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In episode one of Making of an Activist we explore DeRay Mckesson’s early years in Baltimore, growing up with two parents struggling with addiction. However, with the assistance of a broader support system, DeRay manages not just to survive, but to thrive. At a young age, he was already campaigning and organizing. We explore the nature and nurture circumstances of DeRay’s activism. Expert commentary and historical context provided by Harvard Professor, Brandon Terry, and other experts.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Calvin, Old Recording, DeRay Mckesson, TeRay, Interviews, Dr Brandon Terry, Interviewer, Brandon, Damon Centola, Travon Free, Robin

Interviews  01:02

Lots of kids were interested in the work we were doing, but, you know, he was just always vibrating at a little different frequency. He never looked back. And the thing about, when the ray ran, he expected to win, you know, losing one option to him. He’s a person, right? He’s a very real person, just like you, and this real person that, like, lays on my floor and tumbles with my kids also is able to speak in the White House. 1,000,001 questions, full of personality and, you know, sort of uninhibited, talking to adults, talking to kids, talking to whomever. So that was my introduction to DeRay. Was bright orange Dorito teeth and a lot of questions.

 

Travon Free  01:45

I’m Travon free, and this is Making Of An Activist in this three part series, we’re digging into how a kid from Baltimore grew up to be one of America’s most recognizable modern activists. His name is DeRay Mckesson, and he’s probably best known as the Black Lives Matter protester in that puffy blue vest.

 

DeRay Mckesson  02:03

I’ll talk about that damn vest in a second. I just watched this.

 

Interviewer  02:06

Many people know you, DeRay, they go, oh, blue vest. DeRay, we know the vest. I’ve seen this vest. I saw it when it looked new. I see it when it looks like now.

 

DeRay Mckesson  02:14

You know it’s easy to get dressed every day. I just need to iron my sleeves because you’ll never see anything else anyway. And, yeah, no, it just makes me feel safe.

 

02:20

He became a familiar face on Twitter and in news coverage on the movement in Ferguson in 2014 and his work eventually led him to co found Campaign Zero, which focuses on ending police violence through research and advocacy campaigns. He also faced a slew of challenges in the uphill battle of remaking our criminal justice system, our education system and learning how to be both a leader and community member throughout but I know DeRay is a friend, someone I’ve seen make magic and confront challenges over and over. I’m a filmmaker and activist myself, and I’ve known DeRay for 10 years now, which kind of sounds crazy. We first met when Mike Brown was killed, and the Ferguson protest dominated our lives, and now DeRay is the first person I call whenever there’s something serious or silly to talk about. This podcast series is the companion to a documentary about derays activism in Ferguson and beyond. Here in the podcast, we’re taking a step back and getting to know who DeRay was before he was sitting in rooms with Oprah or Obama or fighting for a better world at the highest level of policy and activism. This is part one. An activist is born.

 

DeRay Mckesson  03:30

I think the most important thing that you have to understand is Baltimore.

 

Old Recording  03:43

Baltimore was first and foremost a seaport, a big seaport that stretches for 46 miles along the Patapsco River and the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay. This is Eyewitness News at Five with Sally Thornton. City of Baltimore rejoiced Monday as Cleveland Browns owner art modell announced his intention to move the story Browns franchise to Baltimore.

 

DeRay Mckesson  04:08

Baltimore is important for a lot of different reasons.

 

Dr Brandon Terry  04:10

This is Dr Brandon Terry. He teaches about African American political thought and History at Harvard, and he’s from Baltimore.

 

DeRay Mckesson  04:17

One being that it is one of the epicenters of the severe crises that confront poor, working class African Americans. At the end of the 20th century.

 

Old Recording  04:29

President Bush today continued the selling of his anti drug plan. A disturbing new report about black males in Baltimore indicates that more than half of the city’s young black men were in trouble with the law in 1991. Right now, a police shooting case in Baltimore is being investigated. Others are statistics. May at first be misleading, Maryland has one of the nation’s highest proportions of AIDS patients in the country.

 

DeRay Mckesson  04:53

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the drug war has been focused virtually totally in terms of arrest imprisonment in the in the black Community. Baltimore, I think, teaches really thoughtful people that there are no easy answers to a lot of these questions.

 

Old Recording  05:08

And DeRay Mckesson, he grew up in Baltimore too.  DeRay and I fought like cats and dogs when we were younger, probably all the way up to high school. We went to different high schools, and so that was a time and we got some separation, and I wouldn’t even say, liked each other in high school, we just were separated, so we weren’t getting on each other’s nerves as much.

 

05:28

This is DeRay’s, older sister, TeRay with a T.

 

TeRay  05:31

Today, he is one of my favorite people, but back then, 20 years ago, not so much.

