Shaun King on Social Media Influence and Infamy [Transcript]

Photo: Shaun King

Kimberly Foster: Welcome to the Black Media Minute where we dive into the ins and outs of the media business with black creatives and industry professionals. I’m your host, Kimberly Foster. The Black Lives Matter movement has made microcelebrities out of its most vocal and most visible public supporters. One of whom is Shaun King. Where King goes, controversy seems to follow. But he is also a man deeply committed to amplifying the stories of the most marginalized and disaffected. He is senior justice writer at the New York Daily News. I caught up with him to talk about his work and all of the uncomfortable stuff that comes with being a public personality.

Thank you so much for joining me, Shaun.

Shaun King: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. Good to talk to you.

KF: You’re now a journalist. You’re senior justice writer for the New York Daily News. How’d you end up there?

SK: It’s a pretty wild story. Literally, right before you and I started talking, I submitted my second story for the day. I tend to write two stories everyday five days a week. It’s a real grind. But it also allows me to really try to have my finger on the pulse of injustice in America. How I got the opportunity was pretty amazing, actually. I’ve always been a writer and have always loved writing. I have a book that I released years before I was even really in this position. I’ve always blogged and written for magazines and publications. But I never even considered it full-time as a career. It wasn’t something that I was really reaching for.

But all the way back now, almost two years to the day in July of 2014 actually, almost two years ago, I was actually working at an environmental charity called Global Green in Santa Monica. It was like a really cushy job, like right on the beach there on the Pacific Ocean. I cared about injustice. I talked about it and I used my social media platforms to talk about injustice all the time. But it was what I did in my spare time. A few days after my wife’s birthday in mid-July, I got a email that really kind of rocked my world. It was something I had never seen before.

The emails says something to the effect of, it was from a college buddy of mine, “Shaun, there’s a crazy video on YouTube of this man. People are saying he’s a grandfather. He was being choked to death by police. You have to see it.” I remember and this is how much things have changed, Kimberly. When I first saw it, I was thinking like, “Oh my God, why? Why is somebody sending me something so crazy?” I’d actually protested decades before that when Amadou Diallo was killed by the NYPD, even protesting when Sean Bell was killed by the NYPD. But I’ve never seen it before.

This idea that I was about to click on a link to see someone’s death, it shocked me. I clicked on it. Sure enough, it was exactly what he said it was. It was Eric Garner on the sidewalk in Staten Island, begging for his life saying that he could not breathe and dying right there. It just disturbed me in a serious way. That afternoon, I was determined to share that video with anybody and everybody who could see it thinking if I share this video, somebody’s going to go to jail. That’s what made sense in my mind at the time and it should have made sense. I shared it on Facebook. I shared it on Twitter. I’d built up an email list of almost 30,000 people across the years. I blasted it to my email list. I was like, “You have to see this. We have to demand justice.”

I think all of us thought there was going to be some justice. So much so that the last President Bush, George W. Bush, he did an interview on CNN and he was like, “Yeah, I saw it. I was very disturbed. Something needs to happen.” I became obsessed with his, with Eric Garner’s case. So much so that I started doing a really crappy job at the environmental charity I was in charge of social media and communications. Day and night I was chopping up the video, getting stills of it, studying the law in New York to find out that choke holds have been banned for decades.

In the few weeks where I was obsessed with his case, during those few weeks, Mike Brown was killed, John Crawford was killed. Our country changed in a lot of ways. All of us who were already hurt and frustrated by the death of Trayvon Martin and a lack of justice in that case. All of us, millions and millions of us became deeply hurt, frustrated, traumatized, angry, upset about what we were now understanding was a trend. I started using all of my social media platforms to talk about these things. In October of 2014, Daily Kos, a liberal news website offered me a job. They said, “Shaun, we love what you’re doing on Facebook and Twitter but could you do it for us? Could you write it in long form?”
For about a year, I worked for Daily Kos. They were great. I mean, they allowed me to write whatever I was thinking about and feeling. The New York Daily News saw it. They were making some pretty big changes. They hired a new editor in chief. I was his first hire. He felt like he had a lot of respect for me for the stories that I was writing. He kind of recruited me away from Daily Kos which was hard for me because they had been so good to me. But it was kind of with this understanding, “Shaun, we’ll put your stories out there with the hope that not only that more people read them but that we can affect the issues of our day.” I took the job with New York Daily News. I’ve been there fore a little over six months.

