“I am a student, I have my ID, and I have a lot of guests,” a protest leader said into the megaphone.
The security officers stepped aside, and the crowd kept moving. Participants then gathered at the campus center, chanting “Out of the dorms and into the streets” as students rushed out of buildings. Some joined the protesters, others took photos or brought out bottles of water.
The “occupation” of the university, which took local officials completely by surprise, lasted until the following morning.
On the last day of Ferguson October, clergy members, led by Cornel West and Jim Wallis, conducted a planned mass arrest demonstration at the Ferguson Police Department. Officers lined the parking lot, blocking them from entering. After saying a prayer, the clergy members walked forward into the police line, in some spots breaking it, before being taken into custody.
Later that night, it was again the young activists’ turn, as they spread out in various parts of the city to host disruptive protests. Some went downtown to the site of a St. Louis Rams game, others blocked traffic in and out of a fundraiser being held by Senator Claire McCaskill, with whom the activists had been deeply frustrated after her vocal support for prosecutor McCulloch. Others went from Walmart to Walmart—the department store chain where, in Ohio, months earlier, John Crawford had been shot and killed—linking arms before dropping to their knees.
“I’ve got my hands up on my head, please don’t shoot me dead!” they chanted at the officers standing guard beneath the bright blue letters above the entrance. Moments later, police announced that the store was closed for the night. As I made my way back to the car, I spotted Mckesson, who was off to the side of the dwindling demonstration, tweeting.
Mckesson felt as if he was everywhere during those days in October and November, an ever-present force at the site of the action. He’d post images of the protest signs and videos of the long lines of police officers who showed up in riot gear.
“Wild!” he would declare.
“The movement lives,” he would add.
After the protests in Ferguson largely ended in November, he took the work on the road, traveling to New York and to Selma, and then to McKinney, Texas, where an officer was caught on tape manhandling a young woman at a pool party, and then to Charleston after the killing of Walter Scott. Then the police in Baltimore killed Freddie Gray.
Armed with a deep Rolodex of media contacts built during the Ferguson protests—there are likely few national reporters or television producers without one of his several cell phone numbers—Mckesson became a go-to interview during the unrest in Baltimore, plastered on cable news as a representative of those who had taken to the streets. Because he had grown up there, Mckesson now spoke with an authority he had lacked during the Ferguson uprising. He pushed back at cable news hosts and spoke with expansive rhetoric. For media looking to anoint a leader on behalf of the leaderless protest movement, he was the easy choice.
In an April 28, 2015, exchange that quickly went viral, Mckesson grew visibly frustrated with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who spent most of the interview asking the activist, repeatedly, to condemn the riots. “There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?” Blitzer asked Mckesson after listing statistics on the property damage during the rioting. “There’s no excuse for the seven people that the Baltimore City Police Department has killed in the past year, either, right?” Mckesson, who earlier in the exchange had said he hoped to see nothing but peaceful protests, jabbed back.
Mckesson and the newsletter team transitioned from “We the Protesters” to “Campaign Zero,” a policy-oriented activist arm that pledged to put forth recommendations for how “we can live in a world where the police don’t kill people.” The efforts first consisted of ten recommendations, spanning from body cameras to new police union contracts, but eventually expanded to include detailed proposals, earning the group sit-down meetings with the White House, as well as Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, Mckesson continued to milk his humongous social media following for access—to business leaders, political figures, and celebrities. It’s been rumored that when music superstar Beyoncé began to consider financially supporting the protest movement—which her music had frequently referenced in the months since Ferguson—she secretly met with Mckesson in her New York offices. Months later, she and her husband, rap mogul Jay Z, gave a six-figure donation to Black Lives Matter–affiliated groups.
But by summer 2015 the nation’s mood was shifting, or had already shifted. For the first year after Ferguson, the focus of many of the activists had remained urgent awareness—the battle to convince the rest of the country that the police killings of black men and women were a crisis. This had been largely accomplished. Now, new questions were being raised: How would these newly identified leaders continue the work, and how, if at all, should they interact with the ongoing presidential campaign?
It was around that time that I got a text from Mckesson. He’s a creature of habit, so most of our conversations begin with a three-word message from him. “Can you talk?” he asked, using one of half a dozen phrases he recycles through dozens of times a day.
A few minutes later we were on the phone, talking off the record, as we often did when I wasn’t working on a specific story. He was thinking of running for mayor, he told me, and wanted to know what I thought.
“Mckesson has already inspired thousands around the country to protest police brutality,” Greg Howard would later write for the New York Times Magazine. “But the viability of any civil rights movement lies in its ability to move from the street to the places where governance happens.”
I don’t remember what I told Mckesson that day, other than that he’d better let me break the story if and when he actually decided to run, but I do remember being struck by his audacity. Here was a thirty-year-old with no real political experience, currently crashing on the couch of a family friend in Baltimore, who was willing to boldly dream of being elected to lead the city in which he grew up. He had already examined the residency laws and the eligibility requirements. He could win, he assured me. But the question that mattered was what impact his run would have on the protest movement—would it help or hurt the greater cause, and what would this mean to his digital platform?
