DeRay McKesson Talks About the Hardest Job He's Ever Had
In 2015, DeRay McKesson quit his $110,000-a-year job as a human-resources official at Minneapolis Public Schools and moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to join the second year of protests in Ferguson over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer. Soon afterward, McKesson, along with other activists, launched Campaign Zero, a ten-point plan to reform police departments.
McKesson says leaving a traditional office job for full-time activism was the hardest career decision of his life. But he’d had a long history in activism. In middle school and high school, McKesson participated in student government and on Baltimore’s student council, in which students give feedback to local and state-level school administrators. At Bowdoin, the liberal-arts