It’s been a great opportunity but I’m not satisfied because I’ve learned that writing stories about injustice is not enough. That alone doesn’t move the needle. I’m just as frustrated as you or anybody else. But I’m doing the best with the opportunity that I have to expose injustice everyday.

KF: Do you foresee yourself staying in journalism long-term?

SK: I hope so. I like to write. I enjoy being able to give voice. When I write a story, I try to write them from the perspective of victims. I try to write them from the perspective of families who’ve been done wrong, who have lost their loved ones or people who have experienced injustice. There’s not enough of that that exists particularly just in mainstream media. In that sense, I cherish the opportunity to do what I do and to be a voice for victims.

A lot of the stories that I tell is the first time anybody’s ever heard of these stories because families literally almost … it’s almost overwhelming for me but literally everyday, sometimes a few dozen times a day, families all across America are writing me to tell me about something awful that they’ve experienced, not just police brutality but racism and discrimination. I’m not even able to keep up. I hope that not just more outlets to do what I’m doing but that other outlets hire more people like me to continue to write these stories.

KF: When I was doing my research, there seems to be a perception that you switched careers frequently, that you don’t want to stay put in any one lane. How do you feel about that perception of your work?

SK: I think there’s some truth to the reality that I’m a very restless soul. I definitely live in the moment. It’s not that I change careers so much but I lived in Atlanta. I went to college at Morehouse College and graduated all the way back in 2001. I’m 36 now. But for the first 10 years of my life, I was like most young men in their 20’s except I got married when I was in college and started having kids when I was in college. For the first 10 years of my life, I’m just kind of scrambling like a lot of young college graduates finding whatever job was available.

Right out of Morehouse, I taught middle school and high school, civics and history at a charter school here in Atlanta where I am now. Then I worked with several kind of justice related charities for several years where I taught life skills at prisons and youth detention centers. Then I worked for several churches in Atlanta. Sometimes doing justice work even in those churches. But for me, all of that work was almost all charitable work. I was people centered, I was justice centered. I almost always stayed in the kind of the nonprofit sector. I started a crowd funding platform to raise money for people who had pressing needs but didn’t know where to get the resources to do it.

For me, it may seem like, “Wow, Shaun is all over the map.” I get that. But having actually lived it, it’s all just an expression of me trying to find out how can I use my life in this moment to help people right now. When I finished Morehouse, for me, that answer was teaching. After I taught for several years, it was, “Let me do what I was doing in the classroom but let me do it in prisons and youth detention centers.” Then after I left that, it was, “Let me use that same spirit and energy of organizing people but let me see how I can do that through the local church.” I think recently, it’s the same type of work, the same spirit of work but it’s how can I use my voice, my influence, how can I use it online with social media, with journalism, how can I use this opportunity to speak about what I think are the most pressing issues of our time.

Had I known what I know now about police brutality, had I known that five years ago or 10 years ago, maybe it would have focused on it more then. But I didn’t just show up protesting and speaking about these things for the first time. It’s something I’ve done throughout my life. I think one of the struggles is if you follow me today on Twitter or Facebook, you just now come to know me. But I’m 36, I’ve been working full time for the past 18 years. While I may be new to you or any of your listeners, I’ve had a whole career of doing work for good and for different causes. I don’t think I’ll change in that regard. I’m not just bothered by police brutality. I’m not just bothered by problems in the United States. I’m disturbed by inequity and injustice all over the world.

I have other entrepreneurial ideas that I’m interested in. I have other charitable causes that I care about that even if I went for them, people would be like, “That’s weird. Why would the police brutality guy care about pediatric cancer?” But I do. I mean, my family and I have lost several, several of our friends have lost their children to pediatric cancer. At any moment, if I chose to devote the rest of my life to that, that’s my prerogative. I think though that you’ll see a lot more people like me in the years ahead who aren’t just focused on one thing but care about a lot of different things and just try to go in whatever direction they can, wherever they feel they’re needed most at the moment. I get that people feel like I’m all over the map but it’s just me doing the best in the time that we’re in.

