As far as the Ferguson case I haven’t heard of or seen anything much about it locally.
If you include facebook as a community, some black facebook friends from when I lived in Memphis have made some statements about it, and talked about the other black boy who was shot, because he had a toy gun. Most of the black people repeat things about their sons being at risk, and a few talk about what they teach their sons, because they feel black boys and men are treated and seen in an unfair way. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Memphis had some sort of deminstration, but I don’t live there anymore, and I don’t think it is a small town, but it is a small-medium sized city.
Some of my white friends on facebook say things like if you think the black boy in the Ferguson case was totally innocent then that’s wrong. They state things saying you have to look at all facts. Other white people are really upset, because they believe there is a lot of unfairness in the system against minorities. They also defend that people need to understand the position of the police and the dangerous situations they are in or believe they are in during an interaction.
A long time back during the Elian Gonzalez case they blocked the streets not too far from me and set tires on fire. It was not a small town though, it was in Miami and surrounding areas, and that was actually the vicinity of where Elian was living.
I think it’s horrible to block traffic like that and set fires. People can get hurt, and demonstrating without blocking traffic I think is just as effective. During that case a lot of the Cubans demonstrating were waving the Cuban flag, which to this day I do not understand. They wanted the kid to stay in the US, but then they are holding up the Cuban flag? They just looked like out of control Cubans who don’t understand how it is supposed to work in America. I am not saying that’s what I think of Cubans en masse, I am only saying during those demonstrations, some I would call riots, that’s what some of the “white” Americans around me were saying. We also thought the boy should be with his father, whereas it seemed most of the Cubans thought he should stay in the US. The end result was police having to take actions during the demonstrations, which looked horrible, and finally the federal government putting out an order to go in with what was like a SWAT team or military; men with guns rushing the small house the boy was kept in to take the boy out by force.