In a strong acknowledgement of their tenacity, courage, and persistence,
Time magazine
just named the Ferguson protestors as a runner up in their annual Person of the Year project—second only to the doctors and relief workers fighting the Ebola crisis. The written narrative from
Time begins:
At the beginning, they just wanted to pay tribute. Neighbors stood on cracked sidewalks behind yellow police tape, watching the dead teen’s body bake for hours in the summer heat. They tried to scrub his blood from the pavement with soap.
It was Johnetta Elzie’s first protest.
She didn’t expect the cops to show up to a candlelight vigil with canine units and riot gear. Crowds filled the streets that night. The next day they did it again. Elzie, 25, had been getting ready to return to college but kept coming back instead. She chanted and marched, dodged plumes of tear gas, took a rubber bullet to her left collarbone. And she tapped out tweets to tell the world what was happening in an obscure township in Middle America. “I was just hoping someone would care,” she says.
Featured in the
Time acknowledgement, Ferguson leaders Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson shared their thoughts on it on Twitter.
Read the entire story from
Time, written by Alex Altman,
here.