DeRay Mckesson’s book-jacket photo shows him wearing his iconic blue vest. “I needed something to wear that would keep me warm, but that I’d never have to pack,” he writes about the insulated vest he bought during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of teenager Michael Brown. “I got used to wearing it, like a safety blanket of sorts. But it also serves as a reminder. I’ve worn it every day since the winter of 2014.”
It is with this sort of introspection and self-awareness that Mckesson takes us through the stories of his life, especially the years he ended up spending in Ferguson. “I’d only planned to be in Ferguson for the weekend,” he tells us. “It only took those first two days for me to realize that I’d stay longer than a weekend—indeed, that I’d stay in the streets for as long as it took.”
Mckesson, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist and co-founder of the anti-police-violence group Campaign Zero, was raised by his father, grandmother, and great-grandmother (his mother left when he was three, and his house burned down when he was nine) in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, who graduated from high school but never attended college, saved and borrowed to make sure that DeRay and his sister, TeRay, could get a good education. After graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine, Mckesson went on to work in the public school systems of New York, Baltimore, and Minneapolis. He was the human resources director for Minneapolis Public Schools in 2014, when he left to observe and document the protests in Ferguson.
DeRay Mckesson
In On the Other Side of Freedom, his first book, Mckesson seeks to share what he has learned. “In each generation,” he writes, “there is a moment when young and old, inspired or disillusioned, come together around a shared hope, imagine the world as it can be, and have the opportunity to bring that world into existence. Our moment is now.”
That word “hope” is spread throughout the book, from its subtitle to its final essay, “Letter to an Activist.” “Hope,” he explains in the book’s opening essay, “is the belief that our tomorrows can be better than our todays.” He stresses that it is not the same thing as faith. “Faith is rooted in certainty; hope is rooted in possibility—and they both require their own different kinds of work.”
In his series of essays, Mckesson discusses racism, whiteness, his own experience with bullying, and his sexuality. He also examines the history and role of policing in our society, and describes how he helped develop the first database of “officer-involved killings”—something that police forces across the country had been previously unable to provide. The data, once accessible, revealed the astonishing fact that “one in every three people killed by a stranger in this country is killed by a police officer,” according to Mckesson.
“Protest is the work of hope. Protest, at its core, is telling the truth in public. It is confrontation and disruption rooted in the acknowledgement of a future that has not yet come, but that is possible.”
Mckesson also looks at the history of civil rights struggles, with a focus on those whose voices and stories are left out. He recalls how Claudette Colvin, at age fifteen, kept her seat on the bus a full nine months before Rosa Parks, and how Jo Ann Robinson drafted and printed the 52,000 leaflets that started the Montgomery bus boycott before Martin Luther King’s first community meeting. And he tells how Bayard Rustin, a key architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was ostracized by the leadership because he was an out gay man.
The book mixes historical remembering with lessons for today. “Protest is, in its own way, a storytelling,” Mckesson writes. “Protest is the work of hope. Protest, at its core, is telling the truth in public. It is confrontation and disruption rooted in the acknowledgement of a future that has not yet come, but that is possible.”
It was joining the protests in Ferguson—first as a witness, then as a participant, then as a disseminator of information about what he witnessed—that taught DeRay Mckesson about hope and, importantly, “about the difference between the people willing to talk about resistance and the people willing to do the work of resistance.”
Two other important, recently published books also chronicle this resistance: Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A. Carruthers, and Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimaging Freedom in the 21st Century by Barbara Ransby. Carruthers quotes Ransby’s work in her book, and Ransby interviewed Carruthers for hers. Both books chronicle real-world movements for change.
Carruthers grew up and works in Chicago, Illinois, where she is the founding director of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). “My intent,” she tells us, “is to balance stories of my community-organizing experiences, BYP100, and my personal life in order to inspire revolutionary action.”
“We are dreaming about and fighting for a world without prisons, without gender-based violence, where definitions of valuable work are transformed, and where the land we live on is liberated alongside its peoples.”
Much of the book is rooted in historical movements for liberation and justice, such as Chicago’s anti-eviction struggles in the 1930s, which she brings to bear on the struggles of today: “We are dreaming about and fighting for a world without prisons, without gender-based violence, where definitions of valuable work are transformed, and where the land we live on is liberated alongside its peoples.”
In all aspects of her work, and her analysis, Carruthers looks at issues through a black, queer, feminist lens—reinterpreting both accountability and oppression. As she writes, “It is within the spaces of imagination, the dream spaces, that liberatory practices are born and grow, leading to the space to act and to transform.”
In all aspects of her work, and her analysis, Carruthers looks at issues through a black, queer, feminist lens—reinterpreting both accountability and oppression.
Barbara Ransby, a professor and director of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a whole chapter on organizing work in her home city. “Chicago,” she notes, “has been the site of intense resistance to racist state violence for decades.” She chronicles many of these resistance organizations and resistors, in anticipation of the 2019 mayoral race as an upcoming “pivotal moment for Chicago’s new and old coalitions.”
Ransby reminds readers “there remains work to be done” but also much reason to be optimistic. “The growth of left-leaning groups,” she writes, “has the potential to pull U.S. politics to the left, if and only if they take seriously the scourge of white supremacy and the generative and transformative power of the black insurgent impulse.”