Civil rights activist McKesson has passion for justice
Former teacher part of 2014 Occupy SLU protest
Our series “How I became a …” digs into the stories of accomplished and influential people, finding out how they got to where they are in their careers. (Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
From sixth-grade classrooms to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, DeRay McKesson has been inciting change and passion in people all over the country.
As a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, the host of Crooked Media’s “Pod Save the People” podcast, co-founder of anti-police-violence website Campaign Zero, and a new author (his memoir “On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope” is out on shelves now) the civil rights activist and former teacher and school administrator has made it his passion and life’s mission to pursue justice. USA TODAY caught up with McKesson to talk about everything from his time as a teacher to the lessons that he has learned in the 2014 Occupy SLU protest.
Question: Who has been your biggest mentor?
DeRay McKesson: My peers in protest, because we’ve all really pushed each other to be honest and fervent about change. The spirit of urgency is something that I understood differently in the street, and it’s just stayed. The protesters have been the most consistent.
Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
McKesson: I think that what we all did in the street in St. Louis (in 2014-16). We were so laser-focused on the work ahead that we weren’t really looking up at people watching or how it transformed other communities. When I think about the work – we were (protesting) in the street for over 400 days – and when I look back at the actions we planned. The way we used Twitter ... all those things, with no playbook, we made it up as we went along. That was so special to just see, night after night, people be creative about a certain setdown action or how we told a story or how we asked these questions and got this outcome. That, to me, is one of the coolest things.
Q: What does your path look like, from college to now?
McKesson: I used to teach sixthgrade math, and (teaching kids) was by far the most incredible thing I’ve ever done. I also worked for the Harlem (N.Y.) Children’s Zone and helped lead the largest center in the zone at 145th and Douglas. Then, I went home to Baltimore, opened up an after-school center for middle-grade students and then I trained and supported a third of all of the new teachers in the city. After that, I became the No. 2 in the office of human capital for Baltimore City Public Schools. Then the superintendent left and most of the senior staff also transi- tioned out, so I went to Minneapolis, working in a similar role in human resources.
In August 2014, (Michael) Brown (an unarmed black teenager) got killed, and I went to St. Louis, quit my job in my school system and moved to St. Louis, and I was organizing. I did that for a year exclusively and then I ran for mayor (of Baltimore, but lost in the primaries in April 2016). (In June 2016, I) became the chief of human capital in the Baltimore school system – did that for a year – and continued to organize, but I went to work every day and had a job where I went to work every day. I recently left that work to come back to organizing (activism) around ending mass incarceration, police abuses and the racial wealth gap.
Q: What is the most powerful protest you’ve been to?
McKesson: There’s not one. St. Louis was just different – the police were different in St. Louis – aggressive in a way that we didn’t see anywhere else. The creativity in St. Louis that was required every day was just something different.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
McKesson: I spend a lot of time either supporting organizers with data – we made Campaign Zero about ending police violence – or attending a lot of meetings, trying to peel back layers we might have never thought about. With the (weekly) podcast, we (McKesson hosts the show with Samuel Sinyangwe, Clint Smith and Brittany Packnett) use it to make sure that we’re always using our platform to amplify the stories of other people: that part of our work is to make sure the truth gets out and people’s stories get out, and the platform is a really powerful one to do that.
Q: What’s your biggest high in this journey and your biggest low?
McKesson: High: There’s a protest in St. Louis called Occupy SLU (St. Louis University). Just to be a part of the people who pulled that off, the people that managed it – so many people involved. I didn’t lead that, I didn’t create it, but I was one of the people that led one of the groups as we marched – and it was early in the protest, it was such an incredibly organized event. It was huge crowds, aggressive, everything about it was just … I’ll never forget that feeling that night and I’ll never forget being a part of it.
Low: Sometimes there’s infighting (in the activist groups I’m involved with). It can involve a lot of things that take the focus off of the work at hand, and that’s (a) real low.
Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
McKesson: Don’t follow my footsteps, create your own footsteps.
The only thing that is true is that we have a lot of work to do, and I surely don’t have all the answers. I’ve done what I thought was important and that is real to me, but I know that there are many ways to be in this work. I’m interested in being a part of a vision and a team, so I’m ready to follow whoever has a bigger vision.