In episode two of Making of an Activist we dive into DeRay Mckesson’s college years where he was the first and only class and student body president at Bowdoin, DeRay was the centre of civic life on campus. We explore the formative experiences on and off campus, what drew him to the classroom, and revisit what key people in his life at that time remember about DeRay the student, leader, and teacher.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Barry Mills, Interviews, Angus King, Irby-Mitchell, News, Burgess LePage, Jameena Bernard, Travon Free, Brandon Terry

Interviews  00:01

He had made a commitment to being a positive black male for black kids. he took the time to, like, slow down with people and interact with them. So as much as he’s this amazing activist, the guy’s got a super heart, you know, he’s a big hearted guy.

 

Travon Free  01:14

Welcome back to Making Of An Activist, the three part companion podcast to the documentary about DeRay Mckesson and his activism. I’m your host. Travon Free, and this is episode two. An activist is formed.  Before he spearheaded the largest policing reform in American history, Deray was a teenager who left his home in Baltimore to attend Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine, and it wasn’t a judgment.

 

Irby-Mitchell  01:56

Like, what is Maine? Had never been in Maine. Didn’t know what Maine was like, so ended up in Maine. They’re probably, I feel like there were, like 15 of us, 13 black people in my class. There’s nothing about Brunswick Maine that is similar to Baltimore.

 

Travon Free  02:10

This is Irby-Mitchell. When DeRay got to Bowdoin in 2003 Irby was a young assistant director of college admissions there. When it was an all male, predominantly white institution, there was a critical mass of black men at the school, but by the time I arrived there in 2000 and when the ray came, the school had sort of lost its way in terms of the diversity of the student body. At that time, the only critical mass of black families in Brunswick were those who were stationed there through the US Navy. And so for some of our black kids, singing in a gospel choir with Navy families was a thing, whereas, you know, you didn’t have to socially construct the black experience in Baltimore.  But DeRay was ready for a new experience, so he packed up and moved his life to this tiny community in Maine.

 

Irby-Mitchell  03:00

People just really nice. That was definitely how I thought about Bowdoin when I first got there. The thing that really cemented it for me is that there was a the our girls basketball team was basketball team was incredible, and we were like a universe of the main game. And I wanted pizza, I asked one of the police officers, because the Maine, state police, I don’t know it’s Maine, why is the state police in the vessel game? I don’t know, but he was there and I needed to, like, break a 20 for the pizza people. And he just, like, gave me money. He was like, it’s fine, just go get your pizza. And I was like, I just that was that just wasn’t what I understood to be the world.

 

Burgess LePage  03:43

Everyone knew who DeRay was, but more importantly, he knew who everyone was, which meant it was hard sometimes to be his close friend. It doesn’t feel that different now that he’s like quote, unquote, famous because he was bold and famous before anything else.

 

Travon Free  03:57

This is Burgess LePage. She’s one of DeRay’s best friends from college.

 

Burgess LePage  04:01

He has a wonderful sense of fashion now. At Bowdoin, he wore almost every day a bow sweatshirt, gym shorts and flip flops. And that’s that was pretty much it. Sometimes jeans. So in that way too, he was you could, you could pick him out from far away as well.

 

Travon Free  04:18

DeRay was also one of very few black students on campus.

 

Irby-Mitchell  04:22

There was like a small but mighty crew of us my year, and we were all really close. So it was definitely like, I mean, we would have always loved more black people to be there, and we had seen Bowdoin not do right by the black people there before us, and they were really angry, and rightly so.

 

Travon Free  04:40

Maine has a reputation for being a very white state, and even though it was an important part of the Underground Railroad, even though Black communities have thrived there for generations, it is still a very white state. In this small, mostly white community, black students can feel isolated. They might earn their degree without even having a black professor. Their subject, they might be the only black student in class and be unfairly asked to explain race to their peers, and the school wasn’t necessarily taking these issues seriously. DeRay saw that and came up with the strategy,

 

Irby-Mitchell  05:12

But we were like, You know what? We will drive this place crazy before it drives us crazy. That was what we said, you know.

