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On the Other Side of Freedom: Race and Justice in a Divided America
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.
240 pages, Paperback
Published April 11, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 10, 2020
A moving, educational and inspiring account of the Ferguson protests, and the movement they inspired. A long review wouldn’t do it justice, so I’m just going to say a vital read for allies, and anyone opposed to systemic racism and discrimination. Go and read it now.
November 7, 2025
AN INFLUENTIAL BLM ORGANIZER REMAINS HOPEFUL
Organizer and activist DeRay Mckesson wrote in the ‘Author’s Note’ of this 2018 book, “This is not the whole story---of my life, of Ferguson, of a movement. I could never tell the whole story of any of those things, as the story is never whole from a single perspective. I can no more tell the story of my growing up, knowing that my sister and my father and my loved ones have their own richness to add, than I can tell the story of the movement or the protests, knowing that all the other people who contributed and participated and were incarcerated have their own perspective to share. These are the stories that I feel best equipped to tell… These stories are offered in the spirit of protest, in the tradition of those who revealed a part of themselves on paper in hopes that words on paper could help move us closer to justice and equity. I love my blackness. And yours.” (Pg. xiv)
He explains, “I’ve received many death threats over the years, the FBI has visited my house, my phone has been hacked, cities have hired surveillance companies that have deemed me a serious threat… These moments forced me to think about the ‘why’ of this work, the fundamental question of whether it is worth the costs. But we all know the risks of protesting, and we choose to meet them head-on. There were so many times in the early months that I was met with an almost paralyzing fear, but … I realized that, for what felt like the first time, I wasn’t afraid. It was in losing the fear of death that I began to understand faith and hope.” (Pg. 5-6)
He clarifies, “Faith is the belief that certain outcomes WILL happen and hope the belief that certain outcomes CAN happen… Faith is rooted in certainty; hope is rooted in possibility---and they both require their own different kinds of work. The work of faith is to actively surrender to forces unseen, to acknowledge that what is desired will come about, but by means that you may never know, and this is difficult… Hope is the belief that our tomorrows can be better than our todays… We acknowledge our limitations in impacting the eventual outcome and rest on optimism as our key act, the primary tool in our toolkit. When we talk about being hopeful for a future in which black bodies are not considered weapons, it’s so easy to deride hope as a platitude… or even as an enemy of progress. Yet there’s another side to hope. Hope can be a driving force.” (Pg. 6-7)
He recounts the ‘Five-Second Rule,’ where while protesting, “police offices would inform me that I was walking too slowly; that I could not pace back and forth in a given area; that standing still was now illegal… We remember … meeting it as a challenge. Instead of tiring us out, it only firmed our resolve. We couldn’t stand still? Okay. We would march all day and night, and we would make the police do the same. We wouldn’t be the only ones exhausted, we reminded them.” (Pg. 18-19)
He acknowledges, “as the HISTORY of this movement is penned. Already the story has been framed and retold by people who were not a sustained presence either in person or virtually before the movement became popular, before we’d build the critical mass of supporters across the world. And it is being taken over either to stand in for a range of intellectual experiences or to reinforce particular narratives that fit personal ends. I think this may be a danger of the internet, of feigned proximity. But those of us who were there, we remember. We remember how quickly the safe houses were established, how smoothly the bail fund operated. We remember the lawyers… who set up clinics to close active warrants of protesters… I remember too all the people that told us that protest was not the way to make a difference, that we were wasting our time, that we needed to try different methods what were more acceptable. When the protests began, I still worked for Minneapolis Public Schools.” (Pg. 20-21)
He observes, “when Michael Brown Jr.’s body lay in the street, the latest death in what was becoming a public record of indiscriminate kills by the police, the notion of accomplishment rang hollow. And so we could not remain silent. A response to murder that involves silence only invites more murder. We could not afford to surrender to the faith in a better tomorrow. We chose protest as a matter of survival.” (Pg. 25-26)
He recounts, “I found myself thinking more and more about what it would mean to do my part. I was… working as the senior director of Human Capital for Minneapolis Public Schools… I was responsible for all staffing in the district---from hiring to salary setting… But I needed to do more… I was watching the news and saw the protests unfold… On TV, it looked like the protesters were angry and unruly. On Twitter, it looked like the police were out of control and reckless. I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes… Joining the protest changed so much. It only took those first two days for me to realize that I’d stay longer than a weekend---indeed, that I’d stay in the streets for as long as it took… I eventually quit my job and moved to St. Louis County permanently…” (Pg. 34-38)
He asks, “Will we always need a response to conflict? Yes. Do we need the police as they currently exist? No. It is not simply that policing is broken… Policing isn’t something to be bandaged up and fixed. The institution of policing is built on … flawed assumptions about reducing conflict over time… Importantly, the problem is not limited to a few bad apples, but rather a bad barrel---today’s culture of policing simply doesn’t match the needs of communities… It’s about a system… that is responding in ways that don’t actually make sense for the people they purport to serve… we don’t need guardians if the guardians kill us, and we don’t need warriors at war with the people needing protection.” (Pg. 47-48)
He explains the process of developing the ‘Mapping Police Violence [MPV]’ database: “[It] sought to build on the work of … the two major databases on police violence that … pioneered a methodology for finding cases online without having to go through the police departments themselves… MPV merged these databases and then filled in missing information about race… and added an armed/unarmed category… MPV was the first comprehensive national analysis of fatal police violence in the United States, and it was in a format that made the information actionable.” (Pg. 51-52)
He notes, “Without data, it’s hard to challenge the assumptions, stereotypes, and justifications that the police push. For instance, law enforcement commonly advances the notion that there is a relationship between community violence and police violence… However, the data plainly does not support this: some police departments kill people far less frequently than others. The level of community violence… did not explain the level of police violence there… police violence reflects a lack of accountability in the culture, policies, and practices of the institutions of policing… We now had the data to help us understand the problem in a more holistic sense.” (Pg. 55-56)