 

Travon Free  05:37

Apart from the angst of fighting with his older sister, TeRay remembers his childhood as a happy one. He enjoyed plenty of 90s kid stuff, like hanging out with his cousins and playing Sim City on the computer until his eyes burned. But even if he was trying to virtually remake the world by building digital town halls alone in his bedroom, he was rarely far from family.

 

TeRay  05:57

I had an aunt that lived right next door to my grandmother and then her daughter lived right next door to her. And so we were always between these three houses, essentially, with all of the kids in those three houses. It was like everybody was outside. Somebody was going to church. All the kids hopped in the van, and then we ended up at church. And so we could have ended up at church. We could have ended up at the grocery store. We were just all kind of together everywhere that we went. And so that’s kind of what I think about when I think about his early sense of community. It was family. We were just everybody was family. Everybody was around, even the kind of neighbors on that block. Everybody was just kind of a part of that.

 

Travon Free  06:36

And that community of family got even tighter when times were hard, like when DeRay, TeRay and their dad, Calvin, lost their home.

 

Calvin  06:44

When our house burned down, they went to live with their grandparents. And I mean, you know how they say they don’t make him like that no more. He was head over. He was in love with all of them. The grandfather told him how to ride the bike for the first time, his grandmother and great grandmother was fierce protectors of him, and he knew when he went there he was safe.

 

DeRay Mckesson  07:10

So the house burned down, and we have nothing. We don’t have toys. We got no pictures. Like, literally, we have nothing. And what’s so crazy is that I have no negative memories of that. I remember being like, well, that sucks, but it was like, Oh, we could deliver grandma now, you know, like it was Uncle Barry walked us to school every day. My best friend Deidre lived around the corner. My cousins lived next door. It was one of the coolest things that ever happened, you know, because, like, the people were there.

 

Calvin  07:39

It was a big part of his childhood, and it goes back to the sense of community, and that has a lot to do with where he got that from also.

 

Travon Free  07:49

Calvin describes DeRay as an inquisitive, relentlessly positive kind of kid, so much so that he had a catchphrase.

 

Calvin  07:56

His favorite saying was always positive things happened to positive people, and he lived by that.

 

Travon Free  08:03

It’s a phrase DeRay brought into his very first community organized work in Student Government.

 

DeRay Mckesson  08:08

Student Government in the school that I was in in sixth grade was very much like do the thing, so we play in the dances and stuff like that, and the adults really just let us do it. So my first introduction to leadership was one where we got to set the boundaries, and we got to, like, push and push until somebody told us no.

 

Calvin  08:25

I just watched him change from the first time he became class president, he took it very serious. He just never looked back. He never looked back. And the thing about when DeRay ran, he expected the win. You know, losing one option to him when he ran, he ran the win. And as far as I know, he won every year. He just had that drive. I believe some people just born with a drive. He definitely has that drive.

 

Travon Free  08:56

As DeRay was finding his own voice in student government, people around him in Baltimore were fighting against some of the most difficult problems in modern history. Here’s Brandon again.

 

Brandon  09:08

You know the kinds of things that Deray was seeing in 1990s Baltimore, they’re different than the kind of things Martin Luther King saw in 1930s and 40s. Atlanta, some more severely concentrated poverty. You’re seeing the highest murder rates in the history of this country up until that time, the worst drug epidemic in the history of the country. Now that’s been surpassed by the opioid epidemic.

 

Travon Free  09:39

It was also a time when incarceration rates skyrocketed.

 

Brandon  09:43

When we were in high school, Martin O’Malley became the mayor of Baltimore, and his mandate was, the thing he’d run on, was that he would get crime down. He’d get the murder rate down. And he did, but the way he did. Was by arresting such extraordinary numbers of people that the ACLU and every major civil liberties organization that looked at the case thought it unconscionable and unconstitutional.

 

Travon Free  10:18

It’s no coincidence that the world Deray knew as a kid was full of the kinds of problems he’d eventually go on to fight.

 

Brandon  10:24

That was just a distinct moment in history compared to the Jim Crow period and compared to the abolitionist period. So, you know, the activists that are moved by that they’re more recent, they’re people from the Black Power Generation. They’re people from those difficult times in the 1980s where it just seemed like nothing was working, people like Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, I mean, wildly different political strategies and philosophies. But, you know, trying to find a foothold in the face of all of these really difficult, mutating, political problems.

 

Travon Free  11:02

Some of these problems hit close to home. DeRay’s. Parents both struggle with addiction, and he and his sister were raised by his father, Calvin. Calvin started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings when his kids were young.

