The Ferguson Conspiracy
"It is now not coincidental. There is a murderer targeting activists from #Ferguson. #WeAreNotInvisible #Resist - MariaChapelleNadal (@MariaChappelleN) May 5, 2017"
As the Riverfront Times noted, "The theory that some person or group is responsible for an alarming number of deaths involving Ferguson activists is nearly as old as the Ferguson movement itself". Such a belief can arguably be linked to the death of Deandre Joshua, a 20-year-old black man who was killed during the Ferguson protests on November 11, 2014. However, just as the Ferguson Conspiracy itself is undergirded by over-conflated mistruths, the reality of Joshua's role as an activist also requires closer scrutiny.
Major news outlets, including Rolling Stone, NBC News, and The Chicago Tribune, published articles in March of 2019 with the compelling headlines pictured above, referencing the fates of several Ferguson activists. These same articles all subsumed Joshua's name under the general tagline of activists' deaths, despite the fact that an earlier NYT article from December of 2014 states that, "His family said Mr. Joshua had never joined the marches and protests over Mr. [Michael] Brown's shooting."
The truth of Joshua's death did little to silence the growing concerns of a deeper insidious scheme against activists.
The image above was also posted to Facebook in March of 2019 and garnered more than twelve thousand shares; the original poster included
This page has paths:
- What it means to be an activist Sidra Arshad