 

Travon Free  05:16

And he made a pact with the students around him who were ready to take on this challenge together, people like his good friend Emily, a fellow Black student at Bowdoin, in an active part of the student government there.

 

Irby-Mitchell  05:26

I remember talking to Emily about this, and we were just like, we will not like, we just won’t let this place make us angry, like we won’t let it do Asia. So we were like, the only way to not do that is to lead. So we were like, we’ll just be in everything. So we did instead of having to fight the college on the outside, we fought from the inside. We were in student government, we were in clubs. We led things like that was sort of our strategy, and we were close.

 

Travon Free  05:54

DeRay took the college by storm. He was class president for three of his four years on campus, and he was also Bowdoin Student Government President for his junior and senior years, which means that as a senior, he had both roles at the same time, which is kind of unheard of, and he made the student government at Bowdoin series.

 

Irby-Mitchell  06:13

I remember being like, this can be real. We just need to add some structure, democratize it a little bit more. It was like way too concentrated with the President’s Student Government. Like, I remember people not believing that it could be a real thing, but by the end, it was like college officials are, like, frustrated with me that they didn’t get invited to the meetings. Like people came people like, wanted to run for office. It was like a slow haul to make it real and not just be like one or two people with power, but this idea that everybody had power into that.

 

Travon Free  06:43

DeRay knew the power of community. He saw it as a kid watching NA meetings, and he felt how important it was to the students around him. He also saw how the world could let people down in times of need.

 

Irby-Mitchell  06:55

Sabrina, yeah, so my second year Boeing, I lived in one of the first shoe dorms, and I was a proctor, and all the first years live together, and then proctor is, like, like, essentially, like an RA that lives also with the first years. And one of my proctees, Sabrina, was having a hard time adjusting it was early. It was like, couple weeks in the school, and she just, yeah, she, you know, Bowdoin was great, if it was great and it was not great, if it was not great, like, if you found your people, it was great, but if you didn’t, it’s such a small place that your people might not be there, right? Because it is actually small. And I think that for Sabrina, like, I don’t think her, I don’t know, I don’t think her people are there. And it was, like, she just, it was a lot going on, but she and I really close. We were actually together. She she called her father from my phone and said she was coming home. She was like, I just need to come home. So she comes home, and then I get called into the dean’s office probably a week later, because she attempted to take her life but hadn’t died yet. Because she was like, it wasn’t looking good. And then she passed, and I remember having to, you know, we had to have an emergency meeting with my proxy group. It was snowing outside. It was freezing. It’s main It was sad, and it just was like, yeah, I think it was Sabrina’s in one of the photos that’s on the background of my phone still, because it just was heartbreaking. She was so young and and just like she was good.

 

Travon Free  08:23

It was the first time DeRay experienced the suicide of someone close to him, and it focused him even more on the importance of community.

 

Irby-Mitchell  08:31

I’ve had five suicides since then of people I know. So it has made me much more like present with people much more. Like, I love you. I want you to know I love you. Make it like I is. It fundamentally changed me in terms of, like, showing up. And I showed up for Sabrina, so I have no like, I didn’t show her, but like, the world needs to show up better for people. And I don’t know if the world showed up right for Sabrina and I, after her death was like, I’ll make sure that I do my part to be a part of the world that shows up for people, you know.

 

Travon Free  09:05

So he doubled down on connecting with his peers. And the smallness of von meant that DeRay really connected with his professors too, like now Senator Angus King.

 

Angus King  09:15

When I first ran in 1994 I said I made the statement, no fish should leave Maine with its head on. And the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that the most bizarre political promise in the history of American politics, because I don’t think they got it. I mean, what I’m talking about is processing.