KF: There are lots of gotcha articles about Shaun King on the internet. You’ve been criticized for what people are saying has been a lack of transparency and how you’ve handled finances in some of the organizations you’ve started. People have accused you of not being accountable in your activism. I was just thinking that running things, being the head of an organization, being the face requires a very specific skill set. Is it possible that some of the skills required to be the face of the organization, run an organization are just not your strengths and now you’ve a niche where you can really capitalize on your strengths?

SK: Well, I agree with that being a possibility. Like I am a terrible manager of people. First off, even to back up, I am as transparent [and] as much of an open book as anybody you’ll ever meet. That’s not just hyperbole. I not only do I wear my heart on my sleeve, but I openly admit mistakes, flaws. Then all these things about transparency with finances are completely bogus. No charity, no leader, not only in the nonprofit space but particularly in this kind of justice space has been more open and clear and honest about how much money they’ve raised and where the money has gone and just to be … to lay it all on the table. Since this movement began, there are several articles that say things that just are completely untrue.

Since this movement began, I’ve helped raised nearly $750,000. I have not received a single penny of that. None of it. Never. Not a dime. Throughout this entire movement, I’ve always been employed. That’s not to knock people who aren’t employed but I never raised funds to benefit myself. I’ve never said, “Hey, donate to this so I can keep doing what I’m doing.” Everything that I’ve done for this movement, I’ve done in addition to the full-time work. I’ve never been unemployed during this entire time. Even now, with my job with New York Daily News, I’m paid well to do it. It started really as kind of a white supremacist guy, “Hey, this guy is raising funds and is using them for his own benefit.”

What happens is sometimes those lies, they kind of jump the fence and other people see them on blogs that they didn’t know are white supremacist blogs or sites that they didn’t know were that and start using them as a source and say, “Oh wow. This guy is stealing from families affected by police brutality,” when in reality, throughout this entire movement, I have never had even in my possession or even in an account that I had access to a single penny that we’ve raised for families affected police brutality. I didn’t start those fundraisers. Families started those and then asked me to help.

Every attorney and every family member affected by police brutality, they’ve all come forward and said, “Yes, this is true. Shaun never received a penny. We do not pay Shaun. He did not ask for money.” What started out as kind of a really terrible lie, that almost kind of became a meme for me. They’re like, “Hey, this guy is abusing funds raised for this movement.”

KF: We have to be fair and say that it’s not just the Breitbart.coms of the world that …

SK: No, it started as that though. I think had they not started it because there’s no … there is no person, there’s not a single person in this earth who was saying, “Shaun raised money for us and we never received it.” Since August of 2014 when Mike Brown was killed, I’ve raised about, I helped raise about $500,000 for families affected by police brutality including just two weeks ago, I think maybe three or four days ago no, I helped raise the money for the funeral of Simone Marshall, a young woman who died in police custody in Texas. I’ve never had even access to that money, none of it.

Had the Breitbarts and others not initially said that, like initially it was concocted as a lie, like this guy is stealing money from these families. Then it became good people saying, “Wow, is he? I think maybe he is. That’s weird. He’s not denying it. Oh yeah, he did deny it. Oh wow, now he denies it too much. That’s weird.” It puts me in a strange position where I eventually, I just released an accounting of every dollar I’d ever raised in this movement with the phone numbers and contact numbers for every attorney and every family. It really wasn’t enough. People are like, “I don’t know that I believe that.” I mean, at this point in the game, people have to either believe Shaun is stealing money and for some reason, the government and families who he raised it for are completely denying that it happened or they have to accept that I actually raised this money for these family.

By raise money, what we’re really talking about is I Tweeted links, I Facebooked links. I emailed links. Like this money never even came to me. I have raised money all of my life for causes all over the world. In part, it requires a certain shamelessness of asking people for money over and over and over again. When I believe in something, I’ll do it. No matter what it is. I’ll ask a hundred times until I hit the goal. Over the past 10 years, I’ve raised millions of dollars for causes all over the world. There’s never been financial impropriety with any of those.

But what people see is I end up being, and it’s kind of gets all the way back to the original question, Kimberly, is that I end up being this very visible face for a lot of different people and their causes. If it’s money that are raised for Tamir Rice’s family or Mike Brown’s family or this young brother who was shot in New Jersey named Radazz Hearns, his family or Simone Marshall’s family or for other charities or causes. I end up being this very visible face for it. That was never my intention. My intention was just to get these families the money that they needed and the money they were asking for.

