Six years ago today, in Ferguson, Missouri, Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager—just one of hundreds of instances every year in which a white police officer kills a young Black man in the United States. This time, though the cup overflowed—and for a week and a half, an ungovernable revolt raged in on the streets of Ferguson as angry residents and their supporters used a variety of tactics including arson, property destruction, looting, and gunfire to keep police at a distance and impose consequences for the murder. This set a precedent for subsequent rebellions around the country from Berkeley to Baltimore—culminating, after a pause during the first years of the Trump era, with the countrywide upheaval in response to the murder of George Floyd. To understand the events of the past two and a half months better, we can revisit the uprising in Ferguson and the practices and discourses that emerged in those days.

https://cwc.im/FergusonTimeline

This overview sets out the context leading up to the revolt and recounts the events in a timeline including narratives from the participants.