 

Travon Free  09:34

Maine is a small state, and Angus King made a big impact. He’s been a senator from Maine for the last decade, Angus taught a class on leadership at Bowdoin, right after completing his second term as governor of Maine, he remembers Deray as a passionate student.

 

Angus King  09:48

DeRay was one of the best students in my class on leaders and leadership. He took notes, he paid attention, and I believe he’s trying to live it every day.

 

Travon Free  10:00

For DeRay, like, for a lot of students, college was a time of immense personal and intellectual growth.

 

Irby-Mitchell  10:06

I always say to myself, like, I fell in love with my mind. Bo, like, I just never thought you’d go to class and, like, just randomly talk about ideas. Or like, the work was to, like, read the book and understand, and it wasn’t just to take a test.

 

Travon Free  10:18

In addition to learning about leaders from Martin Luther King Jr to earn Shackleton in Angus class, the small community atmosphere at Bowdoin meant they had a chance to really become a family.

 

Irby-Mitchell  10:29

He lives across the street from Bowdoin, and we have a weekly movie night in his living room. What you know we we knew him. We knew his family, because literally, the whole class showed up once a week in his living room and to watch a movie about leadership.

 

Travon Free  10:44

DeRay still stays with Senator King and his wife when he goes back to Bowdoin.

 

Angus King  10:48

I remember being like, are we really going to his house? We have? Are we sitting on his living room floor? And we did like, you know, it was so, so much of a family feel. It was cool.

 

Travon Free  11:00

For DeRay being part of this Bowdoin family meant speaking his mind. He was a kid far from home with some big ideas about how to make the world a better place, and he took those ideas straight to the top.

 

Barry Mills  11:12

So my name is Barry Mills, and I was the president of Bowdoin College in Brunswick Maine from 2001 until 2015 DeRay was passionate about everything. So the filter on his passion wasn’t at that point, I would say, at the highest he was an organizer, and at the same time, he was very obviously committed to students having an opportunity at Bowdoin in the most inclusive ways. There were moments, and this is no exaggeration, where I would kid with him, I said, Are you the president of the college, or am I like, Do you want my office? And he sort of did, but I was fortunate enough that I was able to keep my role.

 

Interviews  11:55

DeRay would challenge Barry and expect answers and solutions to problems he saw on campus, but he also loved him, which meant showing up for him too.

 

Barry Mills  13:44

There are some funny stories, you know he I don’t know, I guess maybe he was a sophomore, and I got sick, and I was home, and one day we were there, and he organized all these students to come to sing to it. It was amazing. And then, um, he’d come every day for weeks with little presents just to cheer me up, you know, like I’m the college president. What the hell is he doing here? Right? But it was very, very impressive. And then, the night before he graduated, he created this surprise so they had, you know, all the parents were there and people were hanging out the night before they graduated. We had a big dinner for the honorans and the people getting honorary degrees. And I got back to my house, it’s like 10 o’clock at night, and nearly the entire class shows up, led by direct to sing. It was amazing. So as much as he’s this amazing activist, the guy’s got a super heart, big hearted guy.

 

Travon Free  14:44

DeRay’s big heart goes hand in hand with his big vision for how to build a better world.

 

Irby-Mitchell  14:49

Yeah, I think that if we are ever gonna build the world we want, we’ll do it together. No one person is strong enough to do it alone, and every community. Bigger than every problem we face.

 

Travon Free  15:02

He’s also extremely focused.

 

Irby-Mitchell  15:05

I was like, very tunnel vision. We were just like tunnel vision, you know? Yeah, I was like tunnel vision.

 

Travon Free  15:11

But that doesn’t mean important things weren’t happening outside the range of to raise tunnel vision. People across America were fighting systemic racism and laying the groundwork for the country to eventually recognize how serious the problem of policing violence against black people really is.

 

Brandon Terry  15:28

There are a lot of people in that kind of period between the romanticized civil rights movement of the 1960s and the romanticized Black Lives Matter movement of the 21st century. And there’s just a lot of people who are doing the hard, grinding work of trying to bring justice for people who are beaten, brutalized, killed by police in this country have often been able to do so with impunity and try to connect those issues to broader injustices in the nation.

