In 2014, protests over the death of Michael Brown broke through everyday life and became a catalyst for change.

NEW YORK (AP) — There have been moments before, moments of despair and grief that have led to anger and calls for justice. Sometimes they have never lasted more than a few sparks. Sometimes they have smoldered for a moment before dying out. And sometimes, under certain circumstances, they have ignited a fire.

This was the case ten years ago, in August 2014, when a white police officer shot and killed 18-year-old black man Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri.

In just a few weeks July 2014 Eric Garner’s death by strangulation at the hands of the New York City police, in a country where the nascent Black Lives Matter movement had still not died down after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the protests after Brown’s death and the heavily armed law enforcement response have sent a wave of protest into the national consciousness.

It opened a new chapter in the fraught history of civil rights in the United States, shining a light on long-standing issues of race and police use of force. And in doing so, it created a space for ripple effects that have spread in the years since—not just in conversations about race and policing, but about race and, well, everything; about protests and what they should or shouldn’t look like, and who can engage in them, about equality and fairness across the board.

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This article is part of an AP series examining the impact, legacy and fallout of the uprising commonly known as the Ferguson uprising.

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Social movements are breaking through everyday life

The domino effect is part of what social movements do. They break the cycle of everyday life to make people think and, hopefully, act differently in many ways.

“What really emerges from the most effective social movements is that they are trying not only to make visible changes in the world in terms of policy and structure and things like that,” said Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “But they are also trying to change the assumptions that people have in their heads about how the world works.”

She cited the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which focused on racial equality, as an example. By the end of the decade, however, other movements were emerging, such as the women’s movement and the environmental movement.

“Is it true that the early ’60s sparked a conversation about structural inequality and rights that was new in American politics? I think so,” she said. “And then did that somehow relate and lead to a conversation about rights for all these other groups that came in the late ’60s? I would say probably, absolutely, they are related.”

Ferguson did more than just call attention to police brutality

When it comes to Ferguson, think about some of the things that have happened since 2014, or the things that we regularly talk about that we didn’t a decade ago: professional athletes engaging in online and on-field protests, which has created a firestorm around athletes and activism that has become a separate conversation; diversity and representation on camera and behind the scenes in entertainment after April Reign created the viral hashtag #OscarsSoWhite; the speed and furor of the protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets; and of course the backlash against all of this, the view from some quarters that those on the left have gone too far.

Of course, the protests in Ferguson did not directly contribute to these events, but by raising issues of justice and equality in everyday situations, they helped create an atmosphere in which people paid attention to events in a different way and these events COULD have happened.

When Reign sent her first tweet in January 2015, after the Oscar nominees were announced, which included no people of color, her one-sentence response, “ #OscarsYesWhite “They asked to touch my hair” quickly went viral.

It’s not that no one had ever addressed the lack of representation on screen before, but she was able to use the social media landscape of the time to create a perfectly worded hashtag that others could join in on. And just months after Brown’s death in Ferguson, her tweet reached audiences at a time when issues of equality and justice were being talked about differently than they had in years past.

Her tweet that sparked the backlash “was so successful because people were open to talking about what it means to be a person of color in this country, whether it’s state-sanctioned violence or whether it’s television or film,” Reign said.

The solidarity protest moved from the streets to the sports fields and congress halls

Some of these people were professional athletes. They had already begun speaking out after the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, with high-profile online posts. That activism gained momentum after Ferguson, in moments like a November 2014 NFL game when five members of the St. Louis Rams walked onto the field with their hands raised in a pose that has become synonymous with protests; athletes invoked the names of those killed on the clothing they wore to games; and in at least one case joined the protest, as New York Knicks player Carmelo Anthony did in 2015.

Then came 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began his protest by refusing to stand during the national anthem, first remaining seated and then kneeling. That caused an uproar, as others in football and other sports leagues, like soccer player Megan Rapinoe, followed suit. Not only uproar over what they were protesting, police abuse of power, but also over whether they could protest at all, athletes as activists.

Since then, athletes have continued to speak out, with WNBA players getting involved in the 2020 U.S. Senate race from Georgia.

Douglas Hartmann, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who has written about sports and society, said athlete and sports activism “has changed dramatically over the past decade” from previous decades, when people did not see athletes as political actors or activists or wanted them to be at all.

“It’s a radical new thing in history that we’re suddenly allowing and accepting athletes as characters like so many others,” he said. “I think it’s great for athletes in some ways, but it’s really different.”

He also stressed that when looking at the impact of a social movement, it is important to consider the response to it. In the current climate, he highlighted the conservative opposition to diversity, equality and inclusion efforts in recent years, as well as protections for members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“There are completely different visions of America at stake”

Social movements and the resistance that accompanies them are “inextricably linked because they are fighting for very different visions of America,” he said.

It’s no surprise that the past decade has seen a rise in LGBTQ+ equality, as well as the treatment of women, most notably the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct. This initiative was led by Tarana Burke, a longtime activist who has worked on issues including suffrage and gender equality, and is best known in the public eye as the founder of the #MeToo movement.

“Everything is really under one big umbrella. Ultimately, we’re fighting for a kind of liberation that is universal,” she said.

“When you start to see that domino effect, it’s not unintentional,” she said. “It’s because one thing encourages another.”