He made dozens of phone calls, bouncing the idea off activists—both local and national—as well as at least half a dozen reporters, another half dozen political consultants, a prominent pollster, and people like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun writer whose work on The Wire has defined the city in the minds of most millennial Americans.
In early January, I traveled to Baltimore for his not-yet campaign’s first planning meeting. There were apples, pizza, tins of holiday popcorn, and freshly brewed coffee spread across a conference room table inside the Charles Fish Building, a historic storefront once home to a white-owned clothing and furniture store known locally for nondiscriminatory practices toward black customers long before the civil rights movement.
Mckesson had called me two days before, offering to let me sit in on the meeting as long as I didn’t report anything from it until after he made a decision about whether or not he was going to run. This type of access reporting—agreeing to a set of terms, no matter how logistical, in exchange for an exclusive reporting opportunity being denied to your peers from other media outlets—always makes me uneasy. It is how, too often, powerful people are able to craft the media narratives that ensure that they maintain that power, doling out morsels of news and information to news outlets in the knowledge that it will discourage hard questions or any degree of skepticism.
When I covered city politics in Boston and Congress for the Post, access reporting was the bread and butter of almost anyone who was working either beat successfully, with both the reporters and the politicians knowing that they were being used. But since I had moved to covering issues of race and justice, there had been much less need for that
access. The young activists knew me and, it seemed, for the most part trusted me—even when I covered them critically or wrote things they wished I hadn’t. They knew I was talking to most of the other young activists; they all felt they should be talking to me, too. There was a fundamental honesty in our interactions, lacking the quid pro quo of so many of my past source relationships. These activists knew I cared about getting the story right, and because of that, they trusted me. At times Mckesson was the exception. His professional background led him to conduct himself as a deliberate operator, working the media and strategically giving out kernels of information and perspective to keep himself and, by extension, the protest movement in reporters’ good graces.
Mckesson had always been particularly forthcoming with me, willing to clue me in to behind-the-scenes details about intermovement drama and fights, as well as strategy as it related to the upcoming presidential contest. He was, and is, a valuable source. But his popularity quickly made him a polarizing figure within the ranks of activists. He got into high-profile Twitter spats with activists like dream hampton and Shaun King. Others posted thinly veiled slights at him and his style of activism on their Facebook pages. Some of the hate was due to jealousy—Mckesson was becoming legitimately famous, an outsized media presence in a movement that had for months insisted it had no central charismatic leader. But some of his critics had more grounded qualms. Mckesson could be thin-skinned and could, at times, occupy so much space that others were shut out of discussion. Even as he insisted he didn’t speak for the entire movement, the media often spent so much time either propping him up or attempting to tear him down that it missed others doing valuable work.
Mckesson’s tactics were tethered to his fundamental belief that the system could be fixed—something that, in a movement that spanned from current elected officials to actual anarchists, and everyone in between, earned him scorn from some BLM-affiliated groups. Meanwhile, conservative media outlets chose him as the person they would attack; they were hyperbolically outraged when he was invited by the Yale Divinity School to give a two-day lecture series. A writer for National Review declared him a “next-generation race-baiter.” Tucker Carlson, the conservative pundit, told a Fox News audience that Mckesson was “not an impressive guy. Just kind of a race hustler.”
I decided early on that I would go out of my way not to use him as an official, on-the-record source when I could avoid it. It wasn’t meant to shield him—one of the reasons we clicked almost immediately is that we both speak matter-of-factly, with a layer of bluntness that is equal parts obnoxious and endearing. But I knew that Mckesson’s value to me as a reporter came from my ability to keep him speaking freely with me as often as possible—providing me with a sounding board for my story ideas and an analysis of the protest movement, challenging my thesis while also giving me information. That’s not to say I never quoted him, but I also wanted to be sensitive to the insistence of the activists that there was no one leader of the movement. Just because Mckesson would always answer the phone didn’t mean I should always call or quote him.
Still, if he was going to run for mayor, I knew I was going to have to cover it to some extent. His entrance into electoral politics would mark the beginning of a new chapter in the protest movement one way or the other.
“The question is,” Mckesson asked the assembled advisers, “what is the world we want to live in? What does that world look like?”
Netta Elzie was there, and so was the rest of Campaign Zero: Samuel Sinyangwe and Brittany Packnett (who phoned in via conference call). Sitting next to me was Donnie O’Callaghan, an education policy analyst and Mckesson’s best friend—the two talked nearly constantly, with Mckesson often calling O’Callaghan to talk through the strategy for a meeting with an elected official or activist group, or even to go over the wording of a tweet he was about to send.
Around the rest of the table were Baltimore residents, primarily worker bees in the school district who had gotten to know Mckesson during his time working for the city schools, as well as a handful of activists who had known him during his teenage years when he was involved in local youth programs.
