I learned hope the hard way. It was a hot day in St Louis county near Ferguson, Missouri in September 2014, and I’d spent the majority of the afternoon at a sit-in on the floor of the St Louis metropolitan police department headquarters. At 9am, 20 of us had filed in and plopped down in four rows in the centre of the station. The police began to gather around us as hundreds of our fellow protesters turned the corner, and were now standing outside the building, demanding to get in. When it looked as if the officers might forcibly remove us, everyone began to link arms – everyone but me. It was my role to record and interpret as much as possible everywhere we protested so that we could consistently tell the truth to the outside world. So, I sat in the front of our stacked rows, unlinked.

I was trying to capture as much as I could on my phone and tweet about it in real time. I wanted to be able to tell the story of the only successful sit-in of a police department since these protests in response to the continued intransigence of the law enforcement community began. We were repeatedly told to move, and we refused. It wasn’t long before the officers’ growing impatience turned to action. I heard the screaming before I realised we had been completely surrounded. It all happened so fast. I looked over and saw a mother trying to stop an officer from driving his thumb into the pressure point behind her daughter’s ear. And when I looked up, there was an officer standing directly over me. She told us that we needed to leave immediately. Again, we refused to move. Then she rested her hand on her Taser. I’ll never forget how time seemed to slow down as I watched her move her hand from her waist to her Taser to her gun.

Suddenly, I was on my back, gliding across the floor as an officer dragged me by my ankles to the exit. “Why are you doing this?” I asked, as a second officer twisted my arm behind my back. His face fell flat, and instead of a verbal reply, he just let go of my arm, picked me up and pushed me out the door.

It was one of two moments lately when death has felt near. And when death is near, so too is the question of how. How did I get myself into this situation? Should I have made a different choice?

I live off the beaten path in Baltimore City in a house that people don’t wander to. If you come to the house, you have made a decision to be at the house. One day in 2017, I was travelling home via a ride-sharing service, and as I arrived, I saw another car in the driveway. I paused, but I was already home, so I felt like I had to get out of the car. And when I got out, the driver in the other car got out, too. And in that moment, the calmness came over me, like it did in the St Louis police station.

I have received many death threats over the years, the FBI has visited my house, my phone has been hacked, cities have hired surveillance companies that have deemed me a serious threat, and a movie theatre was evacuated because I received a threat that I would be shot during a screening. But none of those things shook me like the day I saw that car waiting in front of my house as I came home from work.

The driver walked toward me, and I just stood still. I can’t even say that I was afraid in that moment. I was still and focused in a way that I have known only a few times. I followed his hands and body with my eyes, waiting. Ready. Anxious. He reached out his hand and gave me a packet of papers. I looked down and realised that I had just been served with a lawsuit. I was sued personally by five police officers: three in Dallas and two from Baton Rouge. I hadn’t been physically served in any of the lawsuits except this one, on the day the guy showed up in my driveway. After he handed me the papers he asked to take a photo, and with that, he was on his way.

These moments forced me to think about the “why” of this work – the fundamental question of whether it is worth the costs. But we all know the risks of protesting, and we choose to meet them head-on. There were so many times in the early months of what would later be called the Black Lives Matter movementthat I was met with an almost paralysing fear, but as I watched the officer in the police station, I realised that, for what felt like the first time, I wasn’t afraid.

Protesters gather on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty

It was in losing the fear of death that I began to understand faith and hope. Faith is the belief that certain outcomes will happen, and hope is the belief that they can happen. The work of faith is to actively surrender to forces unseen, to acknowledge that what is desired will come about, but by means you might never know – and this is difficult. Faith will sometimes waver.

Hope is the belief that our tomorrows can be better than our todays. When we talk about being hopeful for a future in which black bodies are not considered weapons, it is so easy to deride hope as a platitude, or even as an enemy of progress. But hope can also be a driving force. Consider the notion of “hope” in relation to that of “dream” – a word with a similar dual use. On the one hand, a dream can be the fanciful whimsy of a child, free to explore any one of countless possible realities, completely unmoored from present-day circumstance. But dreams have another, more actionable meaning. Indeed, they can be a firm, dynamic vision of where you want to go.

Hope is the precursor to strategy. It powers our vision of how to bring about a desired goal, and it amplifies our efforts. I am not surrendering to luck, or a blind faith that things will just get better. I am reminded that to have faith that a world of equity and justice will emerge does not relinquish one’s role in helping it do so. This is the way to use hope: as faith’s companion, and vice versa.

Freedom is not only the absence of oppression, but also the presence of justice and joy. We are fighting to bring about a world we have not seen before. “Make America Great Again” is a familiar evocation of a mythical time of human flourishing in our nation’s history. What is posited as a time of “greatness” was, for many, a time of rampant racism, xenophobia, misogyny and sexism. We have never seen a world of equity, justice and joy. We are trying to create something new. And it is impossible to create something new in the absence of hope.

We did not invent resistance or discover injustice in August 2014. We exist in a legacy of struggle, a legacy rooted in hope. But hope is not magic. Hope is work. Let’s get to the work.

