Shaun King

The controversial activist asks, “What would Frederick Douglass do?”

- Amos Barshad

BY THE TIME WE MEET, at 11 on a Wednesday morning in December, Shaun King, masterful activator of instant-react liberal anger and would-be digital-media titan , has already retweeted a double-digit string of articles to his 1 million followers on everything from the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi to the much-critiqued arrest of Jazmine Headley, a Brooklyn mother who was videotaped clutching her 1-year-old at a publicbenefits office before police forced her hands behind her back. (“Shame shame shame on this city for the trauma they caused this wonderful mother and baby boy.”)

Sitting at a table in Lula, a cozy Bed-Stuy coffee shop, King is still mulling over that last incident: “I’m just trying to figure out how did she spend four nights in Rikers because she was sitting on the floor of social services?! Sometimes I’m so furious I have to fight tears.” King’s in a hoodie and a brown leather jacket; he has bits of gray in his goatee and a simple silver wedding band on his right hand. He skips coffee in favor of the can of Red Bull he walked in with. In King, a 39-year-old father of five, some see a courageous, unflappable activist. Others see an all-purpose outrage machine. Both sides might agree that he seems to exist almost entirely as a voice inside the internet. But as he sits in front of me, he places his iPhone face down on the table and, to my surprise, duly ignores it.

King’s online fame began only a few years ago. In 2014, while working as the director of communications for a Southern California environmental organization called Global Green, he got a Facebook message from an old More house College classmate. It was the video of Eric Garner’s killing. “We didn’t even know his name at the time,” he recalls. “If I had to put my finger on one moment, that message changed my life.”