O’Fallon Teens' Protest Draws Huge Response

St. Louis on the Air

Seventeen-year-old Jalen Thompson and his friends Ryan Staples, Joseph Bartholomew and Ryan Fetsch had barely wrapped up their senior year at Fort Zumwalt West High School when protests against police brutality flared up across the country, sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Thompson and his friends wanted to seize the moment and find a way to galvanize their suburban community of O’Fallon, Missouri, which is largely white. They expected maybe a couple hundred people to show up at their June 1 demonstration — what they got was close to 2,000 people. In this episode of the talk show, Thompson joins host Sarah Fenske to talk about how he organized the first protest he’s ever even attended, the pushback he initially faced and how he’s already caught the attention of national media outlets — including MSNBC and the Today Show.