.
But that’s just me.
“to those who ignore it” Now, exactly who would that be? And exactly how do you know that they are ignoring it?
Just exactly what do you expect them to do, by not “ignoring” the issue.
Honestly, this kind of protest does one thing and one thing only – it pisses people off and drives them away. That is what this did for many who might otherwise be sympathetic. If you think that saying to the “whites” in St Louis “Hey, stop ignoring this, stop shooting black kids”, you are going to get nothing but hostile rejection.
I used to live in the area, and people are always saying ALL KINDS of stupid shit like “St Louis is the most segregated town in the US” which is true except for all the other most segregated towns. It’s no more and no less segregated than Chicago, Nashville, Knoxville, Charlotte, etc etc etc.
Telling people to “stop ignoring the grievances of the minorities” is going to get a LOT of people saying “shut the fuck up – who the fuck are YOU telling me what to do”.
This is divisive, stupid, and idiotic. Just a juvenile and stupid publicity stunt. And another thing – all of the patrons who paid good money for their tickets to see the symphony did not ask or want this kind of stuff.
The protest is not “to the whites”. Most of the singers are white people, and white people who can afford concert tickets. In expressing their solidarity with the murdered Mike Brown they are showing that the community doesn’t have to be divided between blacks and whites. The choice of the song, “Which side are you on”, is to emphasize that.
That makes it very much in harmony with Johannes Brahms, who called his Requiem “German” to emphasize that it was neither Catholic nor Protestant, and later thought “German” was too restrictive:
The Requiem for Mike Brown was addressed to those who take the side of the humans.
This is divisive, stupid, and idiotic.
Says who? White people who wish the protests would go away? Darren Wilson supporters?
Juvenile?
What should people do if they can’t say “”stop ignoring the grievances of the minorities”?
What do I expect “sympathetic” people to do?
Behave as sympathetic people do. Do something!
Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE)
The list goes on…
As a visual artist with close friends who are composers, your view is particularly vacuous and dilettante in the worst way. Audiences should not expect only comfort and joy as they lay back and consume our thoughts and images.
Exciting that you are involved in this. A few things occur to me:: the event serves as reaching out to audience members as well, to let them know they are a vital part of the situation, though circumstances may be handled in a way so as to isolate them from it. Also, for people involved in classical music it is a world that is very much alive, as you know, so good to reach out there. Finally I would assume most of the audience members are voters.
btw, neither here nor there, About a week before Michael Brown was killed, I got lost on the way to St Louis airport – got of rt 70 in Ferguson. The part I saw reminded me of Rockville, MD.
I wish I were more involved, I’m stuck at home -states away- recovering from a hip replacement…but my soul is in Ferguson.
Effective action:
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2014/10/03/3575472/ferguson-voter-registration/
Register voters. Ferguson is a majority black town with white power structure. Get the minority folks registered. Get them voting. That is effective.
If you don’t vote, you may end up with a governing structure that you do not like or that does not like you. That’s effective and appropriate action.
While voting is good, it’s not a cure-all. Would everyone in Ferguson voting have given them anyone better than racist scumbag Jay Nixon as Governor?
Not to mention, there is no opposition to McCollouh as St. Louis County Prosecutor on the ballot this Nov. 4.
“Organizing and `getting in the way,’ as John Lewis would say, is always necessary. You gotta push these politicians you gotta make noise, you gotta organize and you gotta vote. And I don’t think voting is the only answer, but you have to push on specific issues.”
Lauren Burke, freelance journalist and founder of the Crewof42.com, a news website that covers the work of black members of Congress and focuses on issues that impact urban communities
from a panel discussion at the Cato Institute (do you believe?)
http://www.frostillustrated.com/2014/experts-push-better-oversight-police/
Actually, many of the young demonstrators across the street from the FPD the last couple of weeks are working during the day at voter registration door to door.
And it should be remember, from the first demonstration (police riots) police tore down the voter registration table and regional national republicans decried it:
“If that’s not fanning the political flames, I don’t know what is,” Wills said. “I think it’s not only disgusting but completely inappropriate…Injecting race into this conversation and into this tragedy, not only is not helpful, but it doesn’t help a continued conversation of justice and peace.” , Matt Wills, executive director of Missouri’s republican party
That’s why bringing in the State Police is a good thing.
FPD requested the St. Louis County law enforcement to take over “protest managment” but you have to remember:
1.St. Louis County police are from Clyde, the county seat from which county Pros. Atty. McCullouh works. It will indeed be the focus when the grand jury announcement is made.
Will this now be more legal and humane police law enforcement?
For the first 2 days it has been but the Weekend of Resistance is Oct 10-13, and there should be many more Americans standing arm in arm with Ferguson people of conscience.
The woman who organized this knows St Louis and I implicitly-even without knowing her-trust her understanding of what is needed in her community (probably because of my white upbringing on these issues).
