Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
Narrative control in the lives of BLM activists
Main Menu
Sidra Arshad
96a70e51b9279cc7a97c94117cf7fc1a2f92c4da
NBC
1 media/NBC - cons headline _thumb.png 2023-11-04T11:56:09-07:00 Sidra Arshad 96a70e51b9279cc7a97c94117cf7fc1a2f92c4da 43782 2 NBC plain 2023-11-13T07:59:03-08:00 Sidra Arshad 96a70e51b9279cc7a97c94117cf7fc1a2f92c4daThis page is referenced by:
-
1
media/Ferguson Protest.jpg
2023-11-04T11:58:26-07:00
The Ferguson Conspiracy
37
timeline
2024-01-17T10:27:06-08:00
Following the death of Ferguson activist Edward Crawford Jr. on May 5, 2017, former Missouri Senator Maria Chapelle-Nadal tweeted about his death in connection to other Ferguson activists who had died—outrightly stating that their deaths were connected by some unknown assailant.
"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. Another Facebook post, now scrubbed from the site, shared similar sentiments and became so popular that PolitiFact came out with an article to discredit the post, citing it as "mostly false" and reiterating the NYT article that quoted Joshua's family on his lack of role in the Ferguson protests. However, this did not extinguish the online conversation surrounding the conspiracy.
The continued existence of such a conspiracy brings light to the lack of protection that such people as those connected to the Ferguson protests have access too; however, the nuance of each individual story disappears in this process, and accomplishes little for those who have since passed or for their loved ones.
The purpose of this site is to reintroduce the nuance of these stories by tracing the narratives constructed by and about these activists, or more correctly, these individuals associated with the Ferguson protests, beginning with MarShawn McCarrel.