 

Calvin  11:14

I’m celebrating 34 years clean, and I don’t know. I think it’s about my 12th year anniversary, he found out where it was and it was packed. He snuck in there. He was there, and I didn’t know he was there, so he heard my whole story from beginning to end, and when I looked up and saw him, I thought I was gonna die, because if I knew he was there, I wouldn’t have shared half of what I did up until he heard that meeting. He always thought I went to the meetings to help people. He had no idea that I was a recovering drug addict. He said, Daddy, I didn’t know you did drugs. How dude, you were just helping people, and now they get for sneaking into the meeting. You bum. But, uh we talked about the stories that I told and the incidences, and he was like, Wow, dad, you know, I was embarrassed. He wasn’t at all. He, um, he took the positive from it.

 

Travon Free  12:14

DeRay remembers this day a little differently.

 

DeRay Mckesson  12:18

Actually, ahat’s funny about is, I thought he saw me. I thought he saw me the back room. He didn’t see me. So at the end, I come up and he’s like, How long were you here? And I’m like, Well, I heard it, but he, you know, he just never, he won’t answer any question we have in some way, but he just, I never heard him give a talk, and I like, heard him talk about us, and he didn’t know that I was in the room. But it was crazy.

 

Travon Free  12:40

The 12 step fellowship DeRay saw as a kid was about people surviving together through community.

 

DeRay Mckesson  14:25

I think that the biggest lesson it taught me was like what community is. I saw people at their lowest and having lost family and relationships and things like houses and But the coolest part about it is I saw recovery. I saw people like hit moments where they thought they could never, ever come from. And I saw them come from them because they were in my living room. They were on our couch. My father was on the phone with him in the middle of night. My father was, you know, he gave the car to somebody because they needed he was buying suits and Like. He didn’t have a ton of money, but he was always sharing. And it was like, oh, I get it. Like, now the language for that is, like, mutual aid. And we didn’t have that language when I was a kid, but I like, saw what it was like for community to pour into people. And I saw that you didn’t need a million dollars to do that. Love was actually the thing that could connect people. And I saw people with not a lot of money, but a lot of power. I like lived that.

 

Travon Free  15:24

DeRay saw the power of a group of people with a common experience wanting better for themselves, their families and their communities. These were people who could envision a better world and were working to create it together. I keep thinking about my friend DeRay, and how he always seemed to have a vision for what could be better, and maybe it goes all the way back to DeRay, the kid organizing perfect worlds in his favorite video game while still in middle school, DeRay started joining his own groups, youth leadership programs all around Baltimore. He loved people in a room, understanding and making things happen.

 

DeRay Mckesson  15:58

So I represented all middle schoolers in Baltimore County to the State student government, and it was quite didn’t even know that existed. But I saw these like 1112, 13 year olds all over the state, like being just rock stars, like talking about policy in ways I’d never understood. I just I literally had never seen that before, and high schoolers sit on boards of education, and I just didn’t know that was real, and it fundamentally, like changed my life, because it gave me confidence, it gave me goals. I was like, oh, I got it. I see I’m not alone being intense. Everybody in this room is intense. They more intense than me, you know, and it allowed me to really step into my own sort of intensity around policy and organizing and planning, because I was with other 11 year olds who were equally intense. It was so validating and freeing.

 

Travon Free  16:45

Which brings us to DeRay’s meeting with Robin Wood. Robin was the board chair of an organization called Safe and sound, which worked on improving the lives of young people in Baltimore, and she met DeRay in the office.

 

Robin  16:57

I walked into our offices one day, and this kid popped over and he’d been eating Doritos, so his teeth were bright orange, and he’s like, so who are you? Told him who I was, and he said, well, what do you do? And I’m over here because I’m the board chair, and, you know, having a little conversation with the executive director. And he’s like, well, what does the board chair do? So 1,000,001 questions, full of personality and, you know, sort of uninhibited, talking to adults, talking to kids, talking to whomever. So that was my introduction to DeRay. Was bright orange Dorito teeth and a lot of questions.

 

Travon Free  17:31

Robin and DeRay really just clicked.

 

Robin  17:35

I don’t know if I picked him or he picked me, but he sort of made me his first boss. He likes to say I was his first boss, because, you know, he was somebody who got stuff done right. I could count on him to follow through. And, you know, he might be a little off putting for people some of the adults who didn’t like the children spoke to them, you know, as if he were also an adult. That happened once or twice, that it was an issue that came back. But, you know, it’s like, deal with it. That’s why we asked. We asked we have to empower these kids. We want them to tell us what they want to do. And he is unabashed about it.

 

Travon Free  18:06

Robin was one of his biggest supporters, and still is to this day. She’s one of the first of many people who would be rocks and derays life as the challenges he faced got bigger and bigger.

 

DeRay Mckesson  18:16

Robin, operates at such a high cognitive level, and she just made no excuses about rigor. It was like, because I was 14, she wasn’t like, oh, be prepared. Like a 14 year old. She was like, if you’re in the meeting, you’re in the meeting. That changed my life. Like she treated my mind like a peer. You know, people asked me about my first job, and did I was like, I grew up in meetings. The only time I ever worked not in a meeting, was in college. I worked in the mail room in college, and that’s it. I did that from 11 to now. You know.