The courageous young people chanting outside the lion’s den of the FPD each night can’t change all white racism alone. Segregated St Louis culture has to be disrupted for change to happen. Notice how few African Americans are in the audience. You know that isn’t because there are few African American adults who love classical music. There will be more African Americans in that audience soon.
Although this was mostly a secret protest, I hope this Brahms work was a deliberate choice for the community on this night. But even if it was not, it was serendipitous. Of course, the Brahmns Requiem music says it all… but only to those who listen. That couple, in the front of the camera are not really listening: they are use the concerts for their own petty concerns and are shocked that culture has anything to do with real life. The man wanted to make others listen to his crass racism. (Listen carefully about the 60 second mark: the man says to the camera “He was a thug”. But when the camera woman asks him to repeat it, he won’t .) Art cannot be left to the likes of that couple. Art is not an an empty refuge from the travails of the real world, it may be a respite, a replenishment, but mostly, it is a glass to know and feel through.
The modern adaptation to the glorious labor justice song “What Side Are You On” was a beautiful and universal sentiment to signal FERGUSON OCTOBER 10-13, a weekend for all people of good conscience to join the protest and honor Michael Brown’s legacy for change and justice. http://fergusonoctober.com/
As a visual artist, I was delighted to see this simple & elegant paper heart that accompanied the song:
Requiem for Michael Brown
May 20, 1996 – August 9, 2014.
https://twitter.com/stevegiegerich/status/518588487113916416
Most symphony orchestra performances attract a significant number of the city’s business and political elite. Saint Louis has long avoided its white privilege issues preferring to treat it as a Negro problem. The tolerance of the business and political elite to the military policing of a peaceful protest march and the continued silence from these “leaders” about that abuse of the grand jury system to cover up a wrongful death are part of the issue in St. Louis. Some residents of St. Louis thought that the silence needed to be broken in a way that didn’t bring out the militarized police and security theater.
The second point of the demonstration was to show that there are people affluent enough to purchase symphony orchestra tickets for whom this civic failure is an issue.
The third point was to mildly inconvenience some comfortable folks who are not often inconvenienced.
The fourth point was to accomplish the protest and get away before police or security could respond and divert the attention from the issue of justice for Mike Brown to the arrests of “unruly audience members”.
And the alternative requiem, the one for Mike Brown, meshed with the orchestra’s performance. A requiem is about a particular death. Whose requiem has Brahms written in his composition?
I thought that the protest was brilliantly conceived and implemented. Whether protests matter anymore is a different question. Especially since it is widespread knowledge in St. Louis that Gov. Nixon has prepared the National Guard and riot police to act when the grand jury delivers its report–likely to be a failure to indict Darren Wilson. And that that decision is reported to be coming around October 15, or before the midterm election.
Saint Louis has had a habit of resisting desegregation actions. It was the landmark case in stopping cross-district desegregation orders by judges. Gov. Nixon was the counsel for petitioners asking that busing orders for an individual school district be ended. The very suburban geography is of communities defensively incorporating so as to not be part of the City of St. Louis. And the speed trap, minor violation, and warrant mills that enrich those town’s coffers have been amply documented.
Cities in the South typically were under court orders for up to 15 years (dropped during the Reagan administration and after). Charlotte was the first and had a model program for desegregation until realtor redlining and Ronald Reagan’s delegitimizing speech killed it.
I guess it was a bit juvenile. In most countries eventually the public would take to the streets armed. That is apparently how adults elsewhere handle problems this serious. In this case, I prefer juvenile.
I hope there is a big protest on Election Day. I hope that instead of 6% turnout in Ferguson in minority voters, they get 25-50-75%. You can say whatever you want, but I have very little sympathy for the folks in Ferguson. If you don’t vote, you get the shaft.
Get the voters in Ferguson registered. Get them out and vote. And make sure that the State Police are on notice, because I don’t trust the police of Ferguson.
I hope that the process of Democracy works. Mob rule is not appropriate. Let the voters vote, let the majority vote for appropriate representation, and let the government that results be a good one.
You have very little sympathy for the people of Ferguson likely because you don’t understand the difficulties of voting while working one or more low-wage jobs or better-paying jobs with hospital hours or airport hours. And having to commute all over the universe to get to an from work only to get back home and go vote for folks on a ballot, the best choice of whom is like Jay Nixon. And then there is the way that traffic stops can become warrants can become felonies just through and escalation of the way some three strikes laws work.
To their credit, there are now 3000 more voters registered from a town of 21,000. There is more than protest going on in Ferguson at the moment.
Your patronizing contempt duly noted.
I got tired long ago of polite forms of discrimination and racism disguised as why can’t those folks behave. It perpetuates the problem and allows people to pretend that they lack obligations to other people that they do indeed have. It seems to be a continuing problem with educated suburbanized liberals and progressives. And generally is identifiable by taking offense where none was intended.
I’m sorry for my tone. This is the very attitude that I have faced for fifty years that in my opinion allows outright bigots to continue to get off the hook. It’s why liberal parents send their kids to private schools rather than working together to get better public schools.
