Riot erupts following shooting death of unarmed black teen in Missouri

FERGUSON, Mo. — Each night on the streets of this city, the nation's latest symbol of racial unrest, there are two waves of protesters. Call them the A team and the B team.

The A team comes out in the early evening, and its demonstrations are largely peaceful. These are people committed to the idea of non-violent protest. They are usually done by about 11 p.m. Many of them have jobs, and they have to work the next day.

These are people like Cynthia Favored, a St. Louis community activist who says she has joined the Ferguson demonstrations every night since they started Aug. 10. She says she goes home by about 10:30 each night. "I go out there to show my support for our young people and for the Brown family," she says.

They are people like Bishop Edwin Bass, who runs a St. Louis program for the Church of God in Christ that works to improve the quality of life in American cities. He's been at the protests every night. "The vast majority of the people out there are quite sincere protesters," he says. "But there's a small percentage of people out there who have a totally different agenda that has nothing to do with Michael Brown.

"They're kind of out there stoking the crowd," Bass says. "Some of these anarchists have provided the young men with Molotov cocktails and encouraged them to throw them."
Those are the B-team protesters, the people referred to by Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson as "a dangerous dynamic in the night" and "agitators and criminals."  He told CNN on Thursday: "There are some outsiders. There's a lot of people who live here … We can't just blame it on outside instigators."
Of 75 protesters arrested Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, none was from Ferguson, but 60 were from Missouri, including 12 from the adjacent city of St. Louis, according to jail records. The others were from such places as Des Moines, Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati,  Brooklyn and the Bronx, N.Y., and Mount Vernon, Ill.