As the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing rapidly approaches, within days of the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts Rebellion, we are invited to reflect on the connection between state repression and African-American mobilization past and present.

Each generation has a moment when its members share an instance of collective experience that is forever etched into their memory. For the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power generation, it was unquestionably the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till. The disfigured remains of this fourteen-year-old boy became a mirror in which black youth witnessed their most vulnerable selves. The sight was so excruciating that it helped catalyze direct action protest from rural Alabama to the streets of Oakland for nearly a decade and a half.

Today, for a broad swath of people ranging in age from those born in the waning years of the Black Power movement through the interstice between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this moment was embodied in Ferguson.