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On 9 April 2017, political commentator, prolific Twitter user and former British member of Parliament Louise Mensch tweeted to her 224,000 followers that the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 were funded by the Russian government: The claim was soon picked up by others, and quickly started roaring around social media. Mensch did not offer any evidence for her claim nor an explanation as to why a riot would need any funding source. But there is no credible evidence for the claim; the unrest in Ferguson unfolded organically, and because it was well-documented by people with camera phones and the news media, it can be traced from the moment Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown (an unarmed 18-year-old African-American man) to the marches and street violence that resulted. After Brown was shot on 9 August 2014, police left his body in the open on Canfield Drive for four hours. As documented by the New York Times after the fact, but filmed by residents constantly in real time, civil unrest in Ferguson started with outraged and grief-stricken neighbors gathering and seeing Brown, left facedown with blood and fluids streaming from his wounds: In interviews conducted by the New York Times on 23 August 2014, Ferguson residents recounted how shaken they were by the image of the body out for hours in the open, and their outrage at what seemed like the callous responses by police who refused to cover Brown, despite people telling them that children were seeing the grotesque scene. Two residents in particular, interviewed by the Times, explained how Brown's body gradually drew a crowd, and how it resulted in the explosion of anger and outrage that resulted in weeks of protests in Ferguson. Jenetra Spears said she had just seen Brown the day before when he was alive, then was faced with the gruesome image of his body. She said: Another resident, Tommy Chartman-Bey, then described how a crowd grew around the body: Residents and a police officer interviewed by the New York Times described how the scenario further escalated, with mounting distrust between police and the crowd that had gathered. Witnesses reported hearing what sounded like gunfire; officers called for backup. Tensions were further heightened by the arrival of more officers in riot gear using police dogs for crowd control: Another activist who was on the ground in Ferguson did not wish to be interviewed, but simply said the claim was so far afield he didn't want to dignify it with a response. A third called the claim insulting. News reports from Ferguson in 2014 described scenes of intermittent protests and violence, but many of the demonstrators described in the stories were locals who expressed concerns about inequality between white and black residents in the area. The Washington Post reported: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported: To place it in historical context, a racial justice movement had already been galvanized in 2013 when George Zimmerman (a self-deputized neighborhood watch member who shot and killed 17-year-old African-American high school student Trayvon Martin) was cleared of murder charges in Florida. Martin's killing launched a national conversation about the way police interact with black Americans in a country with a long legacy of institutional racism. Like the Trayvon Martin protests, the Ferguson movement was spontaneous and largely driven by social media. Although it was heavily local, it helped congeal the national movement against police violence against the African-American community under the Black Lives Matter banner. But the Ferguson protests were not dictated nor driven by any top-down organization, and it takes no funding stream to prompt outraged residents to take to the streets, which is exactly what happened in 2014 as well as in subsequent years, when demonstrations were (and are) hastily organized on social media in response to incidents of police violence captured on video by citizens with smartphones. Further, it is clear from exhaustive reporting by the news media at the time — as well as a scathing report issued by the Department of Justice in the aftermath — that Ferguson's black community had serious and legitimate civil rights concerns with the police department. Brown's death was only a catalyst that released tensions that were already burning under the surface. We found no evidence that any foreign government, Russia or otherwise, funded the Ferguson protests.
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