It was illegal to stand still on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in August, September and October 2014. This wasn’t on account of any law that had existed prior to the presence of hundreds and thousands of protesters on the streets; it wasn’t on account of any law at all. It was a rule, if one could even call it that, born of hubris and desperation. The police were simply out of ideas for how to coax the swelling ranks of protesters off the streets. So they thought they would wear us out. And before we knew it, we were walking, day and night.

It became known as the “five-second rule”: anyone who stood still for more than five seconds was arrested. Being forced to walk day and night is one of the things I will never forget, a reminder that the law in practice is never neutral, that it can change at the whim of those in power, and that the battles our elders fought are not as far behind us as we had been raised to believe.

Days before the introduction of five-second rule, Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri, in a news conference, imposed a midnight curfew that he claimed was “not to silence the people of Ferguson, but to address those who are drowning out the voice of the people with their actions”. State highway patrol commander Cpt Ronald S Johnson subsequently declared: “We won’t enforce it with trucks, we won’t enforce it with teargas, we will enforce it with communication … We will be telling the people: ‘It’s time to go home.’”

On 16 August, the first night of the citywide midnight curfew in Ferguson, the teargas began at 8pm. Before we ever saw or felt it, we heard the sound of the canister leaving the barrel of the gun – a sound between a large firework and a cartoon cannon – followed by a whiz as it shot through the air. My most vivid memory of that night is seeing a child, maybe five years old, frantically running, directionless and alone. He seemed to notice first what I only realised moments later – that two canisters had fallen near us. By the time I saw he was crying, he was swept up by a parent and I was stuck in a cloud. I tried to outrun the teargas, but I was surrounded – there were cars behind me and a gate to my side, and the gas was moving quickly.

(The previous afternoon I had been at another protester’s house for the first training session given by a group of street medics – current and former medical professionals – who had just arrived in Ferguson. Street medics assist protesting activists, because ambulances rarely, if ever, visit active protest sites. I was one of eight people spending the better part of an afternoon learning how to flush my eyes out in the event of being teargassed, and how to properly assist those around me in distress. None of us had expected to make use of this information so soon. We were told that teargas can fuse your contact lenses to your eyes. I considered removing mine, but in the end decided not to. Less than 24 hours later, I was putting my head in my shirt and running through smoke.)

When I got through to the other side of the smoke, I uncovered my head and felt thankful that I could still see. But within a few seconds I was swept up in a crowd of protesters, all of us seemingly running for our lives. The police, driving Swat vehicles and armed with rubber bullets, were chasing us up West Florissant Avenue, the main site of the protests. They herded us in every direction, in their supposed effort to clear the street. It was like we were being hunted.

Hours later, the Swat vehicles were driving down the streets with officers hanging off them, shining flashlights into parked cars. They were still looking to round us up. I eventually made it back to my car, which I had parked on a side street. I knew I would have to drive down West Florissant to get to where I was staying that night, but once in the car, my only instinct was to hide. I sat there with the lights off, making myself as small as possible, hiding under my steering wheel, praying the flashlights wouldn’t find me. It was hours before I finally drove away.

Days later, I was out in the streets again, and four police officers informed me that I was walking too slowly; that I could not pace back and forth in a given area; that standing still was now illegal. Those of us who were there remember the five-second rule as a defining characteristic of the beginning of this movement. We remember adapting to it and meeting it as a challenge. Instead of tiring us out, it only strengthened our resolve. We couldn’t stand still? OK. We would march all day and all night, and we would make the police do the same. We wouldn’t be the only people exhausted.

I often wondered how it became so easy for the police to unilaterally create and enforce a set of rules in the name of public safety. Why was it so easy for them to obscure the reality of why we were in the streets in the first place? I have read stories about search parties rounding up black men and women. I have seen photos of protesters bloodied for daring to march in politically inconvenient places. But I never thought that in an American city in 2014, it would be illegal to stand still. I never thought I would have to hide under my steering wheel to escape the police. I never thought I would learn to manoeuvre in teargas like I learned how to tie my shoelaces – awkwardly and slowly at first, and then with grace. It wasn’t that I thought the US was better than teargassing its own citizens – I knew that was not so. But I thought those tactics were a thing of the past. Instead, the default reaction to black bodies assembled in protest was to treat us as a threat.

What it has taught me is that freedom is fragile, and that is a lesson I never want to forget. It is all the more important as accounts of the days and months after the Ferguson protests are told and the history of this movement is penned. Those of us who were there remember. We remember how quickly the safe houses were established, how smoothly the bail fund operated. We remember the lawyers, like the ArchCity Defenders and the legal observers, who set up clinics to close active warrants of protesters. We remember the dinners provided by Cathy Daniels, affectionately known as Mama Cat, who fed us in all weathers, and at many tense moments – and the old Ferguson Burger Bar, which fed us when every other place seemed too afraid to stay open. We remember how supporters donated water and ordered pizzas for us.

I remember, too, all the people that told us protest was not the way to make a difference, that we were wasting our time, that we needed to try different, more acceptable methods. When the protests began, I still worked for Minneapolis Public Schools. The steady stream of hate calls I began to receive – and the flood of complaints that members of the board of education were receiving – forced us to remove everyone’s office phone number from the schools board’s website. Today, people talk about the protests as an important part of the ecosystem of citizenship, but that was not the case in the beginning.

