If you spent any time walking West Florissant Avenue, or, heck, even watching cable television, in the late summer or early fall of 2014, then you remember the man in the blue vest.
His name is , and these days, he’s running for mayor of Baltimore.
About 19 months ago Mckesson came to ºüÀêÊÓƵ armed only with his mind and a phone and soon became a Twitter sensation, helping to turn #Ferguson into the among social causes in Twitter’s first 10 years.
Now he’s part of an important transition in the new civil rights movement identified in some circles as Black Lives Matter. It’s a move from protest to action, where those who have been oppressed by a political system that works against them try to assert their influence from inside the system.
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“So many of the changes that will affect people’s lives occur at the city level,†Mckesson told me in a phone conversation recently. That’s one of the reasons why he decided to run for mayor in the city where , which is also where Mckesson grew up. But the move from activism isn’t an “either-or†situation, he says. “It’s important that people push from the outside and impact change from the inside,†Mckesson says. “Both are necessary.â€
Never was that more clear than in the recent negotiations over the consent decree between the city of Ferguson and the U.S. Department of Justice.
On March 15, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III shook hands with Michael Brown Sr., after the city signed the consent decree that calls for massive changes in how the north ºüÀêÊÓƵ County municipality operates its police department and court system. Brown is the father of Michael Brown, whose shooting death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson started the unrest that brought Mckesson and other activists to ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
The handshake should have taken place in February, but politics got in the way.
As Post-Dispatch reporter Stephen Deere in a story March 20, the council was split along racial lines as to whether to sign the decree when it was first presented in February. White council members were against it. Black council members were for it. So the council tried to find a midway point and refused to agree to the decree, sending it back and asking for changes. Then, in an act that would have significant consequences, black council members were successful in getting another African-American, Laverne Mitchom, to fill an open seat on the council. For the first time, the city’s majority black population had a council that looked like them.
Local African-American residents and other advocates for change were outraged that the council hadn’t accepted the decree. So was the Department of Justice, which immediately sued.
Outside pressure built, and with a 4-3 majority, the council had new leverage to adopt the decree.
On March 15, that’s what happened. It took the combination of activism and inside politics to make it happen.
Other signs of such activism turning to political action are showing up across the country.
In Chicago, where several high-profile police killings have riled the city, the prosecutor who was blamed for dragging her feet in filing charges against the police officer who shot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald lost her primary race. in Cleveland who didn’t file charges against the officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
Producing political results shows a maturing of a nascent civil rights movement that Mckesson says is still in its infancy.
“So much of what we’ve done in the past 19 months is just tell the truth in public,†he says.
Like the early raucousness, a lot of the communication has been simply about raising awareness, so that people of all races and creeds and backgrounds can see what daily life is like for people who truly are being oppressed by a system that is stacked against them.
“I think the movement is still young,†Mckesson says. “Will it be able to grow as people grow? Can the movement build coalitions?â€
Nine years separate Rosa Parks’ famous act of defiance by simply sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
For some, the passage of that law, and the Voting Rights Act the next year, signaled an end to the Civil Rights Movement. But the subsequent gutting of that voting rights law by the Supreme Court has led to a series of states passing restrictive voter identification bills that target primarily people of color. Just last week, Hispanics in Phoenix faced massively long lines in an attempt to vote. That wouldn’t have happened before the court took away federal protections that had been in place since the ’60s.
This week the Missouri Legislature is expected of a voter identification bill, despite previous attempts that have been found unconstitutional by the Missouri Supreme Court. If passed, the law would put obstacles in place for about 220,000 existing Missouri voters, many of them people of color or the elderly or disabled.
The movement lives.
— deray mckesson (@deray)
As Mckesson is fond of typing on Twitter:
The movement lives.