10 Years On, Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s Mothers Are Still Fighting for Justice

A decade. A whisper in the grand narrative of time, yet a chasm in the lives cleaved by the summer of 2014. It was a season punctuated by two names, two lives prematurely extinguished: Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Their deaths, separated by three weeks, became enmeshed in the grim chronicle of racialized police violence, a fabric knitted with threads of intolerance that stretches to today.

It was on July 17, 2014, that Garner gasped for breath on a Staten Island sidewalk, his agony for air choked by the weight of a white policeman’s arm, swallowed by the pavement, all for selling loose cigarettes. His final plea, “I can’t breathe,” rumbled through the canyons of history. Not long after, on August 9, Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, lay sprawled on a Ferguson street, shot and killed by a white police officer in broad daylight after a convenience store’s call about stolen cigarillos. Witnesses said the teen had his hands up before he was gunned down. His lifeless body lay prone on the asphalt, under scorching heat for hours, alone, disregarded—a testament to the fragility of Black life in America.

Two names, two lives forever bound by the shared brutality that ignited a nation’s conscience, exposing the raw, searing reality of unrestrained profiling and targeting. Their final moments—detonations of anger and grief—molded into what has become the clarion call of a people.

I can’t breathe.

Hands up, don’t shoot.

Garner was Gwen Carr’s son. Brown was Lezley McSpadden-Head’s. Each with a dream to become more than their stereotyped labels. Garner dreamed of one day running a mechanic shop. The 43-year-old was into cars. He adored them. Especially old foreign types. Brown loved music. He’d even dropped some tracks on SoundCloud. McSpadden-Head and Duane Foster, Brown’s former high school theater director and teacher, said that’s where the teen flourished the most. Brown was killed eight days after graduating from Normandy High School. The silenced melodies and the engines that never purred forever leave a void in the hearts of those who loved the two men.

Burdened by this loss, those left behind, who cherished them, are forced to carry on, wondering, wishing, yearning for what could have been, churning through all the what-ifs. It hasn’t been easy for them. What McSpadden-Head and Carr have done every day since is keep their sons’ names alive, reminding us all that they were loved. That they were somebody’s children, who dreamed big dreams and whose absence leaves a tangible emptiness in ways we may never fully comprehend in a world that so senselessly took them.

“When people ask me [if] I feel anything has changed, my reply is nothing,” McSpadden-Head told me. “I’ve not seen the change that needs to happen for me as a Black woman with Black children and a Black family. We’re still all talking about 400 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, 10 years ago—still, nothing has gotten better.”

“We still have no justice,” she went on. “We still have police brutality happening all over this country. We still have that line drawn in the sand between Black and white. We still have controversial politicians. When will accountability actually take place? And after 10 years, I’m exhausted.” It’s a poignant sentiment that Carr echoed, telling me that when the system meant to grant access to recourse fails, all that mothers—like herself and McSpadden-Head—can do is press on, “uplift each and every individual, [and] never let them forget.” And that’s what they continue to do: remind us all that their sons left an imprint even in their shortened lives.

Because in what seemed like a blink, Garner’s and Brown’s deaths transcended headlines and news cycles, setting off protests that boomed across the country, a communal cry for change, a hunger for a time when someone’s skin color would no longer predetermine their fate. But all these years later, the cries linger in the air, tinged with the bitter knowledge that systemic oppression is as pervasive as the very air we all breathe.

Because in the decade since, there have been more than 6,500 people of color killed at the hands of police. Tanisha Anderson. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. Atatiana Jefferson. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Pamela Turner. Ahmaud Arbery. And countless more names woven into that same sorrowful fabric. Each name, each life, a haunting attestation to the fact that the needle of progress moves agonizingly slowly when it comes to social equality. Yet another reminder that the cacophony of suffering for all the Others in society has no limit. An indictment of how, in America, the cries of the marginalized echo without resolution.

At what point is enough enough?

At what point will parity prevail?

There have been plenty of platitudes and empty promises in the 10 years since. Or, as McSpadden-Head put it, “conversations but no actions.” There have been families forced to go to bed every night—even now—with unanswered questions. With an indescribable pain that words can never ever encapsulate. And in the quiet moments between the protests and the pronouncements, they persist, hoping that, someday soon, this uniquely American way of dying will become a relic of the past, replaced by a society that genuinely values and protects all lives. Until then, I must—we must—remain resolute. Mostly because when I speak to moms like Carr and McSpadden-Head, they show a strength that can only be forged in the fires of unfathomable loss.

Days after what would have been Brown’s 25th birthday, I asked McSpadden-Head how she was feeling. I asked her what she had been doing to get through such moments, once filled with joy but now overshadowed by a melancholy that longed for a flicker of hope for the future. She told me that, night after night, she’d craved eternal sleep. “I want to be with my son. I want him back with me, but I don’t want to leave my other kids. You’re conflicted. You’re confused. It’s everything that PTSD describes,” she told me. “Anytime you feel like you are happy, or you’re thinking about something other than your child, you feel guilty, and sometimes you catch yourself not even breathing—it’s traumatizing.”

Carr touched on a similar point when I caught up with her one July during the first family picnic she and her daughter, Ellisha Flagg-Garner, had put together since Garner’s death to bring the extended relatives together. They had wanted to celebrate life again, to relish the simplicity of it all. For so long, they’d been stripped of that—mourning, aching, and remembering. We got to talking about her activism work since and the several legislative efforts she’s been a part of, like the repeal of the 50-a law, which prevented public transparency around police misconduct records, and the passing of the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which criminalizes the use of the dangerous practice by law enforcement.

She’s acutely aware that “even though you get a bill passed, that don’t mean you know your work is done. And even if they stand on the books as they are, if no one has ever held them accountable, the system is not working. Or should I say, the system is working as designed, because it’s not designed to give us justice and accountability as a people.” She also explained that her coping has been focused on community and healing. “I try to engage and empower and enlighten some mothers [who] can’t get out of bed and they’re taking very strong medication. Some have even tried to commit suicide. And I have gatherings sometimes where we talk. But when we talk, we don’t talk about the tragedy of our children; we talk about what it was that made us laugh, or how silly they were, or, you know, just talk about things that—when it was a happy time.”

In every conversation, I’ve always sensed an unrelenting resilience that has transformed their grief into perseverance, dispelling the stench of the inequity that abides. A desire to tell the world that their sons were here, that each was a cherished name, a cherished life. And as we’ve come to know them by their death day, their families refuse to let this define them. “I rearrange my life in a way where we celebrate Mike’s birthday, which is what I would do if my son was here,” McSpadden-Head told me. “I never want to celebrate his death. I never look forward to August.” She has memorialized her son’s life with a scholarship for students at his alma mater and other schools in the area who want to pursue performing arts or social justice. Carr holds an annual celebration gala around Garner’s birthday.

So somehow I must—we must—remain expectant that someday soon, the tears and anguish of all the survivors, the mothers and fathers, the siblings and extended families, will be replaced by anthems of justice and joy. That someday soon, there will be no more silencing. That all of us will walk free—truly free–without fear.

That someday soon, there’ll be no more names, no more lives tragically taken.

Someday soon, enough will have been enough.