Her Students Asked About Police Shootings. So She Created a Guide for Them.
In the fall of 2014, Patricia A. Matthew’s students started asking her why Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, had been shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. Ms. Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, didn’t have the answers. So she did some research: How had racial tensions reached a boiling point in Ferguson? She quickly came across news stories and additional research on topics closely associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, including differing police treatment of white and black suspects and New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy.