I was a teacher. I also worked at Harlem Children's Zone. I moved back to Baltimore and opened up an after-school, out-of-school program on the west side and then worked in two public school districts, in Baltimore and Minneapolis.
— DeRay Mckesson
I'm not convinced that stealing an iPhone is a felony or stealing a bike is a felony.
There is nothing romantic about teargas. Or smoke bombs or rubber bullets or sound cannons.
It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.
There are very few things that I don't talk about - even my relationships.
The difference between equity and equality is that equality is everyone get the same thing and equity is everyone get the things they deserve.
A lot of organizers are trying to figure out how do we create entrances for people so they can be involved in the work in a way that makes them feel is aligned to the things they're interested in and not the things the organizer is interested in?
I have a big following on Twitter, and Twitter has been invaluable for mobilizing and quickly sharing information. But I'm not really sure that people are learning deep content on Twitter.
There will always be a rule. There will be people who break the rules. There will be consequences. We fundamentally think these things will be true for a time. The question becomes, What are the consequences? Who enforces the consequences? What are the worst consequences?
I think about freedom as not only as the absence of oppression but also the presence of justice and joy.
What we choose to do today and tomorrow will shape our future and build our reality.
Protest is political. It is as political as what our conception of America is.
I take statements that portray untrue statements about me seriously.
I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.
I have a platform, and I can help. I can be in spaces that reporters will never be in because I'm a protester.
I think that I, because of student government and because of working in Baltimore, knew how to be creative with very little resources.
It will always be important that people continue to push on the system from the outside. It will also be important that people make the changes that we know are necessary on the inside.
I think people who are not from here think the Inner Harbor is the only center for culture or fun in the city, and there's so much more to Baltimore. The Harbor's a beautiful place, but there are so many gems embedded in other communities that don't get as much visibility.
I am often asked what it is like to be on the 'front line.' But I do not use the term 'front line' to describe us, the protesters. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence.
Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.
Expressing and loving myself is often so much more complex than 'out' affords me.
Twitter is half me trying to live in the world and half me processing and sharing the world. I share a lot, and some of that is to keep me honest.
We have to create a world where people can show up as whole people every single time.
I think hope is the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, and I don't lose hope.
I've never been a surrogate for Bernie, Hillary, or the DNC.
So many of us don't know what we want; we just know we don't want what we have. We spend 99% of the time talking about how bad it is, but only 1% of the time talking about how we can do something about it.
I am running to be the 50th mayor of Baltimore in order to usher our city into an era where the government is accountable to its people and is aggressively innovative in how it identifies and solves its problems.
I love Baltimore. This city has made me the man that I am.
People are not as imaginative as they think they are.
I'm not desensitized to death.
Sometimes, the hate that I endure is not necessarily about me but about the space I'm in.
I think of protest as confrontation and disruption, as the end of silence.
Bowdoin was the first place that I fell in love with. When I visited, I just had never been to a place with that many resources and that much access to information. That was stuff that you saw in movies. I didn't know that existed in real life.
When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.
Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.
I will never forget the first time I was teargassed or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the SWAT vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal - in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 - to stand still.
Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we've got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.
I'm not ashamed to be gay.
As a gay black man, it's important to me to show up - that I'm able to show up as my whole self, in every space that I'm in, because that's how I'm able to be the most true to who I am.
Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.
Find an issue that's important to you, and be as curious and close to it as possible.
I am excited to return to city schools... and to continue doing the work to ensure that every child in Baltimore City receives a world-class education.
I think about freedom and the urgency around our imagination. If you can't imagine it, you can't fight for it.
Too often, the elected individuals we put our public trust in disappoint us.
I am mindful that the goal of protest is not more protest, but the goal of protest is change.
You're not born woke. Something wakes you up.
When I tweet, I'm mostly preaching to the choir.
The student newspapers are as important to me as the 'New York Times.'
I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.
I think my imagination about jobs was pretty limited. There were so few jobs that I actually saw people who looked like me in, that I imagined myself in, that I think I just stopped imagining.
