DeRay Mckesson

“There is nothing romantic about teargas. Or smoke bombs or rubber bullets or sound cannons.”

“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?”

“If you close your eyes and think about where you feel the most safe, you're probably not going to tell me it's in a room full of police. You feel safe where you're around people that love you, when you have food and shelter, when you're being pushed to be your best self and learn.”

“I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.”

“Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.”

“Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.”

“If anything, any success that I have ever experienced has been because people who didn't have to care about me did, and they pushed me to see things in myself that I did not see in myself at the time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People are not as imaginative as they think they are.”

“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.”

“I've worked in two public school districts, Minneapolis and Baltimore, one as a senior leader. And while we might not always have agreed with the union, and we might have had deep differences, they came to the table.”

“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.”

“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 think people are uncomfortable talking about the racist history of this country and what we need to do to undo the impact of racism.”

“Systemic change rarely comes overnight.”

“I think of protest as confrontation and disruption, as the end of silence.”

“I take statements that portray untrue statements about me seriously.”

“We have to create a world where people can show up as whole people every single time.”

“The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.”