On the Other Side of Freedom
Five years ago, DeRay Mckesson quit his job as a schoolteacher, moved to Ferguson, Missouri, and spent the next 400 days on the streets as an activist, helping to bring the Black Lives Matter movement into being.
Now, in his first book, he draws on his own experiences – of growing up without his mother, with a father in recovery, of having a house burn down and a bully chase him home from school, of pacifying a traffic cop at gunpoint and being dragged out of a police station by his ankles, of determined activism on the streets and in the White House – to make the case for hope, for believing a better future is possible. It is a visionary’s call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.
DeRay Mckesson is a civil rights activist, community organiser, and the host of Crooked Media’s award-winning podcast, Pod Save the People. Spurred by the death of Mike Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and beyond, DeRay became a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement and a co-founder of Campaign Zero. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.