I think there is though like some real truth that as I started out, I’m a bad manager of people. I’m a very private guy. I’ve grown to be even more so with these past few years, I’ve grown to be very reclusive, almost a hermit to be honest with you. I mean, I will go days and days at a time without seeing anybody other than my family. Some of it is because just the harassment and drama that I’ve experienced over the past year. Some of it is just my personality. At the end of the day, I’ve just decided, I’ll do what I do best and feel good about it. When the family of Simone Marshall asked me to help raise the money for her funeral, I had this moment where I was like, “Gosh. When I raise money for families, it gets weird really quick.” People go said, “There go Shaun’s stealing money from these families again.”

There was a part of me that thought I might just tell them no. But they were stuck. They had tried for a day or two to raise the money and it wasn’t going anywhere. Then I got involved and we’ve literally raised all of it in less than an hour. I have to wrestle with am I willing to pay the price for people saying, “This guy is a fraud, a phony.” Am I willing to kind of push through that in return for raising money for these families. It’s like I’ve got nothing but love from these families. You never find any of these families be it Mike Brown’ family or Tamir Rice’s family or anyone else ever saying a crossword about me because I’ve done my best to help them in every way that I can. Anybody who says other than that is lying. That’s not me being over the top, it’s completely dishonest like …

Lying about not just the money that you’ve raised on about of victims of police brutality but also for the other organizations that you started like Justice Together.

Yeah, absolutely. Even with Justice Together. Justice Together was really an experimental idea. I, everyday, get emails and tweets and Facebook messages from good people, particularly people of my age, people who are like in their 30’s who want to know, “Shaun, what can I do about injustice in America? I don’t know that I’m going to be able to necessarily be on the frontline of protest but what can I do to make a real difference?” This concept for Justice Together was that we would coalitions of regular people from all races and background who are just agitated and frustrated with injustice and build coalitions in all 50 states and in every major city in America. I never publicly raised money for Justice Together. I was not writing tweets or Facebook posts. But people who said they wanted to be a part of Justice Together, we passively had a donation link on our website. People donated to it.

But when I got the job at New York Daily News, I decided to step down from the work at Justice Together and we refunded a hundred percent of every dollar that everybody ever gave to us. We included detailed screenshots and receipts and testimonials from people. To this day, you will not find a single person who says, “I donated there and I have no idea what in the world this guy did with this money. He closed this thing down and he must have done something nefarious with it.”

KF: Well, I don’t know about that, Shaun. I’ve seen some people who have raised some people about where the money is.

SK: No, no. People who did not donate have raised thousand of questions, not just about me but about even that money. But there’s not a single person who ever donated to Justice Together who did not get a hundred percent of their money back, not a single person. I’ve been working for months with Ron Sullivan. He’s head of the criminal justice institute at Harvard Law School. Harvard Law School actually reached out to me all the way back in January when they saw this going down and asked could they do a comprehensive audit of all the funds that I’ve raised for this movement and they’ve done that. I’ve released that. It said, “Listen, Harvard Law School has for months gone through and spoken to every attorney and every person and looked at the books. Every dollar we raised for Justice Together was refunded back to every person who gave it.”

What I was saying is, there is nobody who gave money to Justice Together who is saying they didn’t get it back. If they did, they said that before they got it back. Again, as public of a figure as I am, if I was stealing people’s money or abusing the privilege of raising money and spending it on myself, I would be the first person that would be investigated and busted of it. I am well aware of that. That’s why when I closed Justice Together down, I would say good 50% of people when we closed it down even said, “I don’t necessarily want a refund. Can you just use it for something for the movement or something good,” and we insisted for this because I knew conversations like this would eventually happen. We insisted on giving a hundred percent of the people their money back.

I don’t know of any charity who has ever done something like that, to say, “You know what, we’re closing down. We’re not doing this work anymore. We hope that you all will continue to do this work. As a sign of our good faith, any person who’s donated in the previous year, we’re giving you all of your money back.” I’ve never heard of that. Even the people who were advising me and coaching me threw like, “How do you transition? How do I transition out of this gracefully?” Even [inaudible 28:24], “Shaun, I don’t even know that that’s necessary.” The crazy thing is that even though we closed it down, even though we gave back a hundred percent of every penny, literally, including people who gave a dollar or $2, every person who gave, we gave it back.

