Hours after last week’s shooting in Charleston, S.C., Al Sharpton announced plans to travel to the Charleston peninsula. “The Rev” never showed. But DeRay did.
Meet DeRay McKesson: Bowdoin ’07, a former Minneapolis-area school administrator — and now the public face of “Black Lives Matter.” Imagine Al Sharpton, circa the Crown Heights riot, with access to Twitter. That’s DeRay.
When protests began in Ferguson, Mo., McKesson was still working in Minnesota as a human-resources executive with Minneapolis public schools. He would drive to St. Louis on the weekends and tweet — incessantly. He quickly became one of the most recognizable members of the demonstrations. With fellow protester Johnetta Elzie, he launched a newsletter, This Is the Movement, that pulled in 14,000 subscribers at its peak. In March he quit his job and moved to St. Louis permanently.
But he has not spent much time in his new hometown. New York City, Milwaukee, McKinney, Baltimore, Charleston — wherever racial tensions have appeared, McKesson has not been far behind. Such is the life of a professional protester.
And it’s not a bad life, evidently. For their “activism,” McKesson and Elzie shared the 2015 PEN New England Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award, and the No. 11 spot on Fortune’s 2015 “World’s Greatest Leaders List.” (For context: Bill and Melinda Gates were No. 18.)
He was invited by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to her (re)launch on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island earlier this month. America has a long tradition of celebrity activists, but McKesson is something new — the social-media celebrity. His great coup, in the slobbering characterization of the Washington Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar, has been “unleashing tweets that are passionate and perfectly on message at all hours.”
For example:
The language of respectability is a subtle, yet incredibly powerful, way that we participate in white supremacy. It will never free us.