The National Guard on patrol in Ferguson. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Most nights I slept on couches, floors or inflatable mattresses, either with old friends who lived in St Louis, or new friends I had met on the streets. I think of the protests in two waves: before the non-indictment of Michael Brown’s killer, Darren Wilson, and after. (Wilson, a police officer, shot and killed the unarmed, 18-year-old Brown in Ferguson on 9 August 2014, sparking the first protests.) Before the non-indictment, there was a persistent on-edge feeling: we never knew when the decision would come, but we knew that if it was a non-indictment, the protests would become something we hadn’t seen yet. Every day we would hear rumours that “today was the day”. And when the day finally came, the night that followed was one unlike any before. Police cars burned; teargas dissolved in the air in clouds so thick and indistinguishable from all the other smoke that you didn’t realise what it was until you couldn’t breathe. And then there was the National Guard, strewn throughout the area, hiding on main roads behind buildings, ready for action.

We remember because we learned so much about ourselves in the process, about organising, about police violence, about liberation beyond survival, and about the difference between the people willing to talk about resistance and the people willing to do the work of resistance.

We did not know many things in those early days, but we knew a few things well: that Michael Brown should be alive, and that we would not and could not leave the streets. And so we stayed, all night, every night, confident that we were on the right side of justice. And knowing these things was the fuel that led us to stand firm despite, or perhaps because of, the terror that the police were inflicting on us. We may not have known each other’s names, but we knew each other’s hearts. And it was not that we were not afraid – often we were. But we had known fear in our silence, too. And we had grown tired of being silent.

“Indict! Convict! Send that killer cop to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!” went the chants.

They say “move back”, we say “fight back”.

When a message is spoken loud and clear and in unison, when formerly there were whispers or collections of disparate rumblings, it is easy to think of people as finally having found their voices, as if those voices had been lost. That they are being heard now, though, is more an indictment of the listener, not the speaker. We the protesters have never been the voiceless. We have been the unheard. Our storytelling has been key to our survival, as we have spoken about our pain and our joy, even if we were talking to ourselves. It is common since the protests began to hear people who are confused about our tactics ask: why are you doing this? Why are you demanding, now, to be heard?

Protest is telling the truth in public. Sometimes protest is telling the truth to a public that isn’t ready to hear it. Protest is, in its own way, storytelling. We use our bodies, words, art and sounds to tell the truth about the pain we endure, and to demand the justice we know is possible. It is meant to build a community, and to force a response.

We would never have gone into the streets if Michael Brown hadn’t been killed, or if thousands hadn’t been killed before him. The protesters in Minneapolis would not have barricaded the Fourth precinct police station if Jamar Clark hadn’t been killed, if Rekia Boyd hadn’t been killed as she walked, if seven-year-old Aiyana Jones hadn’t been shot through the wall by an officer while she slept on the couch, or if Philando Castile hadn’t been slain while complying with every request and command from the officer who shot him. We took to the streets as a matter of life and death. What else could we do? How, exactly, are we supposed to respond to murder?

It seems we have two options. We can accept the trauma and go about our daily lives – carry the weight of the violence inflicted upon us and pray that we survive. And if we choose to accept it, to suffocate in surrender, then we must ask ourselves: what kind of life is possible in surrender? Or we can challenge the source of the trauma. We can resist. And if we choose to resist, we must ask ourselves: how do we resist, and to what end?

On the streets in Ferguson, and in all the days since, a generation has chosen the latter. We choose to challenge the trauma, and although we know it won’t be easy, we know the alternative is impossible, for we have already lived through the suffocating reality of silence. When Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, we watched in disbelief as the system let his killer go and itself remained relatively unchanged. Florida’s “stand your ground” law became just another way to justify a modern-day lynching. By the time Michael Brown was killed two years later, we knew all too well that we were not promised a better tomorrow, but that we would have to force one into existence.

My generation grew up with the message of progress. Our elders speak of how far we have come, and told us our worst days are behind us. Indeed, that the moral distance we have travelled from enslavement to Jim Crow to today is unfathomable. Just a half century ago, it would have been hard to imagine the freedoms we now have – thus progress, it would seem, is inevitable.

The history lessons we learned in school were always ones of struggle and accomplishment – our freedom gained, constitution changed, national holidays proclaimed and so on. But when Michael Brown’s body lay in the street, the latest death in what was becoming a public record of indiscriminate killings by the police, the notion of accomplishment rang hollow. And so we could not remain silent. A response to murder that involves silence only invites more murder. We could not afford to surrender to the faith in a better tomorrow.

We chose protest as a matter of survival. When we protest, we are simply individuals coming together to use power and activate hope. I have yet to meet a protester rallying against a reality that she didn’t think she could change. And from those first days in Ferguson to today, that is what the protests have done all over the country and all over the world. People have been reminded that they have power, that they must stand in that power, and that when they do, they can change the world.

This is an edited extract from On the Other Side of Freedom by DeRay Mckesson, published by OneWorld and available at guardianbookshop.com

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