 

Travon Free  18:50

We wanted to know what it was that made Deray stand out as a kid, and so we asked Robin how much of the Deray she knew as a child was his nature, and how much of it was the environment and the care he got from those around him?

 

Robin  19:02

Well, that’s gonna be hard to say in derays case, I think nature is that leadership, that just that personality to engage and question, and it’s a sort of empathy. It’s sort of an interest in what other people’s experience is, and that sense of right and wrong, and that something about this isn’t right, I think that’s nature, but nurture. You know, he really came up in a sort of hotbed of activism, in a sense, but certainly civic engagement, engagement around housing, engagement around schools, and the sense of you’re entitled to question what’s going on here and and to expect the people to give you an answer if you have a question of them, you know, a legitimate question about why conditions are as they are. There were just a lot of women, but a lot of people who really were invested in Baltimore and improving the community. And so he was right in the middle of all that. Yeah, you know, lots of kids were interested in the work we were doing, but you know, he was just always vibrating at a little different frequency. Is probably the best way to put it.

 

Travon Free  20:12

This kid honestly vibrated himself into so many leadership things that it’s hard to keep track. I don’t know about you, but at this age, I was on the middle school playground talking about the new Eminem album and hoping my mom would buy me the newest Jordans. But DeRay spent his childhood immersed in debate and building the skills he later used as an activist. It’s hard to say what pulled Deray into these spaces where people were working so hard to make Baltimore better. According to DeRay, meetings were just what he did, like some kids play sports or perform musicals and sitting in meetings, DeRay was developing a clear point of view that one person alone can’t get sober, can’t change what’s happening in a school building, can’t make a community safe and sound, because no one can do that alone.

 

Damon Centola  20:59

One of the most, I would say, influential and misleading narratives in as a modern American culture is that one special person, by themselves, triggers a world of change for a nation or for the, you know, for the entire planet. That’s not how it’s ever worked, but it tells a really good story.

 

Travon Free  21:19

This is Damon Cintola. He’s a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of the book change how to make big things happen.

 

Damon Centola  21:28

And it’s a story that we can understand, right? We understand the concept of leadership. We understand the concept of, like, our emotional relationship to someone who’s, you know, a compelling image or figure. And it also has kind of a magical quality to it, which is like, oh, just find these special people, and everything will be different. And the truth, of course, is, on the one hand, less spectacular, but on the other hand, much more interesting, because it actually means we have more control than we think we do.

 

Travon Free  21:53

Damon, Brandon, they say meaningful social change involves networks of dedicated people, but it also requires vision, and we know that DeRay saw how things could be different. He saw one parent unable to extract from addiction and yet another fine community and sobriety. He saw black leaders like Robin reshaping Baltimore. He saw people taking collective action.

 

Damon Centola  22:15

You know, Rosa Parks was sparking the first person and sparking the first black woman to stand up and refuse to give up her seat, or refused to obey the racist seating laws on busses in the south, there are lots and lots of examples of women who stood up. What was different about Rosa Parks is that she was enmeshed in this network that was part of the civil rights movement in the south, and she was a major player in that community, and so when she acted, the entire network around her was activated in response to this. And so there was a very strong network explanation for why this particular moment was the moment when things were going to start to shift and change and become more of a movement that would galvanize people at a much larger scale.

 

Travon Free  23:01

When DeRay sister TeRay, thinks about the kids in her life, she knows that some of them might very well grow up to be activists. They might be activists like herself, advocating for kids as a principal and building community in the education world, or they might be like her brother, organizing and campaigning for change in other areas they care about there leads a school and sees how Deray story of fighting injustice and reforming policing at the highest levels, inspires her students, but the most important thing she wants the kids to understand is that Deray is human. He has dreams and makes mistakes and needs help from other people.

 

TeRay  23:36

Like he’s my brother, and so when kids find out that I’m related to DeRay. They think of him as this person who has been in the White House and who took a picture with Oprah and things of that nature. And I think that what my relationship with Deray does for these students is to be able to say he’s a person, right? He’s a very real person, just like you, and this real person that like lays on my floor and tumbles with my kids, also is able to speak in the White House, and so you who is sitting in this classroom in Delaware also have the opportunities to do the same types of things. Knowing there is a person allows me to convey to my students that it is possible for all of us.

 

CREDITS  24:25

On the next episode, we go on a journey to figure out how DeRay went from a passionate kid in Baltimore to a star teacher surrounded by activists. The next stop is Maine, the location of Bowdoin College and a place far away from Baltimore in every way, stay with us.