By Ryan Lovelace
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Joshua Williams has been everywhere: protesting in
Ferguson, Mo., Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, Ohio. Now, he is in St. Louis,
where police have arrested him for arson.
During the Ferguson protests, Williams perfected the
skill of catching the attention of journalists and using them to elevate his
claims of police brutality to national attention. Quoted or photographed in
countless articles in publications including the New York Times and USA Today,
Williams claims police in Ferguson, Mo., targeted him because he is black. The
truth, caught on tape by National Review Online, is much different.
The charismatic teenager was one of Ferguson’s most
recognizable protesters. Once the summer protests began, protestors and
reporters alike found themselves transfixed by Williams’s emotional
demonstrations. Sometimes he cried, sometimes he screamed, and sometimes he
confronted police in a way designed to get a response. As high-profile African
Americans flocked to Ferguson, Williams somehow found himself at their side:
When former Princeton University professor Cornel West arrived, there was
Williams, shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “I don’t know how he ended up
arm-in-arm with Cornel West, but . . . for as much as Josh was holding on to
West, Cornel West there, West was holding onto Josh as well and talking with
Josh,” says David Carson, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer who captured
the two marching together. “So it wasn’t like it was a one-way thing.”
Williams has been portrayed in the media as an innocent
victim fighting back against authority; he has been held up as the
quintessential Ferguson protestor, decrying police brutality as he is time and
again brutalized by police. When Williams interrupted a Ferguson City Council
meeting in September and the meeting descended into chaos, for example, the New
York Times published a photo of his disruptive antics with a caption that said
that he had only “posed a question to the City Council.”
Williams came to Ferguson to protest the Ferguson
police’s involvement in the death of Michael Brown. He routinely clashed with
the cops and claimed that he had been arrested multiple times there.
Williams made his way to Washington, D.C., to join protests
there, too. “The reason we came up here is because we are tired of being shot
down in the streets like dogs,” Williams told thousands of people gathered in
the city streets for Al Sharpton’s “Justice for All” march earlier this month.
“Police have a thing called the trigger finger — they can’t control they
trigger finger when they see a black person in the street.”
He proceeded to tell the crowd about the beatings he had
suffered at the hands of police, and claimed to have been arrested five times.
Each time after the police released him, he said, he went back out on the
street to let the cops know that “I don’t care about them.”
NRO visited Ferguson in November and observed something
different. On a cold fall night before the grand jury decided against indicting
police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, Williams stood across
the street from the Ferguson Police Department.
“Come on, I’m ready,” he shouted. “Your time starts now.
You have five minutes to arrest me, or we’re going to bang it out in the
streets.”
NRO didn’t see whether the police complied with his
request, but it was neither the first nor the last time he goaded the police.
In October, the Post-Dispatch photographed him burning an American flag; in
December, he prevented St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson from speaking at a
meeting of the Ferguson Commission, gesturing in Dotson’s face and shouting him
down. The Ferguson Commission is an independent group commissioned by Missouri
governor Jay Nixon to make recommendations about how to make progress in
Ferguson. .
Nonetheless, Williams’s supposed martyrdom has won him
admiring profiles. MSNBC depicted him as a hero of the summer protests. The
profile lauded Williams and detailed his sterling attendance record: “He hasn’t
missed a single day of marching, protesting, or meetings.” MSNBC portrayed his
arrival at the protests in Ferguson as if he were a reluctant leader who was
involuntarily drafted to defy the police: “Like hundreds of other young people
in Ferguson, many of whom have born [sic] the weight of a litany of alleged and
frequent abuses residents say police have heaped upon the city’s black
majority, Williams has found himself thrust into the heart of the city’s
protests and civic action sparked by Brown’s death.”
The reality is more complicated. Williams appears to have
told journalists and his fellow protestors conflicting stories about his past,
and may in fact have been homeless and using those he met through the protests
to survive. “I just keep getting different answers,” says J. B. Forbes, a
photographer with the Post Dispatch who has captured images of Williams. “It’s
almost as if he doesn’t really want you to know exactly where he’s staying.”
Tony Rice, one of Williams’s fellow protestors in
Ferguson, told NRO that Williams stayed with him while protesting there. Rice
did not know where Williams came from, but he had the distinct impression Williams
did not want to return home when Rice met him at the protests last summer.
Williams fed off of the Ferguson protests. “Virtually every time I see Joshua,
the very first words out of his mouth are, ‘Can I borrow five dollars?’ Or,
‘Can I have five dollars? I want to get something to eat,’” Forbes says.
“Apparently he hits everybody up for money.”
Williams’s rhetoric turned violent on several occasions.
On the night of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson, Williams’s
comments on Twitter grew much more hostile. As Ferguson burned, Williams
tweeted, “Who burned s*** down we burned s*** down,” and “Man the whole west
flossant [sic] is on fire f*** with us again we gave you 108 f****** days to
indict him but you didn’t so we burned it down.”
On the night after Christmas, St. Louis County Police
arrested Williams on suspicion of arson in a separate incident. Williams was
reportedly involved in the looting and burning of a QuikTrip convenience store
on Christmas Eve in Berkeley, Mo., a St. Louis suburb approximately two miles
away from Ferguson. The police did not immediately respond to NRO’s request for
comment.
He may have been glorified as a peaceful protester, but
Williams’s story never added up.
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