As twilight descended on Ferguson, Missouri, for a third consecutive night after the killing of Michael Brown Jr. by a police officer, Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett could no longer hold her peace.
Each day since the killing on April 9, 2014, she had watched her daughter, Brittany, leave the safety of home to protest the grotesque manner in which the 18-year-old Brown had been treated, his body lying in the street for hours, as if in a warning to the community.
The previous night had been particularly brutal: Officers hurled tear gas which Brittany had inhaled. Police officers atop tanks pointed their rifles at protesters. Gwendolyn DeLoach Packnett had seen enough.
“My mom was, like, ‘I just really would rather you stay home,’” Brittany recalled. “She was, ‘I know that you’re passionate about this, I know that you’re angry, but I need you to stay home tonight.’”
“And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t even know how to stay home.’”
The decision to leave that night against her mother’s wishes, and subsequent decisions she made to become a national leader in the movement for police accountability for Brown’s death, reflects not just the story of one activist fulfilling her purpose and finding her voice.
In its own way, Packnett’s rise to be one of her generation’s best-known racial justice activists also reflects the promise and power of the ministry of her late father, the Rev. Ronald Barrington Packnett, who was senior pastor of St. Louis’ historic Central Baptist Church.
The Rev. Packnett’s organizing and activism extended into the street, said his friends and family interviewed for this story.
He organized the St. Louis community in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. He defied the religious establishment when he committed to attending the Louis Farrakhan-led Million Man March in 1994, when that kind of activity was frowned upon in the conservative circles that Packnett used to run in.
Packnett died in December 1996 after a long illness. He was just 45.
Matthew V. Johnson, senior pastor of the Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, knew Packnett — part of a new generation of progressive preachers who began thinking theologically about the social situation of the 1980s.
In 1982, Packnett was named to the executive board of the 7-million-member National Baptist Convention – a key post from which to push for a more socially aware and dynamic version of the country’s largest Black denomination.
“The understanding was that the civil rights-era religious awareness finally arrived at the National Baptist Convention,” said Johnson. The leadership wanted young, progressive reformers and Packnett fell into that group, he said.
Throughout her childhood, until her father died, Brittany was often in tow.
“I tell people that I was really raised in this tradition,” Packnett told media. “The formal politics, the informal politics, boardroom presence, speaking at the high-level institutions, the street work, the protests, the community building.”
“Our collective commitment as a church to issues of justice was always as much of a part of ministry as anything else,” she said. “There was an intentional orientation around the beauty and value of Blackness within my spiritual upbringing at all times.”
Ferguson marked a new phase in the freedom struggle. For perhaps the first time, a mass protest movement for justice for a single victim was born organically — not convened by members of the clergy or centered in the church.
Many of the participants were unchurched, and tension boiled over numerous times as nationally prominent clergy and the hip-hop community encountered contrasting receptions as they converged on Ferguson. It demonstrated how the 40-year-old musical genre had joined, and in some cases supplanted, the Black church as the conscience of young Black America.
Brittany — who married and now identifies as Brittany Packnett-Cunningham – is a self-avowed police abolitionist.
She brought to the social-justice movement a uniquely prophetic voice deeply influenced by the cadences, rhymes and beats of hip-hop. It was a legacy from the early days of her father’s ministry, when the hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five depicted the deterioration of Black communities and the horrors of police brutality.
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