People to this day are still saying, “He raised that money and stole it,” but it’s not based in reality. At this point, what else can is say other than to say, “Here is every family I’ve raised money for and here are the phone numbers and emails of all their attorneys. Here is the little bit of money that we even raised for Justice Together. Here is the evidence where we refunded a hundred percent of that money. Here are random strangers, here are testimonials from random strangers saying, “Yeah, we got it back and here was the date and here’s the receipt.” I don’t know that there’s anything else left that I can do other than now try to do the best I can at the work that I’m doing.

It started as a complete lie. The lie initially as that I stole money that I raised for Eric Garner but never even raised money for Eric Garner. Eric Garner’s wife and daughter, his daughter Erica who I’ve become friends with had to repeatedly come out and say, “Please stop. This man never even raised money for us. It’s a lie.” Then it hopped from family to family to family. These families end up getting harassed because people to this very day, literally, even this week, I’ve spoken to attorneys for those families who say, “Shaun, we are still being harassed by people asking us if you stole the money that you helped us raise.”

There’s a publicly available accounting of where all of these has happened?

Yeah, absolutely. I released that all the way back in December. When we get off, I’ll send you a link to it. It includes a dollar for dollar, a penny for penny accounting of every dollar that I’ve helped raised over these past two years which actually is every dollar I’ve raised for three or four years. It shows where every dollar went. It accounts for all of it. It accounts for all of the refunds. It was actually widely shared. But that part of a story is never as juicy as, “I think this guy stole money,” which is a really juicy find. All I can do, and it’s a mess, Kimberly, because when I deny it a lot, people are like, “That’s kind of weird that that guy keeps denying it.”

Then when I’m quiet, they’re like, “Oh, it’s kind of shady that he won’t speak about it,” even though I’ve spoken about it literally dozens of times. Like over this past year, I’ve spoken at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Facebook, Google and every place I’ve gone, I have answered these questions. I’ve done it on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of people, on Twitter, on blogs, on news cast. It is still like, “I don’t know. Maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe he isn’t.”

KF: Yeah, I think that you’ve been pretty clear. Let’s get back to the media part. What do you feel is the role of social media in the current movement for black lives?

SK: I think it’s changing. I think almost every, all of us, yourself and myself included, when we first became aware that … we had a passive awareness that America was a place, was an unjust country and that racial injustice was a very real thing. But before social media, we weren’t aware of how prevalent it was. I did not know that in the ’90s and 2000’s that tens of thousands were killed by police. Not hundreds, not thousands but nearly 20,000 people from the ’90s until today. I didn’t know that. I knew about a few major cases. But social media all of a sudden made us all very aware of big and small issues of injustice, locally, nationally, at colleges and universities.

In a sense, it made us hyper aware in a way that I think we’re also still processing like, “How do we emotionally manage being surrounded by the awareness by so much wrong in our country?” It can be overwhelming for people to the point of several activists and leaders have been battling deep depression and suicidal thoughts. We even had a young activist in Ohio who took his own life just battling through dealing with all of this. I think first is we still have to be ourselves on social media. For a while, there was a lot of criticism because activists and leaders and just regular people, we wouldn’t just tweet about injustice but if we saw a music video that we liked or saw something hilarious on Blackish or an article, I’m a huge sports fan and it’s Steph Curry hit a big shot, I might want to tweet about it.

For a while, there was this weird blow back like, “Man, why are you talking about NBA when there’s so much injustice going on?” I think we’ve finally gotten to a point where all of us realize that we cannot live and breathe injustice 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, that we also have to laugh, mourn, grieve, smile and be amazed, be wowed. Be proud. That life is not just fighting injustice. It’s also every other human emotion. Now, I think if you look at my account or other social media accounts of activism leaders, we try to have a more realistic balance of what the world looks like. I probably struggle with that more than others but it’s making people aware.

It’s making people aware not just of like right now as we speak, Freddy Grey has been the number one trending topic in America for a good chunk of the day because they determined, they cleared one of the officers of all the charges but it cannot just be us talking about Freddy Grey. It has to be us talking about injustices that people don’t know about, making them aware of injustice in Hollywood, in academia, in fashion, in business and not just making people aware but we’re finally getting to a point where a lot of people are trying their best to also talk about real solutions for it.

