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<a href="http://www.colorlines.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Colorlines</strong></a></p>
<p>The Darren Wilson grand jury has decided that the officer will not be indicted for the August 9 fatal shooting of unarmed, black teenager Michael Brown. The decision comes within the context of intense local and national protesting and organizing. So what does the lack of an indictment in the Michael Brown killing mean? Here’s what leading activists and thinkers told Colorlines immediately after the decision was announced:</p>
<p><strong>Patrisse Cullors, executive director of Dignity and Power Now and co-founder of Black Lives Matter</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> The decision to not indict Darren Wilson is infuriating, frightening, and maddening. This country has shown time and time again that black life is invaluable. I also know that the indictment or non-indictment of one officer will not end the rampant terror police departments enact upon black communities. We cannot jail or indict our way out of white supremacy.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> We must continue to be in the streets, lobby for new laws and push for the demilitarizing of police departments as well as reducing their budgets. We need to believe that safety does not have to rely on a badge or gun, but rather healthy communities that are provided with jobs, shelter and proper education.</p>
<p><strong>Brittney Cooper, Crunk Feminist Collective</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> Devastated.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> Revolt.</p>
<p><strong>Imani Perry, professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do feel about the decision?</strong> The decision is harrowing and yet mundane. Police violence, a lack of due process, surveillance, presumptions of black guilt, and the absolute devaluation of black life are all everyday business in America. The American criminal justice system is so rotten, perhaps it is a fools errand to ever seek justice or fairness from it. Had Darren Wilson been indicted, the odds that he would be convicted would have been minimal. If he had been convicted, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that law enforcement is an engine of anti-black racism in this country. Yet this decision is still a terrible blow. It is a green light for an ever more murderous police state.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> We must follow the organizers, both Ferguson organizers and national organizers. It is time for us to remember the legacies of SNCC, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, to hold them close as our inheritance. It is time for us to study the systems of racial and economic injustice in order to best struggle against them. It is time for establishment and bureaucratic civil rights professionals to step back and make space for this rebirth of the freedom movement. It is time for us to join this movement, to listen, to learn, and to keep our hands on freedom’s plow.</p>
<p><strong>Deepa Iyer, Race Forward board of directors and former director of South Asian Americans Leading Together</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> I am deeply saddened and outraged by the failure of the grand jury to indict Darren Wilson. The legal system too has failed Michael Brown and his family. But I’m also trying to draw courage and inspiration from the protestors in Ferguson who have, for three months now in the midst of a virtual police state, reminded us why we must continue to fight for reforms in the criminal justice system, from police accountability to the demilitarization of law enforcement to anti-profiling laws.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> As a South Asian American, I am committed to the struggle for racial justice and my responsibility to our movement has become even more clearer in light of the events in Ferguson.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Yaba Blay, director or Africana Studies, Drexel University</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> I’m frustrated with myself for expecting, if only for a moment, that people who have historically not valued black life, would actually value black life. More than anything, I’m sad. I’m just sad. This is no way to live.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward? </strong>Organize. Organize. Organize.</p>
<p><strong>Mychal Denzel Smith, writer and Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> The decision was as expected. The United States is founded on white supremacy and the destruction of black bodies and continues its existence on those principles.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> Moving forward, toward justice, is a matter of making the privileged uncomfortable.</p>
<p>The marginalized and terrorized communities of America will have to assert their right to existence in every way possible, from politics to the arts, from classrooms to corner stores, and beyond. The fight is on.</p>
<p><strong>Bakari Kitwana, executive director of Rap Sessions and author of the forthcoming “Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> The debt America owes the Brown family can never be paid. This verdict reveals the salient message lost on the powers that be: There is no conditioning that can be imagined that can prepare black people to accept that death of an unarmed teen at the hands of a police officer is justifiable. America has just lost the latest generation of black Americans who imagined justice could be found in the land that prides itself on a perverted sense of the rule of law.</p>
<p>The country has no jobs for black youth. No affordable meaningful education. No justice. With every new state sanctioned murder, America is signing its own death certificate. Minus an apparatus of justice, black people are left to mete out a brand of justice of their own.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> It is clear the police have been empowered by the state to shoot to kill with impunity. In the reformist lane, that means at the very least disarming the police and requiring officers to live in the communities they serve.</p>
<p>In the revolutionary lane, we must keep in mind that we are dealing with the second generation of black Americans to come of age after the civil rights movement. The promises that black folk imagined two generations ago have not been realized. This is a generation to whom America feels no obligation. No obligation to provide jobs. No obligation to provide a living wage. No obligation to get the vampire corporations out of their pockets. No obligation to provide affordable, meaningful education. We have a generation that imagined justice would prevail who just had that snatched away. Much like the second generation that came of age after the civil war, who ushered in the great migration, this is a generation whose backs have been pushed to the wall. They have nothing to lose. In my estimation, no form of vigilante justice is off the table.</p>
<p><strong>Salamishah Tillet, associate professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, co-founder, A Long Walk Home</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> Waiting for this [decision] is the ritual of black life in America: dying, grieving, fighting, demanding, mourning, mounting protests, hoping, voting, being disenfranchised, shot at and dying again. Right now, I am wondering how to stop a cycle that African-Americans neither created nor condone and how far from freedom we still remain.</p>
<p>Last time Black America gathered around like this was probably when Barack Obama became president in 2008. How little the word “hope” means right now and how huge the project/practice/principle and radical act that # BlackLives-Matters means today, as it did then, as it is always has in this grand experiment we call America. Rest in power, beloved prince. #FergusonGoddam.</p>
<p><strong>What can we do to move forward?</strong> We continue to organize with vigilance to dismantle a capitalist, racist, and sexist system that predicates itself on rendering black lives as weaponized bodies, as inferior, and not worthy of state protection and due process. This means we continue to take on the prison-industrial complex, violence against women, wealth inequality, and our elected officials (even those who claim to be with us) with deep, unwavering resistance.</p>
<p><strong>Gary Delgado, Alliance for a Just Society and Race Forward board member</strong></p>
<p><strong>How do you feel about the decision?</strong> The preparation, timing, and cautions for peaceful protest all pointed to an unjust decision. I’m angry but not surprised. The most common result of a police murder is the exoneration of cop who didn’t get the memo that America is post racial. As Wilson’s defenders say, “He was doing what he got trained to do.” Now, as communities of color express, a deep sadness, and a glowering rage, men in riot gear are doing what they are trained to do—channeling their fear into defending bricks, glass, and concrete.</p>
<p>For more responses to the Ferguson Grand Jury verduct visit Colorlines at: <a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/11/ferguson_goddamn.html" target="_blank">http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/11/ferguson_goddamn.html</a></p>
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