Mckesson would bank on his celebrity to mobilize the electorate, a Donald Trump–esque strategy that was always partially flawed. A municipal electorate, much more so than a statewide or national one, votes less on its hopes and aspirations than on its daily necessities. Few candidates could match the inspiring life story of DeRay Mckesson. But they didn’t have to—instead, they could lean on electoral or city government experience. Voters in city elections want to know if you can fill the potholes out in front of their home, and whether you’re going to promise that, unlike that last time, the roads will be plowed in a timely fashion after a crippling snowstorm. Mckesson couldn’t guarantee them any of those things—he would have been the first political outsider elected to the corner office of Baltimore City Hall in modern history.
In the early 2000s, Jelani Cobb wrote this about the long-shot presidential bid embarked upon by the Reverend Al Sharpton:
Sleep if you want to, but beneath the comic appearance, the self-deprecating one-liners and the deliberately Ebonic dictation is a political rationality that Sharpton has parlayed into his present standing as the most influential nonelected black Democrat in the party. Never mind the snickers from the wine-n-cheese set, because Al Sharpton knows he can’t win. He also knows he doesn’t have to win—all he needs to do is not lose.
The mayoral run made the nation’s most prominent protester even more famous. It gave him an opportunity to flex and strengthen his policy chops on issues other than police and education. It forced him to build expansive fundraising and email lists that, no matter what direction his public life takes next, will help ensure his powerful reach long after others have called it quits.
DeRay Mckesson was not going to be the mayor of Baltimore. But success isn’t always defined by victory.
Just after 10:41 a.m. on Friday, May 1, 2015, a Washington Post colleague shouted out for my attention.
“She’s coming on!” he yelled. “Turn on CNN.”
The pearl necklace around her neck poked out near the top of the white button-down blouse that state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby wore beneath a tailored black blazer that day. The podium was crowded with microphones, but her head boldly stuck out above them and into the camera shot.
“I had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Gray’s family,” Mosby said. “I assured his family that no one is above the law and that I would pursue justice on their behalf.”
In a city looking for a leader, they seemed to have found one in Mosby. She praised the peaceful protests and the crowds who had called for justice. And she decried the acts of violence, with strokes of support for law enforcement.
“My administration is committed to creating a fair and equitable justice system for all, no matter what your occupation, your age, your race, your color, or your creed,” she said.
The wife of city councilman Nick Mosby, who represented the neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived and where the bulk of the demonstrations were being held, went on to announce that six officers involved in taking Gray into custody would be charged in connection with his death.
“We have probable cause to file criminal charges,” Mosby declared.
“Yes! Yes!” some in the crowd could be heard shouting.
In an instant, she became a polarizing national figure—a long-awaited savior to the scores of activists and protest movement sympathizers who had for months craved a prosecutor with the audacity to charge officers in connection with the deaths of unarmed black men, and an anticop villain to police sympathizers and police unions, who largely believe that officers should never be charged with crimes when they kill people on the job.
Within hours, the local Fraternal Order of Police was calling for Mosby to recuse herself from the case. But she had no plans to step aside. These officers would see their day in court.
In many ways, Marilyn Mosby was born and bred fo
r this case. Her family tree was built of branches full of law enforcement, primarily in Boston, where she had been raised. She thrived under pressure and in front of the camera. In announcing the charges, she spoke with the deep and even sweeping conviction of an activist and the prophetic fire of a preacher whose message was a lifetime in the making.
Marilyn Mosby was just fourteen years old when her cousin was shot and killed as he sat on his bike in the driveway of their grandparents’ Boston home on a Friday night in August 1994. Like Mosby, the slain boy, Diron Spence, had grown up in Dorchester, a racially diverse working-class section of the city, in a family of police officers. His stepfather, grandfather, and several aunts and uncles were veteran Boston police officers, and the family’s connections to the department traced back at least five generations.
The shooting was a case of mistaken identity. Spence’s bike, borrowed from a cousin, had a satchel attached to it, not unlike the kind used at the time by some neighborhood drug runners to traffic their product. Family members concluded that the shooter must have assumed Spence was a dope boy, approached him, and attempted to rob him.
The slaying captivated Boston, which at the time was dealing with a spike in crime and wrestling with issues of law enforcement, gangs, race, and drugs.
It was a turning point for Mosby, who watched her family members become characters in a gritty city’s tabloid story of the month.
“She says that to this day, that murder was a factor in her having the initiative to become an attorney,” Linda Thompson, Mosby’s mother and a former twenty-one-year Boston police officer, told me when I got her on the phone the same day her daughter announced the charges against the six officers. “It was very hard for the whole family.… But she was very close to him, they were just a few years apart, and to have him murdered so senselessly, it really shook her.”
While police initially said they knew of no motive in the slaying, the Boston Herald—one of the city’s two major daily newspapers, which despite its conservative leanings is widely read in the black community—speculated that the killing might have been a drug deal gone wrong or an attempt by eighteen-year-old Kevin Denis to rob Spence of his shoes.
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