I think we’re seeing, I believe we’re seeing some improvement. Like I saw an article talking about how many, how much, how many new roles in Hollywood black actors and actresses have been given over the past year. Even statistically, while it’s not that we’re taking over Hollywood, it’s that just a few days ago, we were all amped and excited as we saw who was being added to the cast of Black Panther or we saw the kind of record bidding war for Nate Parker’s movie on Nat Turner. We see a movie like Creed with a leading black actor and actress in a beautiful love story. We’re feeling like, “Okay, maybe people are seeing that they’re not only hearing our complaints but taking us seriously and are improving.”

But I don’t think it’s enough at all. Like I twitted earlier today that 460 people have been killed by police this year. At all the colleges and universities I’ve spoken at this year, literally every single one of them, I’ve asked this question, I ask people, “Can you name one person who’s been killed by police in 2016?” Most people cannot. They tell you Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and others but something has shifted. I’ve written about it some. But some of it is just that people are exhausted and frustrated and having a hard time with so many hashtags. Some of it is that this presidential election has sucked the wind out of talking about police brutality but most people cannot name one of those 460 victims.

I speak to those families regularly. They’re hurt by it because they’re feeling like, “Wow, why can I not make the injustice that my family has experience, why can I not make it known?” I think they have a real point because they believe rightfully so that the more known those cases are, the more likely it is that they can get some type of justice locally and the flip of that is true. When you have injustice that happens and nobody knows about it, it’s almost impossible for these families to force the hands of police prosecutors.

I think lastly, I think the black lives matter movement while it was initially rooted in so many ways in brutality and violence against black bodies, I think it’s shifted and move not just to violence against black folk but also just a more diverse set of needs and issues and concerns. That’s the natural progression of any movement. Often, there are historic moments that spark. Rosa Parks refusing to get off from her seat sparked the Montgomery bus boy cut. But two, three and four years after the Montgomery bus boy cut, they were talking about a wide variety of issues. Then 10 years later, they were talking about issues. They were hardly even mentioning Rosa Parks. They had new struggles and challenges and problems.

I think we now are in, if we like to compare ourselves to different times in history, if the murder of Mike Brown or even say the death of Trayvon Martin, if that represented our Rosa Parks moment, that means we are kind of in the 1950’s of this movement.

KF: Are people now experiencing outrage fatigue?

SK: Yeah, I think so. I think all of us have a very limited bandwidth of emotional capacity. What’s hurtful about that is that the issues to be outraged about have not ceased. But it is now … we started this conversation, I was telling you about all the way back in 2014, I got this email about this grandfather who was choked to death on the sidewalk of New York who turned out to be Eric Garner, when I got that email, I had never received an email like that in my life. Now, I know that an average of three to four people a day are killed by police in America. At any given moment, I could watch a new video of police brutality and be disgusted by it.

What’s ugly about that is that we become, to a degree, numb to it. It’s our mind’s way of protecting itself, our brain’s way of protecting us from a total meltdown but becoming numb to it is problematic because it gives us, it gives some people the impression that we’re not outraged. Of course we are. But we are processing through how do you sustain outrage, not for days but for weeks or years. There is a degree of just fatigue in general. Even like … there’s even a degree of drama of fatigue, like I see people all the time like, “Oh Lord, I hope this isn’t another bit of drama from Shaun King.” It’s like people are just tired. They’re tired of injustice. They’re tired of drama. People just want to live a life free of so much injustice and we’re all struggling to figure out how we do that.

KF: Let’s talk about drama for a minute. You have publicly gone back and forth with another big face in the black lives matter movement, DeRay Mckesson. You have apologized for some of those exchanges.

SK: Indeed, indeed. I will always apologize. DeRay said some things about me that I don’t think he apologized for and I think a lot of people said a lot of things. But when you apologize, you do it because it should be done. I made a big mistake there. Everything that I said in that exchange was true. My mistake was I tried to like play the shade game and like throwing shade is not even what I do. I don’t even know why I ever did that. It’s not really in my character. If you look back in the previous two years before I started kind of talking smack to DeRay online which is ridiculous, I’ve never done that. It’s not even what I do. Throughout most of my life, I’ve always been a bridge builder, like somebody who brings diverse groups of people together.

