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Five years ago, DeRay Mckesson quit his job as a school teacher, 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. Even when the police made it illegal to stand still, they refused to back down. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement.
Honest, courageous, and imaginative, On the Other Side of Freedom is a work brimming with hope. Drawing 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, of determined activism on the streets and in the White House - Mckesson asks us to imagine the best of what is possible. Honouring the voices of a new generation of activists, On the Other Side of Freedom is a visionary's call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in.
Author: DeRay Mckesson
Paperback Published June 2019 240 pages
Reviews:
"Mckesson also weaves in personal stories of his upbringing as the child of two alcoholic parents, his first exposure to attending school with white children (and to the privileges that whites take for granted), his childhood sexual abuse by an acquaintance, and his complicated role as a gay black man in the Black Lives Matter movement."... This is a poetic, passionate and deeply personal book that dutifully disclaims any pretense of leadership, crediting everything to the collective actions of individuals in the streets of Ferguson." The Washington Post