 

Travon Free  16:00

This is Brandon Terry. He’s the professor at Harvard who we heard from in Episode One.

 

Brandon Terry  16:04

People like Sharpton, people like Howard Daughtry in Brooklyn, Angela Davis, and the people around critical resistance who first raised the call for prison abolition and have done really incisive work on police brutality, folks in Chicago out of the Rainbow Coalition. There are all of these efforts around the country to try to raise us to a level of national concern, but they’re swimming against the current, no question about it.

 

Travon Free  16:32

And students on campus were definitely feeling the importance of this moment in American history.

 

Burgess LePage  16:38

Bush was re elected into office when we were at Bowdoin, and I remember that day that was just a hard day at a liberal arts campus.

 

News  16:48

Tonight on frontline, an exclusive investigation in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, people were shot and killed by the New Orleans Police Department. Martial Law in the city of New Orleans.

 

Burgess LePage  17:01

I remember Katrina and, yeah, that’s George Bush doesn’t care about black people. Like, that’s the time that we were in. And so that was, I think, kind of a slow burn awakening of how those different factors played together.

 

Travon Free  17:14

This was also an important time for gay rights in America.

 

Irby-Mitchell  17:17

I’m gay, so I was like, very, you know, wasn’t cool, like, nobody was really out at boat. I mean, there were COVID people out, but it was now, I go back, there’s, like, a gay, lesbian Center. I’m like, what is this? I’m like, we’ve come a long way that just, well, yeah, and I like, wasn’t there were no, there weren’t a lot of black people at Bowdoin. I mean, about there’s certainly a lot of black eyes, nobody, none of them were gay that I knew.

 

Burgess LePage  17:40

It’s a little bit painful to look back at our time at Bowdoin, because, you know, it was 2007 when we graduated. So while I think we thought ourselves a pretty progressive space, Bowdoin, at the time, was not a place where it was very safe to be out and proud for really most people at Campus. I’m queer, identifying myself, and I wonder what might have yeah, just wonder what it might have looked like for him to have been able to be truly himself.

 

Travon Free  18:05

DeRay raise identity as a gay black man is something he has in common with some activists who came before him. Here’s Brandon again.

 

Brandon Terry  18:13

People like Bayard rusted who were not closeted and had to navigate a very difficult, tight rope between communities who needed their skills and their commitment, their willingness to sacrifice, but weren’t always accepting of their homosexuality, and a broader world Where both African Americans and many of their allies were at times ambivalent about whether a gay black man should be the face of a civil rights struggle.

 

News  18:53

Is this just a bad time to be trying to protect a gay couple’s right to marriage? It’s an issue of equality and it’s an issue of civil rights. I think the people of New Mexico have said over and over again, they are ready for civil unions.

 

Travon Free  19:08

This was the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a time when, for a lot of folks, it was okay to be who you were, but not okay to talk about it. But over time, DeRay realized that for him, talking about it was important.

 

Irby-Mitchell  19:20

The New York Times Magazine did a big piece where I was featured in early in the protest, and I remember being with the reporter, and it was, it was important to me that he knew that I was gay, because I didn’t want any kid or anybody to ever think that the only way to do this work was to hide who you were. So I was like, you know what? I’ll just like, say, let’s say, let’s get it over with right now. Let’s say it now. Let’s do it now. I was never in the closet, but, like, people just didn’t know, you know. So I was like, they’ll know now.

 

Travon Free  19:51

He also knew that he needed to talk about inequity in education. He saw so many different types of students and how their education as kids and teenagers. Changed the opportunities that they had later in life, and he decided that this was where he was going to use his voice. He was recruited to Teach for America, which places new teachers in underserved schools across the country. And specifically chose to go to New York City.