There was a single day where I was really frustrated. Like throughout this entire movement, there had been a hundred different times that anyone of us could have said something incredibly challenging about somebody else. That’s just life. That’s not this movement. If you work somewhere, if you work at Walmart, there are probably 25 things you could say about your employees that would make them look ridiculous. On this random day, literally, I was sick, I had strep throat, ear infections, sinus infection, and I was dealing with a lot of BS online. I had been frustrated with DeRay for several weeks privately, like on the low. With all the frustration, I decided I was then going to express this frustration on Twitter. It was a dumb move. It was just …

KF: Do you have DeRay’s phone number? Do you have a way to contact him privately?

SK: I’ve reached out to DeRay. I actually have emailed him and texted him like in a way to try to make amends. I’ve reached out to him directly. I’ve reached out to DeRay through other people who I hoped could be a middle person. But he has shown no interest in that.

KF: I guess I asked that just to get some context for how it got to the timeline.

SK: Yeah, I think some context. Well, DeRay and I worked and interacted with each other very closely from the day DeRay first went to Ferguson and then probably for almost the next 18 months. He and I interacted almost everyday. We texted each other hundreds and hundreds of times. We talked regularly. We direct messaged and emailed each other everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. We shared each other’s information, just whatever it was that the other was working on. We shared it. I was close enough with him that I asked him to be on the board of the charity that we were starting. I felt like I got him and he got me.

We were two very different guys but we had kind of actually kind of similar background where we both our starts in education. We both didn’t initially didn’t see ourselves on a path toward activism and standing against police brutality but we’re both kind of so disturbed by it that we’ve felt we had to. We just kind of understood each other throughout those 18 months where we interacted a lot, there were a lot of times where people came to me and said, “Hey, don’t work with that guy. We don’t trust him. He’s not from here. He doesn’t have Ferguson’s best interest in mind.” I just disagreed with that.

Yeah, I accept that he was an outsider but I always felt like his heart was in the right place. I would defend him and people would come and say, “Hey, this guy, Shaun. Actually, he’s not even black. Actually, he’s not raising money for families, he’s stealing it,” and DeRay would come to my defense. It wasn’t like we had an agreement but we did it because we were friends. I think when Justice Together closed was also at a time where he was moving on from Ferguson as well, not moving on from the work on Ferguson, but actually moving physically away from being there full-time. I’d never, for some reason or another, I had never been able to get along well with Neta who was a close partner of DeRay’s. Like from the beginning, she was like really transparent and just told me like flat out like, “I don’t like you.” Just flat out came out and said it. My thing was everybody doesn’t have to work together.

When I closed Justice Together down, there were a lot of legitimately frustrated people who said they were very disappointed that I closed it down. I knew that that was coming. I had to make the calculated decision to temporarily disappoint people who had hoped I would lead that work, we would do that work together knowing that once I started this job at New York Daily News that I would not be able to earnestly manage it. A lot of those people who came to him were just incredibly frustrated and felt like I had played them to the left, played their frustrations with the way I shut it down. I made a decision that I wasn’t going to … I hardly knew any of these kind of virtual volunteers that were … we’d form these coalitions all around the country but I didn’t know a lot of those people personally.

Instead of passing it on to someone that I didn’t really know because we had formed a board. We were a legal entity, I decided to just shut it down and I told everybody, “Hey, if you want to continue fighting police brutality in your own way, even with the people you’ve met, please do but it won’t be with this legal entity.” That was a calculated decision just for even the benefit of that board. A lot of those people were pissed. They’re really pissed. People who they saw this vehicle of justice together as something that they were going to be able to be a part of to do this work and a lot of them came to DeRay and expressed their frustration.

DeRay and I went back a lot. I was like, “Hey, man. This is how I’m going to do it.” He disagreed with the way I ended it. I didn’t think that the disagreement was that serious. I thought it was less than that. This is a rather long story but I can close it with this, I wrote a few tweets about a lot of people who had been visiting the White House and I didn’t have necessarily DeRay in mind and I definitely wasn’t thinking about Neta. She had never been invited to the White House at that time. But I wrote several tweets saying, “Listen, everybody doesn’t go to the White House because some people are too revolutionary, too radical and that’s okay.” I felt like I was in that mold of people. I even had somebody worked at the White House for a while who was my friend who told me, “Shaun, because of the things you’ve said, you’ll never be invited to the White House.” I wrote some tweets about that.

