Protesters United Against Ferguson Decision, but Challenged in Building ...

FERGUSON, Mo. - Demonstrators forced the temporary closing of the St. Louis Galleria mall after staging a mass 'die-in' on Friday afternoon, lying on the floor for four and a half minutes of silence to represent the hours that Michael Brown was left on the street after a police officer shot him dead.

In Oakland, Calif., a group of people protesting the grand jury's decision not to indict the officer chained themselves to a train at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station, forcing officials to close the station and causing delays across the system.

And in Chicago, New York and Seattle on Friday, hundreds of demonstrators flocked to the streets and retail locations with chants like, 'If we don't get no justice, they don't get no profits,' to disrupt Black Friday shopping in the hopes of highlighting issues of race, class and law enforcement that they believe the Brown case laid bare.

Waves of protests have popped up across the country after it was announced this week that a grand jury would not charge Officer Darren Wilson in the killing the 18-year-old, unarmed Mr. Brown. But it is far from clear whether such actions will build into anything that brings a sustained social movement like the civil rights marches of the 1960s.

Groups are divided by aim and by geography, with goals of justice for Mr. Brown or an end of lethal police force against minorities, but no clear or easy path for achieving them.

Certainly there is an array of new coalitions with names like Lost Voices and Tribe X, and across the country this week there were calls to hold police departments accountable and social media organizing campaigns. Many of the demonstrations had a distinctly local flavor.

In Durham, N.C., for example, protesters gathered in a plaza where in September 2013 the police shot and killed Derek Walker, 26, a black man who was publicly brandishing a gun, apparently intending to use it on himself after losing a custody fight.

'The last time I was standing in this square, every one of us was tear gassed, including my daughter,' Serena Sebring, a field organizer with the activist group Southerners on New Ground told the crowd, to shouts of affirmation. She called on those attending to take the fight to city government, including running for five soon-to-be-vacant seats on a police civilian review board.

But here in Ferguson, where Mr. Brown's killing sparked a broad outcry, the challenges of creating a movement out of students and anarchists, established civil rights leaders and the new hackers, and the angry and dispossessed were clear. Groups had planned for weeks how to maintain what they called militant but nonviolent protests if Officer Wilson was not indicted.

Yet the demonstrations quickly turned destructive, with stores set aflame and looted on the night of the grand jury's decision not to indict him was announced.

The violence fulfilled the worst fears of Patricia Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman. Until recently, she was one of the people standing in between the police line and the protesters, urging calm on both sides. After the August shooting, she used to try to broker deals for the demonstrators on the front lines. She has since pulled back, saying that lawless actors have hurt the peaceful movement.

She became turned off, she said, several weeks ago after she called out several activists at a protest planning meeting who she said attacked a young man they accused of live-streaming the private session. At a protest a few days later, several members of the group she had criticized surrounded her and threatened her, she said. Only four people came to her defense when they circled her, she said.

'If we can't stand up to the punks and the hoodlums who are giving the protest a bad name, you're not ready to stand up to the police,' said Ms. Bynes, 35. 'You throw a rock and hide behind a peaceful crowd, you're a coward.'

Ms. Bynes has urged peaceful protesters to avoid the evening demonstrations because they became too dangerous, and to instead focus on other ways to effect change. She has started a petition for a performance audit of the City of Ferguson. She said she planned to be active in campaigning for the next Ferguson municipal elections next year. And she hoped to push more people to become active in their city and county councils.

'If they've been doing the same tactics for 100 days and absolutely nothing has changed, you've got to change the tactics,' she said, reflecting on the near nightly protests that have taken place here since Mr. Brown was killed on Aug. 9.

Part of the challenge for activists here and across the country is whether they can or want to agree on a concrete agenda, whether it be civilian review boards for police, or special prosecutors, or a push for more minority police officers.

Getting there will also require bridging generational and tactical divides, activists said.

On the one hand, a new crop of young activist groups that has sprouted has brought energy and attention in the wake of Mr. Brown's killing. On the other hand, it is the older, more established civil rights leadership that has the resources and knowledge of how to push concrete measures. Yet some of the younger activists remain skeptical of their older counterparts and of participating in traditional politics. There also remain questions of how militant or peaceful the groups want to be.

'It's been a little disjointed,' said Alisha Sonnier, 19, the president of Tribe X, a youth activist group in the St. Louis region that formed after Mr. Brown's death. 'At the end of the day all of us are dealing with similar feelings and similar emotions. There's a disjointment in how we feel we should go about it.'

On Friday afternoon, Ms. Sonnier's organization led about 100 protesters through the Galleria in suburban Richmond Heights. They chanted and sang for about an hour, adjusting their slogans and lyrics to fit the moment ('Hands up! Don't Shop!' for instance, and 'No true bill set our soul on fire,' sung to the tune of 'chestnuts roasting on an open fire' from 'The Christmas Song.') Dozens of police and security personnel trailed the protesters but did not make any arrests. Several stores closed before the management eventually closed the entire mall.

Documents Released in the Ferguson Case

'One of the few ways to be heard and have people listen to you is to have an economic impact,' Ms. Sonnier said. 'If you want to really affect people, especially those who are in power, you got to hit their pocket. We as a people cannot allow people to keep making money and a business to go on, and we can't even get justice when our people die.'

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was planning to start a countdown to the end of the grand jury in New York that is looking into the case of Eric Garner, 43, who died after being placed in a chokehold while the police attempted to arrest him for allegedly selling cigarettes illegally on July 17, said he had learned a lesson from the Trayvon Martin case.

After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of the unarmed Florida teenager, Mr. Sharpton said, his organization left it to local groups to fight to overturn the state's so-called stand-your-ground self-defense law. But those efforts faded, and the state's Republican governor was re-elected this year.

'We're working with a lot of the young groups in Ferguson,' Mr. Sharpton said. 'We're not letting it now just dissipate into groups that will not be there in 30, 90 days. It has to be connected to a broader agenda.'

Mr. Sharpton said groups would be pushing for the creation of national guidelines by the Justice Department for investigating officers when they use deadly force, which would be a mechanism to take investigations of police shootings out of the hands of local prosecutors who are close to the departments.

The N.A.A.C.P. was planning to start a 120-mile, seven-day march from Ferguson to the Missouri capital, Jefferson City, on Saturday.

But so far the nighttime protests in Ferguson have mostly been spontaneous, angry standoffs in front of the police station, with demonstrators shouting at the officers.

Older leaders needed to give the young ones room to vent and be angry, and carefully go about supporting their cause in a way that does not lecture them, said Michael McPhearson, co-chairman of the Don't Shoot Coalition and executive director of Veterans for Peace.

'It's a matter of supporting what they're doing, instead of trying to mold it,' he said.