DERAY MCKESSON
AN ACTIVIST AND EDUCATOR, DERAY MCKESSON IS ALSO AN OUT AND PROUD VOICE OF THE #BLACKLIVESMATTER MOVEMENT
ACTIVISM AWARD
WORDS: CLIFF JOANNOU // PHOTOGRAPHS: CAMERON MCNEE
On 9 August 2014, unarmed black teenager Mike Brown was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson, following reports of a robbery at a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri. Decades of frustration at the excessive police aggression faced by people of colour in the USA erupted into riots across the county. This would be the beginning of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
The hashtag appeared on banners during protests and was quickly adopted across social media, becoming the motto for the systematic oppression of black people, calling out police brutality, the erasure of black history and media bias.
Watching the situation unfold from his couch in Baltimore, DeRay Mckesson decided he needed to be involved. “I saw the protests on TV, saw them on Twitter and I was like, ‘I’m gonna go’,” he tells me as we meet in New York City. “I said: ‘I wanna go, I wanna see what’s happening’, and I went to bear witness.”
When he arrived, DeRay was sprayed with tear gas. “I was like, ‘This is wild, I didn’t do anything wrong’. That was the beginning of it for me and so many people.” He has famously become inseparable from the blue Patagonia gilet that he wore on that eventful day. The protests that summer ignited conversations around racism that for too long had been limited to hushed murmurs. The USA may have had a black president but the experience for many people of colour has been one of struggle and police antagonism.