Ferguson is a Jim Crow police town. It’s obvious what’s going on an how elections rules can be bent when it is out of the spotlight to ensure low participation. So people flat out give up on voting.
This year it’s changing. Yet people are rhetorically shaming them for what they did in the past.
The problem in Ferguson is that white bigots have seized control of City government and are running a financial racket that allows property owners to have lower taxes while black citizens unequally pay the freight through bogus arrests and fines.
That attitude spreads to inpunity in the police department who feel free to abuse innocent black men and women. The county prosecutor is biased because of his personal tragedy, and the state governor collaborated to continue segregationist practices.
Ferguson does not have a Negro problem. It has a white privilege and control problem. It takes the assistance of white people with some power to deal with that problem.
As I was reading your last two comments I caught myself singing the refrain from Which Side are You On? sung by Arlo Guthrie.
“Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on?”
Black or white, we all have to choose. I don’t know how much power I have, but this white girl chooses to stand with Mike Brown and the people who are trying not to let the world forget what happened.
I’m glad these singers invaded the sanctity of the symphony and made much of the audience uncomfortable. I suspect that much of that audience has money and power, so if even 1% of the audience was made to really think, that’s a good thing.
In what world is it okay to accept police brutality and open season on young black men? Not any world I want to live in.
such a well worded reply, tarheel
Thank you for this. I grew up in a vicious racist society of which I was unconscious until the Civil Rights movement made me think. Folks outside the old Confederate states then lived in an illusion that what was happening in the South was a Southern problem. That made it much easier to pass the Civil Rights Acts in 1964. As the hostility shown in Cicero and Southie showed, the problem really was a national problem.
But in the South when I talked to the “folks of good will” in my church then or neighbors, I didn’t encounter outright hateful bigots as much as very nice people who were afraid to get involved in pushing for justice and very offended that “those folks” demonstrating in Birmingham and Selma weren’t going through proper channels and doing it the right way.
What they did not realize was that “doing it the right way” would have allowed them to be silenced, the protest to be ineffective, and no change happening at all.
These were otherwise liberal and progressive people in a day when every Southern governor ran as a “progressive governor” — meaning that he (of course they were all male) wanted to expand funding for roads, schools, and universities.
“Patronizing contempt” for a blame-the-victims attitude? Honestly, I think TD’s responses are far less patronizing or contemptuous than your comments here merit.
Voting matters, but it’s the end of a democratic process, not the sole cure-all. And a lot of things can interfere at any step of that process.
Have the black citizens of Ferguson collectively made a poor choice in the past by failing to vote? Perhaps. Are there factors – both life circumstance and intentional efforts by the white elites running the town – which have made voter registration or voting itself difficult or worse? Perhaps – it strikes me as rather likely, given everything else we know about the warrant mills and systematic extraction of wealth from the black majority, and all the other attacks we’ve seen on voter participation in towns like this throughout US history.
Or maybe folks didn’t feel like voting because there was nobody on the ballot who came close to representing their interests, or the people who did had not even a remote chance of winning. You may not have heard, but “one person, one vote” has a history in this country of not always working very well, especially in one-party or Jim Crow jurisdictions. Ferguson is both.
In the end, none of that matters, any more than it matters in a sexual assault what sort of skirt the victim was wearing. Anyone who takes an oath of public office violates it when they treat citizens the way the black residents of Ferguson have been treated. Those officials (and the people they answer to) are the problem, not their victims. Your attitude is repellent.
Amen, Mr. Parrish, with gratitude
The interrupted piece:
Brahms, “Requiem”
Tarheel, the orchestra was not interrupted during the performance of the Requiem, please stop saying that.
That’s what the video shows.
My understanding was that the protest occurred immediately after the intermission and while the orchestra was getting ready to resume.
Some members of the audience experienced it as an interruption, some media reported it as an interruption.
Technically, your point is correct.
Even the title of the YouTube says “interrupt”.
Misleading headlines but I suppose you could say “interrupted the program because an intermission” is on the program.
However since singers were in various seats around the hall their timing was as good as it could be.
from blogger Shaun King, interview with Symphony protestors:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/05/1334471/-Requiem-for-Mike-Brown-protest-in-the-St-Louis-Sym
phony-exposes-both-white-privilege-and-support
I wonder if the organizer considered discussing the situation with the Maestro. In Sioux Falls, our orchestra is always looking for ways to be relevant. Reaching out to the various communities is a key to relevance. Next week, the SD Symphony will do another piece related to Native communities, in which the symphony will do an Indian inspired piece with a native soloist.
If the organizer had reached out, the symphony might have found a way to work with the protesters. Symphonies are always looking for opportunity.
better the way they did it. would put the maestro in a very bad position if he knew ahead of time
this was beautiful
Monday Oct 6
Court declares the “5 second” rule (Ferguson protestors have to be constantly walking) is unconstitutional. ACLU WINS FOR FERGUSON!