DeRay Mckesson

Black Lives Matter started a revolution—and a counterrevolution.

- Zak Cheney-rice

FEW AMERICAN SOCIALFEW AMERICAN SOCIAL movements shaped the 2010s as definitively as Black Lives Matter, and few of its activists have proved to be as galvanizing—and controversial—as DeRay Mckesson. The then-29-year-old school administrator drove from Minneapolis to Missouri in August 2014 to join the protests against the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. He quickly became one of BLM’s best-known voices, playing a key role in updating the rest of the country about what was happening on the ground, all while being teargassed and hounded by local law enforcement. But with the attention came criticism: Mckesson was dismissed as an unaccountable showboat by some fellow activists and cast as “public enemy No. 1” by BLM’s detractors in government, right-wing media, and the police. When those forces rode into the White House in 2016, Mckesson’s warnings about their power and cruelty seemed all the more prescient.

What was it about Michael Brown ? 1

It was this moment of me being like, I can’t say that I value kids and would do anything for young people and I’m unwilling to at least go to stand in solidarity with people for a weekend. They killed a teenager.

With the benefit of hindsight, do you think something like Black Lives Matter was inevitable?