 

Irby-Mitchell  20:14

I loved von and I could not wait to get out of Maine by my senior year. I was like, literally put me in a place where I am one of 12 million I like, want to be a faceless, nameless person. I wanted to understand how education worked, and what I wanted to accomplish was like, I wanted to deliver a great math experience to kids and communities that look like mine. Like that was what I wanted to do.

 

Travon Free  20:39

DeRay is a person who says yes to people, to opportunities, to challenges. So when this young, optimistic man saw an opportunity to support students, he took it, and luckily, someone from his community had just gone down the same path a year earlier.

 

Irby-Mitchell  20:54

I got really lucky. So Donnie, who is still one of my best friends, he was student body president at Colby. I was student body president Bowden. He’s a year older, so he taught in the school that I ended up teaching at. So when I went to New York, he was like, come teach in my school? Yeah, Frederick Douglass Academy, eight. It was in East New York, and which is in Brooklyn. It’s a very far out area Brooklyn, over by Canarsie and in start city, and which is its own kind of specific community. It was a new small school, so I was a founding teacher, and we started out as just one wing in the fourth floor of an elementary school.  Teaching was hard. Teaching is just a hard thing to do. I taught 60-91, 20 minute classes. Teaching that long middle school math is actually just hard. And then I was at a school that only existed. It only existed one year before I got there. So not only was I new teacher, but I was helping build systems instructions, but had never been in a school before, right? So that was sort of hard, and we were still figuring out the best composition of the staff. When you’re a small school with a small staff and you’re building yourselves up. You know, it’s very hard. Lost our math teacher even before the school year started, I went to, like, a retreat. There was one math teacher there and showed up at school, and that math teacher had taken a different job, because you really are building something, and it’s great, but it’s also challenging. I get coaches, TFA supported me, and I had Donna and Miss Bales to, like, really help rounded out. I mean, we really were a team. So that wasn’t the hardest part. It was like the principal ran a fear based school. So that was, you know, when that, when the fear dissipated. It was the wild, wild west a little bit, you know, it was like, we didn’t have air conditioning. The textbooks were old. It was like, those were the things that were like, oh my God, give me what is going on.

 

Travon Free  22:43

As much as he loved his students in Brooklyn, DeRay struggle with whether or not to move on. After his first year, he worked for a summer at the Harlem Children’s Zone, and they wanted to keep him. Jameena Bernard is now the president of Teach for America, but in 2008 she was the executive director of the New York region, and she obviously didn’t want dere to leave the program early.

 

Jameena Bernard  23:04

I very specifically remember our conversation in Starbucks in Harlem, where I lived, and where he was working that summer. Our first meeting was really a candid conversation about what it meant to live up to that two year commitment that he made to us at Teach for America and to the school that hired him, and ultimately, obviously to his students.

 

Irby-Mitchell  23:32

I know jamina Now, but jamina was not my Ed when I started the core, so my first interaction with her was her being like, Absolutely not. So yeah, they if they tried to tell you some long conversation, it was not they were just telling me the decision they made. They were like, no. I was like, okay.

 

Travon Free  23:49

He did finish his term with Teach for America, and as one of the only black teachers in the core, DeRay, once again, stood out. He was selected to give a parting speech to all the teachers in New York who were completing their service that year.

 

Jameena Bernard  24:01

So funny enough, given our own conversation, mine and his, when we first met and why we were even meeting, it was fun to see that he had labeled his the title of his remarks were our living commitments, and he did speak about how in his own life, he had made a commitment to being a positive black male for black kids, and I just love that he brought that to life with the rest of his peers as he was getting ready to, you know, offer them a charge as well.

 

CREDITS 24:33

And that commitment to support students and be a positive force for change wouldn’t waver, but it would eventually take him out of the classroom and far from his students in Brooklyn. In the next episode, how DeRay went from a passionate kid finding community in college and then supporting kids in the classroom to shaking up the education departments in multiple cities and eventually the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, stay with us.