As the clock struck 11 p.m., there was a thorough, if almost disappointing, silence. There were no sirens, no helicopters. No gunshots or hissing tear gas canisters. No shattering glass.
Much of the media would stay out there for several more hours—we were largely exempt from the curfew, as long as we stayed in a few designated areas—but my eyes had tired of the riot porn. I had begun walking toward the car I had rented to drive back to DC when I heard a familiar voice call out in the night.
“Missster Low-er-ry!”
I turned and saw a familiar blue vest.
The first time I saw that vest, and the lanky, toned body that wore it, was in October 2014, outside a Walmart in St. Louis.
I had only spoken to DeRay Mckesson a handful of times at that point, and frankly, I was more than a little skeptical.
DeRay, as he would soon be known nationally—I’m always amused by the number of people who can recall for me their four favorite tweets of his but can’t remember or pronounce his first name—had gotten to Ferguson after I left. He’d seen the tweets and the media coverage, had driven, from his then-home in Minneapolis, more than five hundred miles to Ferguson.
The burned QuikTrip and the growing memorial covering the stains of Michael Brown’s blood on Canfield Drive had become a mecca for progressive and black America. By now a cliché, but also impossible to overstate: Ferguson had birthed a new movement. Caravans of college students, reporters, and activists pulled in every day for weeks. On any given night there were as many demonstrators from Texas and New York and California as there were from Greater St. Louis. Dave Chappelle was there. Talib Kweli was there. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were there.
And by the end of August, so was the school administrator from Minneapolis who would soon become the most singular presence linked to the Black Lives Matter movement.
DeRay Mckesson was born on July 9, 1985, in Baltimore, not far from the neighborhood where, just a few years later, in a run-down row house, an infant Freddie Gray would learn to crawl and then stand. Both of DeRay’s parents were drug addicts, his mom leaving the family while he was still just a young child. His father pledged to get clean, got himself a job with a local seafood distributor, and, with the help of a grandmother, raised DeRay and his sister.
The chaos of DeRay’s early upbringing created a young man who thrived in structure and with control. He excelled in school, prompted by his desire to achieve and to please. Of his many unique qualities, it is DeRay’s uncanny ability to craft the deepest of intimacies with people he has just met that has lent a crucial binding force to the protest movement.
“There is a touching earnestness to Mckesson that makes you want to believe everything he says,” wrote Jay Caspian Kang in a profile of Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie for the New York Times Magazine. Kang’s description was right—Mckesson speaks with a soft authority, calmly asserting confidence so unwavering that, before you realize it, you’ve been intoxicated by his message.
To know DeRay is to be DeRay’s friend—he will have it no other way. He has kept the phone number of almost every person he has ever met. He name-drops, not in the grating way of a Capitol Hill intern or a career-climbing Beltway reporter, but with the earnestness of someone who can’t fathom that you, too, don’t know every person imaginable.
He was elected to student government every year from sixth grade through his senior year at Bowdoin College, where he served as both senior class president and student body president. After college he took a series of jobs in education, beginning with a two-year stint as a middle school math teacher in Brooklyn through Teach for America. He later moved back to Baltimore to start an after-school program for fifth-through-eighth-grade students on the city’s west side before taking jobs as a human resources administrator, first with the Baltimore City Schools and later with the Minneapolis Public Schools.
Mckesson told me it was that background in education that drove him to Ferguson. Education had been his own means of creating a life of stability after he’d been handed a deeply disadvantaging slate of circumstances. He’d gone from the housing projects to one of the nation’s finest private colleges, giving campus tours and dining with the college president. As a teacher in New York, then as an administrator in Baltimore and Minneapolis, he wanted that same escape valve for the young children who stormed through the front doors of his schools each day. But he realized after Ferguson that those children could never make it to the dream of a better reality if their lives were being extinguished in the streets.
It was a troubling revelation for the soon-to-be activist, whose outlook on life was largely predicated on the belief that the system, with some exceptions, worked. That if he could get his children in front of better teachers, in more functional school systems, with better and more culturally sensitive and responsive curriculums, he reasoned, he could improve their circumstances and save their lives. He might bristle at the description, but DeRay Mckesson was an institutionalist. He believed that power could be modified and tailored to uplift the oppressed.
The death of Michael Brown, and the way peaceful protesters were treated by responding officers—encased in clouds of tear gas and chaos—broke that worldview.
Once Mckesson arrived in Ferguson, he injected his activism with the academic rigor and attention to detail that had brought him professional success. In a medic training—one of the dozens of such sessions held by activists to prepare for the ongoing protests—he met Netta Elzie, who at the time was still the most prominent voice on the ground in Ferguson. She was equal parts brash and brief in her introduction—“I’m one of the big tweeters here.” Days later, they found themselves side by side again, this time in a church pew at Greater St. Mark’s, which hosted the bulk of activist trainings, strategy sessions, and services during the early days of the Ferguson protests.
