In the year since the teenager was slain at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., the nation has seen countless additional murders and cases of unnecessary aggression against Black citizens across the country—from Baltimore to Charleston to Waller County, Texas, to New York and in numerous cities in between.
In the wake of Brown’s death, Dr. Justin Hansford, an assistant professor of law at St. Louis University, has found himself actively engaged in the protests. He opened his home as a safe house for those who had been hit by tear gas, and he served as a legal observer to ensure the protesters’ Constitutional rights were not being violated. (They were, he found. In fact, so many rights were violated that Hansford teamed up with the Human Rights Network to testify before the United Nations in Geneva about the violations he saw.) He was also arrested while serving as a legal observer during one of the protests—one of six on the site, the only Black legal observer, and the only of the six arrested that night.
“The intersection between the academy and activism in Ferguson has been really strong,” he said. “The students here have been really dynamic in their activism, and the schools here have been really forced to respond, some of them better than others.”
In his own case, despite the fact that there is a lot of regional hostility toward the #BlackLivesMatter movement, St. Louis University officials have been pretty supportive, he said.
Admitting his arrest “caused a lot of commotion in the university setting [because] a lot of people were unhappy with my involvement,” Hansford said Dean Michael A. Wolf “has been really supportive” and even came to “bail me out when I was in jail.”
In addition to the dean, “most of the faculty has been really supportive as well,” he said. “Some don’t agree with what I’m doing, some have stayed away,” but, in general, St. Louis University School of Law’s culture is “a very good, supportive culture.”