Netta saw those tweets and was very upset. She felt like, “Why is this guy throwing shade on the good work that good people are doing.” Then she threw some personal insults and things out there. I then responded and that’s where I shouldn’t have. I owned that almost from the beginning, like within 24 hours. I wrote kind of some dopey tweets just saying, “It was dumb of me to say the things I’ve said, to engage in what ended up in a really ugly war of words, not just between DeRay and I, but kind of between DeRay, Netta and I.” She was kind of his primary defender. It just got ugly. The things he said. I felt like he said some things that weren’t true. He thought I said some things that weren’t true.

I worked after that for several weeks through a great guy named Clint Smith who’s a scholar at Harvard. Clint is a mutual friend of DeRay and I. I worked with Clint to try to figure out a way for DeRay and I to resolve our differences, kind of for the good of the movement. DeRay was not interested. That’s his prerogative. After that, later, several months ago, but several months after that, I decided again to just reach out, not that he and I were ever going to be buddies like we were, close like we were, but to figure out like, “Hey, is there a way to peacefully and publicly resolve it so people don’t see us as enemies?” He wasn’t interested. There’s definitely a lack of trust between the two of us.

This work, you wear your heart on your sleeve. You pour your heart and soul into it. We felt like somebody that you thought you could trust when you feel like they’ve come at you wrong, it can be hard to find your way back. It’s very likely that he and I would never work together on any big projects or anything like that but I still hold out that there’s some way for us to peacefully resolve it and to talk through it. That’s something I’ve done throughout my entire life. That’s not just for DeRay but for everybody. Anybody who has a real grievance with me, I would hope to resolve it somehow. Whatever that means, I’m always willing to do that.

KF: Do you enjoy being a public figure? Do you miss anonymity at all?

SK: I think I miss it some but I’ve always been a public figure. As far back as I can remember, when I was a student at Morehouse, I was a student government president. I’ve always been a rather, even before this movement, I had already done work that was rather well-known but in a different way. I’ve never been as known as I am now. I think I can deal with being known. I hate the stress that it’s provided and put on my family. All of my children have ugly stuff about them on the internet. People ask my kids stuff. My kids have actually had threats come their way. It’s just like now that I hate that my safety is a problem or that the safety of my family is a problem but I don’t mind the burdens that come with being known.

SK: I mean, it’s tricky. Like anytime, anywhere I go now at this point, in pretty much any major city, people recognize me. I don’t mind that. But it’s tricky when I’m out with my family. People will come to our table and want to talk or something like that. But they mean well, it just comes with it. The benefit of being known is that I get to use this opportunity to share stories of injustice, to make other people’s story known. I try not to use … I don’t mean this in shade, not on DeRay or anybody else, I don’t tweet selfies with celebrities. I don’t, even if I meet with them or interact with them, I don’t talk about it publicly. I’m not in this to get famous.

I turn down almost every media request for interviews. I have my own platforms so I don’t need to get on NBC or anywhere else to make the points that I’m making. I do what I do and I only desire to even be known in the first place to the extent that it allows me to expose injustice. Like last week, the story that I wrote about Simone Marshall, the young girl who died in custody in Texas, she was just 22, a mother of a 3-year old, that story was the most read story at NewYorkDailyNews.com for two days. It was the most shared story that I’ve written in months. She’s been dead for a week and nobody knew about it. I’m willing to trade the discomfort with being known particularly as somebody that’s kind of a private guy for the benefit of being able to make these other stories known.

KF: Well, we’ve gone a little bit longer than I was expecting. But you gave me a lot. Thank you so much for joining me, Shaun. I really appreciate your candor.

SK: I was glad to talk to you and I’m available anytime. Good to connect with you. Thank you for all your listeners for hearing us out.

KF: Well, that concludes another episode of the Black Media Minute. Side note, this episode was long but I could have gone twice as long with Shaun. There was so much to cover. But still, be sure to subscribe. Rate us on iTunes and visit blackmediaminute.com or go find all of our episodes, information about the show and you’ll be able to sign up for our weekly email newsletter. Thanks, guys. See you next time.