ST. LOUIS — More than 1,000 people gathered Saturday for a second day of organized rallies to protest the death of Michael Brown and other fatal police shootings in the St. Louis region and beyond.
Marchers started assembling in the morning hours in downtown St. Louis, and the crowd became larger than the ones seen at Friday’s rallies.
The main focus of the march, which wended through downtown streets for several hours, was the recent police shootings of unarmed black males in Missouri, but participants also embraced such causes as gay rights and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Police officers were stationed around the area.
Tensions were evident early Saturday morning in Ferguson, the site of the Brown killing. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department in the aftermath of Friday’s demonstrations.
Some chanted, ‘‘Killer cops, KKK, how many kids did you kill today?’’ as a wall of about 100 officers in riot gear stood impassively.
The four-day series of protests called Ferguson October began Friday afternoon with a march outside the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office in Clayton.
Participants renewed calls for prosecutor Bob McCulloch to charge Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson officer, in the Aug. 9 death of 18-year-old Brown, who was unarmed. A grand jury is reviewing the case.
‘‘I have two sons and a daughter. I want a world for them where the people who are supposed to be community helpers are actually helping, where they can trust those people to protect and serve rather than control and repress,’’ said Ashlee Wiest-Laird, 48, a pastor from Boston who attended Saturday’s march in St. Louis.
The situation in Missouri especially resonated with Wiest-Laird: She is white and her adopted sons, ages 14 and 11, are black.
Organizers said beforehand that they expected 6,000 to 10,000 participants for the weekend’s events. Police were not able to provide a crowd estimate Saturday, but organizers and participants suggested the march’s size may have approached as many as 2,000.
After the initial march in Clayton, the demonstrations moved to Ferguson on Friday night as protesters stood inches from officers in riot gear before dispersing. Many then went to the neighborhood on St. Louis’s south side where a police shooting of another black 18-year-old occurred Wednesday night.
By 2 a.m. Saturday, St. Louis police had blocked a main road that crosses an interstate highway near Saint Louis University’s medical complex, but the heavy police restrictions didn’t keep hundreds more, including many newcomers from across the country who joined local residents, from marching in the streets.
‘‘It’s important for this country to stand with this community,’’ said Ellen Davidson of New York City, a community college administrator on her second trip to the St. Louis area since Brown’s death.
The white St. Louis officer, whose name hasn’t been released, shot Vonderrit D. Myers after police say Myers opened fire. Myers’s parents say he was unarmed.
The officer was in uniform but working off duty for a private neighborhood security patrol. Police said he fired 17 rounds, and preliminary autopsy results show a shot to the head killed Myers.
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