Mckesson had an idea, spurred in part by the way he had watched Elzie’s tweets and, to a lesser extent, his own, go viral night after night. There was a clear hunger for content from the ground—people around the country could sense that there was something just short of a revolution breaking out in the streets in suburban St. Louis—but there was also so much news that was just inaccurate, portraying Michael Brown as a thug, unquestioningly passing on police accounts justifying the use of tear gas and rubber bullets, not to mention the commentary that borrowed from well-worn racial tropes. In other words, there was little real news, not to mention nuance and context, coming out of Ferguson.
Mckesson and Elzie decided together that instead of letting the media control the narrative, they would curate media content—circulating the pieces that got it right and calling out the outlets that got it wrong. Partnering with Brittney Packnett and Justin Hansford, they started the Ferguson Protester Newsletter. Among its most powerful features was the day counter near the top of each edition:
# of days since Darren Wilson has remained free: 50
# of apologies from the Mayor of Ferguson: 0
# of protesters arrested last night: 24
By the time the grand jury declined to indict Wilson in November 2014, the newsletter had more than twenty thousand subscribers.
Mckesson and Elzie played a crucial role as the de facto communications team for the ongoing Ferguson protests. Among the links, they included information about planned demonstrations by St. Louis activist groups, as well as Black Lives Matter–affiliated groups across the country. They would then promote positive coverage that the demonstrations had received. The newsletter’s subscribers, and the robust online followings that Mckesson and Elzie amassed while publishing it, grew by the hundreds each day, keeping the protests in the headlines and near the front of the nation’s collective consciousness during the months between Michael Brown’s death and the grand jury decision—a crucial three-month period when a diversion of the nation’s attention could have forever muted the growing movement.
The work they were doing was certainly impressive, but I couldn’t help but view Mckesson as a
bit of an interloper—someone who, like me, had parachuted into Ferguson and suddenly was granted a measure of legitimacy by his newfound proximity to the chaos. Aided by the fact that I had been arrested and thus had an outsized platform and following, I had developed a steady stable of sources within the upper ranks of the protesters, and talked regularly with at least half a dozen of them. Mckesson arrived late in the game, after the protests were already in full swing. Often, both in the media and in activist spaces, we assign credibility based on proximity to trauma. That manifested itself in the pride many on the ground in St. Louis took in being “day one” protesters. It shows up in the us-versus-them mind-set local reporters and outlets sometimes project toward national correspondents who drop into a story. The theory is that legitimacy can only be earned through a long-suffering and constant presence. But that view is limiting in that it forecloses on the possibility that at times change is most effectively spurred by a fresh set of critical eyes.
Yet as August and September gave way to October, Mckesson became an indispensable source. While activist groups continued daily protests outside the police station, with groups like Tribe X and the Lost Voices, as well as individuals like Tony Rice and Heather DeMian, serving as essential foot soldiers, the media and national attention had largely shifted away from Ferguson. The Ferguson Protester Newsletter provided a daily reminder and tip sheet for the media, still eager to cover the developments but now geographically far from the action.
On the second weekend in October, activist groups convened Ferguson October, which would prove the most successful collaboration among the organic protest groups, individual actors like Mckesson and Netta Elzie, and the broader Black Lives Matter network, including Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the three women regarded as founders of the hashtag, and their various allies. The efforts of all these individuals would be amplified by public relations work spearheaded by Mervyn Marcano and the Advancement Project, a national civil rights group that for months provided crucial support to the young organizers. Thousands of college students, clergy, and activists traveled to Ferguson for the weekend.
The movement had found a new name to rally around while they awaited the Darren Wilson grand jury decision: just one night before Ferguson October was set to begin, another young black man, Vonderrit “Drup” Myers, had been shot and killed in St. Louis. That night, more than a hundred demonstrators gathered at the spot where Myers had been killed and set out to march through St. Louis, ending outside a QuikTrip gas station, where they staged a sit-in in front of the glass doors.
The plans for the late-night march were closely held by organizers—with only several dozen of the local activists most active in Ferguson aware that the group would be led to the gas station and that an act of civil disobedience would take place. Organizers remained tight-lipped about their destination, going as far as tweeting inaccurate information about when they were embarking on the march and in which direction they were walking.
Chanting “No justice, no peace” and “The whole damn system is guilty as hell,” the marchers were on the move for close to half an hour. Blocks from the QuikTrip, officers in cruisers, trucks, and large tactical vehicles began to catch up.
When the protest reached the gas station, leaders yelled through the loudspeakers: “Do not cause any destruction, this is a peaceful protest.” Then volunteers stood guard at the gas station’s entrances to make sure no one entered or harmed the building.
Responding officers ordered them to disperse, but the protesters locked arms and remained seated as the officers used batons to try to break their arms apart and deployed pepper spray. At least fourteen people were arrested; the rest of the crowd dispersed into the night.
