FERGUSON, Mo. — The people who came to this boarded-up downtown Thursday morning knew they could not do much to salve Ferguson’s wounds. But it was Thanksgiving, and they felt as though they could not just sit home either. So they brought paint brushes and prayers, thermoses of coffee, and trays of drop biscuits, hoping to counterbalance the arsons, angry protests, and racial strife.
“This is a really small thing,” said Darcy Edwin, 26, as she painted a pastel oak tree onto the plywood boards covering an optical shop on South Florissant Road. “It’s not going to fix any big issue.”
It was cold and gray outside, and the streets that had overflowed with demonstrators for the past few nights were eerily still. Into this stepped Edwin, a Ferguson resident who works as a teaching assistant. “It’s harder to stay in,” she said.
The looting and gunshots, flaming buildings, and street clashes that erupted Monday after a grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer for fatally shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, cast a pall on the holiday for families around the St. Louis area and beyond.
While the governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, ate a Thanksgiving meal with the National Guard troops who have been called up to secure the streets here, Brown’s family and activists nationwide set aside empty chairs as dinner-table memorials.
Around midmorning Thursday, the Rev. Carlton Lee stood in a pulpit here and talked about the work of Flood Christian Church. But Lee was not speaking at Flood. Instead, he was at Wellspring Church, three days before he planned to hold a Sunday service in a parking lot. His own church had been declared a total loss, a casualty of a fire that burned late Monday amid the unrest.
He talked of rebuilding a church from the rubble, even though questions remain about whether an insurance policy will underwrite the project.
“I don’t know how,” Lee said in a soft voice. “I don’t know when. But I trust God.”
In nearby St. Louis, the unrest forced the city to put off its Thanksgiving Day parade. In Ferguson, officials postponed the Northern Lights celebration — an annual post-Thanksgiving holiday festival — as people anxiously waited to see whether tensions would flare again after two calmer nights of protest.
“It’s very unfortunate because this festival is about the community coming together,” said Ferguson’s mayor, James Knowles. “We light the Christmas tree. We’ve got kids making gingerbread houses. We’ve got music and carolers and horse carriage rides. There’s no reason to disrupt it.”
On Wednesday night, dozens of marchers returned to the Ferguson Police Department, but they were outnumbered by the hundreds of police officers and National Guard troops.
Nixon, who has been criticized for not deploying enough Guard forces to prevent Monday night’s widespread chaos, on Thursday thanked Guard members for spending the holiday away from their families.
For many residents, Thanksgiving brought a moment to reunite with one another after an anxious week of closed schools, police barricades, and relentless attention from the news media.
At Wellspring Church, black families and white families sat beneath blue stained-glass windows, praying and singing hymns that said, “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.” Fittingly, the pastor, F. Willis Johnson Jr. discussed the Book of Job in his sermon, and spoke of faithfulness amid uncertainty and turmoil.
“God is in control every day,” he said, “not the governor, not the National Guard.” But just outside the church were more concrete signs of control. A National Guard vehicle was parked nearby, as were many police cars. Businesses were boarded up, and South Florissant Road was nearly empty. Even inside the church, which has become a gathering place for demonstrators, there was a handwritten sign with the familiar protest call of “No Justice, No Peace!”
After the service, as congregants made their way to a lunch table of turkey, ham, stuffing, and pumpkin pie, Johnson said the holiday’s arrival was a “welcome relief.”
“In many respects, we’ve been locked in and on lockdown,” he said. “We have not given over and expressed our best selves toward each other, and so the expression of gratitude, the extending of gift and grace through food and fellowship, that is what not only this community strives toward, but it’s what we’re called to be.”