Deray Mckesson

• Deray Mckesson
• Born: July 9, 1985

Is a former school administrator, candidate for mayor of Baltimore, a central actor in the Black Lives Matter movement, and the founder of Campaign Zero. He is one of the most recognized voices of the Black Lives Matter movement and has a significant online following on Twitter and Facebook.

DeRay Mckesson was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Growing up, his family life was difficult. His mother was a drug addict who left the family when he was only three years old. He grew up living with his father, great-grandmother, and sister. Despite poverty and his rough neighborhood, Mckesson thrived in school. He was serious, but well-liked. First elected to student government in the sixth grade, he would serve in student government every year through college. He attended Bowdoin College, a prestigious private liberal arts college in Maine, on scholarship. He majored in government and legal studies and graduated in 2007.

After graduation, Mckesson taught for two years as a sixth-grade math teacher in Brooklyn, New York, through the Teach for America program. After the two-year program ended, he moved back to Baltimore, his hometown, and worked as an administrator in the public schools. By 2014, he was working in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, public school system as an administrator. It was then that he learned of the shooting of Michael Brown.

On August 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a town outside of St. Louis. Wilson had stopped Brown, only eighteen years old, because he matched the description of a suspect involved in a robbery of a convenience store. After the stop, an altercation ensued and Wilson shot Brown twelve times. Wilson claimed that Brown was moving to attack him, although witnesses contradicted this claim. It was widely believed that Brown had his hands in the air and was unarmed when Wilson opened fire. Although, this account could not be proven, it gave rise to the slogan “Hands up, Don’t Shoot!” When Wilson was acquitted of any wrongdoing, the town of Ferguson erupted into protests and looting.

Mckesson was watching the news coming out of Ferguson and noticed differences in the police reports on Twitter and the reports from television news. He decided that he needed to investigate for himself, so he traveled the six hundred miles to Ferguson. When he arrived he tweeted what he saw and provided up-to-date information on what was happening in the town. His short, succinct, Twitter reports and his use of various hashtags brought him thousands of followers. Eventually, he became widely associated with the Black Lives Matter movement due to his online presence.

Mckesson’s time in Ferguson transformed him. As an educational administrator and student body representative, he had worked within systems of power and authority for much of his life. But in Ferguson, the beginning of his activist career, he was tear-gassed and experienced several frightening situations. At the same time, he experienced the hope of a community and the appreciation they have for those who work to make the system more just. “I’ll never forget the woman who brought her grill out every day in those early days to make hot dogs and hamburgers for protesters, or the people who made sure that everyone had water. It was in Ferguson that I began to understand that protest is also community-building, literally bringing together people to form new communities of power,” he told one journalist Rembert Browne in New York Magazine. He started publishing This is the Movement, a newsletter about what was happening in Ferguson. Journalists across the nation followed the newsletter for breaking news and tips.

When Mckesson finally left Ferguson, he did not return to Minneapolis. Instead, he went back to Baltimore and became the interim chief human capital officer for the Baltimore City Public Schools. Around the time that Mckesson returned to his hometown, Freddie Gray, a young twenty-five-year-old black man, was arrested by Baltimore Police and mysteriously suffered injuries to his spinal cord while in the police van. Later medical examiner reports would indicate that Gray received the injuries while in the custody of the police. The West Baltimore community erupted in protest. Through the late spring of 2015 there were a series of local and national protests, along with rioting and looting in the city. Throughout this, Mckesson maintained a prominent online presence, tweeting about the case and the issues. He had a special interest in the case because he grew up on the same side of town as Gray. From Ferguson to Baltimore, he had turned into a fulltime activist.

By 2016, Mckesson was considered one of the best-known voices of the Black Lives Matter movement and visited President Barack Obama in February of that year. After meeting with the president, he tweeted “Why did I go to the mtg w/ @potus today? B/c there are things we can do now to make folks’ lives better today, tomorrow, & the day after.” In response to the growing deaths of African Americans at the hands of police, Mckesson co-founded Campaign Zero, an organization with a ten-point platform aiming to end police violence in the nation. The platform include calls for ending “broken-windows” policing, demilitarizing police, limiting use of force, enhancing community representation, and providing better training.

On February 3, 2016, Mckesson launched his campaign for mayor of Baltimore. In order to be successful, he would have to win the Democratic primary in a crowded field of thirteen better-connected local politicians. Yet, Mckesson hoped that he could parlay his national fame into local office. Unfortunately, his activism and fame did not translate well. In the first poll in March of 2016, he received less than one percent of the vote. In the end, Mckesson finished sixth in the Democratic primary for Baltimore mayor on April 26, 2016, garnering a little over 3,000 votes, about two percent of the total vote.

DeRay Mckesson rose to prominence with the growing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was a sorrowful admission that the systematic dehumanization of African Americans continued unabated for centuries, but it was also a powerful demand that society recognize the value, worth, and power of black lives. It was a message that resonated with young activists in the twenty-first century. However, the direction of the Black Lives Matter movement was not often clear. While activists like Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors of the Black Lives Matter organization tried to harness the collective online energy of young activists into action, the larger movement suffered from a lack of concrete actions. Mckesson is representative of the aspirations of the movement. He has found his voice and audience online, but he has had trouble translating that presence into the real world. He has an online community but no real community. He has succeeded in contributing to and changing the conversation regarding police brutality, policing, and incarceration, but he has had trouble achieving legislative or structural reform. Black Lives Matter is the most significant civil rights movement of the twenty-first century, but it also speaks to the possibilities and difficulties of activism in the twenty-first century as well.

For important profiles see Jelani Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” The New Yorker (March 14, 2016), Jay Caspian Kang, “‘Our Demand is Simple: Stop Killing Us,’” The New York Times (May 4, 2015), Miles E. Johnson, “The Political Miseducation of DeRay Mckesson,” Mother Jones (April 25, 2016), Rembert Browne, “In Conversation with DeRay Mckesson,” New York Magazine (November 22, 2015).