Missouri Rep. Bruce Franks (D), a Ferguson activist-turned-state representative, announced Friday that he is resigning his seat, saying that he “can’t heal from the trauma and survive at the epicenter any longer.”
In a lengthy Facebook post, he criticized “politicians and political insiders who keep playing this game with the peoples [sic] lives” and “leaders that look like me but perpetuate the same systemic oppression.”
“If I don’t make this move, St Louis is going to kill me,” he added ominously.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Franks originally won his seat in 2016, replacing incumbent Democrat Penny Hubbard, and won reelection in 2018. A special election will likely be required to fill the vacancy.
Read Franks’ Facebook post here:
I think a lot of us empathize. I can’t imagine what kind of stress and frustration Rep. Franks must have been experiencing.
There’s got to be a lot more to this story.
…the rage-filled nights of protests, injuries and arrests that followed have fundamentally changed America in the half-decade since, in real ways. Those include:
• Exposing widespread, monetized abuse of poor minorities by entire local criminal justice systems.
• Transforming cellphone-wielding civilian bystanders of police conflict into conveyors of news.
• Changing the way the federal government interacts with local police officials, on issues as disparate as availability of surplus military equipment to methods of gathering crime data.
• Spurring a vigorous debate from police union halls to the halls of academia over whether police aggression deters or aggravates violence.
The St Louis Post-Dispatch
I’d get tired too.
I can’t thank Representative Franks enough for his service to our country.
what is most telling is (what sounds to me like) his denunciation of the Democratic party establishment…
There are clear echos of Ayanna Pressley’s speech to the Netroots Nation gathering last weekend, in which she said “If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice”
and I say Good on both of them…and the rest of the Squad as well.