The arrests and disruption, a departure from the rest of the Ferguson October schedule, were only the first signal of what was to come for the rest of the weekend.
Two days later, on Sunday evening, the demonstrators again gathered in the Shaw neighborhood. The media was growing impatient. All that had been said was that we should show up here, and then something big was going to happen. Were they going to march? Where were they going? This tension was present at many of the protests, with journalists demanding information from the protesters, who in turn told them where they could shove their cameras.
“You’re shooting yourselves in the foot,” the slighted reporters would respond. “You need us.”
There is a fundamental arrogance among reporters when it comes to assessing our own role in the creation of social movements—aided by the fact that we seem to have trained a generation of us to believe that we were somehow responsible for the success of the civil rights movement.
That’s not to say that the press did not play a vital role, as outlined exhaustively in Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff’s The Race Beat. Their book reveals that the reporters, who traveled deep into the heart of the Jim Crow South, relayed dispatches to their audiences in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, that played a crucial role in spurring change.
“Without the media the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings,” John Lewis, who was beaten close to death on Bloody Sunday, has said often, this version from a 2005 address to Congress. “I am not certain where we would be today as a nation, if the American public had not been made to acknowledge the struggles we faced in the American South.… Without the media’s willingness to stand in harm’s way and starkly portray events of the Movement as they saw them unfold, Americans may never have understood or even believed the horrors that African Americans faced in the Deep South.”
The role of the press in the civil rights movement also points to our larger failure as a nation to validate and trust the black experience. Why did it take white reporters writing for white audiences to finally address the inequities that black communities had for decades been fighting? Was the lens of whiteness required for the nation to accurately recognize the black experience?
Why did it take gripping images of police dogs and fire hoses for us to recognize the righteousness of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s? Why must a black man or woman’s death be captured on video, and played on a loop on cable news, for us to finally give credence to decades of declarations by black Americans that they were being brutalized by the police?
In recent years, it’s been hard not to notice the tendency of media outlets and reporters to overstate our own importance in the role of social movements. From Occupy Wall Street to the conservative Tea Party to Black Lives Matter—the three movements that have most prominently defined the Obama years—the media has anointed itself the kingmaker. “Without us, no one would hear your message,” enraged cameramen and television anchors declared to groups of hundreds of protesters who had amassed an immeasurable online following and had already brought the city of St. Louis to a near-standstill. These arguments, fundamentally, were about access to power. The media was pointing out to these young activists that they still lacked power; only via the media’s cameras and their pens would the struggle be recognized or acknowledged.
As the arguments between activists and journalists continued, I found Netta Elzie, who whisked me off to a rental car where a group of the night’s organizers were sitting. There was Alexis Templeton, who led the chanting on most nights in Ferguson, and Kayla Reed, who would soon join the Organization for Black Struggle, a local organizing group that had been in the area for decades, and DeRay Mckesson, who had flown in from Minneapolis—at this point he was basically living in St. Louis on the weekend. Also there were Cherrell Brown, of Justice League NYC, who had been instrumental in planning the protests after Eric Garner’s death, and Charles Wade, who during those first few months was perhaps the most crucial fundraiser for a protest movement struggling to survive its chaotic infancy. Tonight, they told me, would be a night to remember. Then they kicked me out of the car so they could continue planning.
The protesters split into two groups, walking in different directions to an undisclosed location.
The first group departed just after 11 p.m., marching to a nearby intersection and shutting down traffic by playing hopscotch, jumping rope, and tossing footballs. The demonstration was a play on what had become one of the most popular chants during the protests: “They think it’s a game. They think it’s a joke.”
The second group departed about forty-five minutes later, marching silently on the sidewalk to meet up with the first group. As the groups converged, they were met by officers in riot gear who held cans of pepper spray and smacked their shin guards. The methodical thumping, an intimidating show of force, radiated through the night air.
The officers stood both on the sidewalk and in the street and threatened to make arrests. Protest leaders said they had the right to proceed on the sidewalk.
“This is an unlawful assembly!” an officer yelled.
“No. It’s not,” responded Dhoruba Shakur, one of the protest organizers who stood at the front of the group. “This is a peaceful group of people silently walking on the sidewalk.”
The scene played out on a bridge leading toward the Saint Louis University campus, with the protesters standing on the sidewalk, shoulder to shoulder. The riot officers fanned out in front of them, refusing to allow the group to continue marching forward, in a scene nearly identical to depictions of the Bloody Sunday standoff between voting rights activists and Alabama state troopers that had occurred in Selma nearly five decades earlier.
“Can you please stop beating your sticks and talk to the people you protect?” Derrick Robinson, a local minister who had been heavily involved in the protests, asked the officers.
After about twenty minutes, officers allowed the march to continue up the sidewalk toward Saint Louis University. The university’s security and police officers tried to stop the protest from entering the campus.
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