He adds, “When the protests began, I would have said … that police violence was bad people making bad decisions in the midst of a bad system. But now I realize that there are literally structures and systems that protect the police from accountability and encourage the types of behaviors and attitudes that do harm to communities.” (Pg. 58)
He asserts, “I had to learn the difference between whiteness and white people, and how to talk about the difference. The former, an enforced power dynamic that confers power exclusively on white people, is sustained by building and manipulating systems and structures. This dynamic situates white people as normal and nonwhite people or people of color as a deviation from the norm. White people are both the primary beneficiaries AND the carriers of whiteness, regardless of any individual person’s intent. The distinction between whiteness and white people is important, because whiteness is an idea made flesh… And whiteness is rooted in domination… White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to people of color, and it is perpetuated … by institutions that codify and thus reinforce it. Conversely, antiblackness if the set of beliefs, practices, and actions that harm, discard, or exploit people of color, with especial severity for black people.” (Pg. 85-86) Later, he adds, “And though not every white person is a cheater, every white person still benefits from what happened, and that’s the point.” (Pg. 91)
He suggests, “Consider the issue of mass incarceration. I think that three things will always remain true: first, there will always be rules; second, there will always be people who break the rules; and last, there will always need to be some form of consequences. And when I say rules here, I mean standards the communities set as norms. And when I say consequences, I mean a structured or standardized response to the breaking of said rules. Now, everything is open to change. We SHOULD have more public conversations about how to enforce the rules. To be sure, some people may need to be separated from society as a consequence of their behavior, but if rehabilitation is the goal… it should not look like solitary confinement.” (Pg. 110-111)
He says, “Even if people were not regular churchgoers or especially religious otherwise, the church still held an important role in the way they thought about the black community. For this reason, it was disappointing when churches turned us away or called the police on us or were simply absent during the unrest. And for some, challenging these churches was off limits. It reminded me that that black church… is about more than faith per se; it is also a model of black power… But to us, the presence of power also means the presence of responsibility.” (Pg. 114-115)
He had previously said, “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God, but that I believed in Storm more. The X-Men seemed somewhat more relatable to me than a Jesus who died for my sins… I went to church because I had to. Church was… not about God so much as it was about other things.” (Pg. 105) Later, he adds, “the movement has not been rooted in a belief in God. And thus religious belief has not been the anchor it once was. And I have been thinking about what it means to win in the absence of a belief in God… We know that the institution of the church isn’t the only moral compass, but that ideas of good and evil come from many places---Storm taught me that before I ever understood any teachings from church… I learned more about God and faith in the protests. But Storm raised me.” (Pg. 116-117)
He recounts, “We met with President Obama in an attempt to influence an agenda at the national level that could potentially help create a model for states and cities to follow in leveraging the power of the federal government to hold police departments accountable.” (Pg. 126) He ran for Mayor of Baltimore in 2016 (finishing sixth in the Democratic primary), but concludes, “That I fell short in running for office, or a president I admired fell short of the actions I sought, or ever that the candidate I supported lost, does not dissuade me from the notion that engagement matters.” (Pg. 133)
He summarizes, “Ferguson was a phenomenon. It was neither the logical nor inevitable conclusion of a particular wave of organizing or organization, nor the result of a small set of people gathering to start a movement. The truth of that phenomenon, how it started, what galvanized it, what sustained it, why it mattered to the world, and what its legacy is---those stories are finally being told now, by the people who lived them.” (Pg. 170)
He states, “I never imagined that a story of the ‘founding’ would emerge or that there would be an attempt to define a set of people as the ‘founders’ of the movement. That some area labeled as such and accept it surprises me. That the founding is credited to me and others despite our making no claim to and actively rejecting the title of ‘founder’ makes me realize that that easy-to-understand story is more palatable than the complicated reality. The founders of the movement were the protesters in the streets.” (Pg. 172)
He explains, “I am a man who loves men, living in a body that so much of the world has been taught to hate. But I have found communities of men like me, ready, able, and willing to live as boldly as possible… because they know that their lives deserve it.” (Pg. 187)
He concludes (in ‘Letter to an Activist’), “Our work needs no more martyrs. You can fight these fights and live. You can experience joy and beauty too. If you are not constantly refueling yourself, you will have nothing to pour into this work. If you’re ever afraid, you must learn to walk toward the fear.” (Pg. 210-211)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the Black Lives Matter movement, and particularly its manifestation in Ferguson.
Organizer and activist DeRay Mckesson wrote in the ‘Author’s Note’ of this 2018 book, “This is not the whole story---of my life, of Ferguson, of a movement. I could never tell the whole story of any of those things, as the story is never whole from a single perspective. I can no more tell the story of my growing up, knowing that my sister and my father and my loved ones have their own richness to add, than I can tell the story of the movement or the protests, knowing that all the other people who contributed and participated and were incarcerated have their own perspective to share. These are the stories that I feel best equipped to tell… These stories are offered in the spirit of protest, in the tradition of those who revealed a part of themselves on paper in hopes that words on paper could help move us closer to justice and equity. I love my blackness. And yours.” (Pg. xiv)
He explains, “I’ve received many death threats over the years, the FBI has visited my house, my phone has been hacked, cities have hired surveillance companies that have deemed me a serious threat… These moments forced me to think about the ‘why’ of this work, the fundamental question of whether it is worth the costs. But we all know the risks of protesting, and we choose to meet them head-on. There were so many times in the early months that I was met with an almost paralyzing fear, but … I realized that, for what felt like the first time, I wasn’t afraid. It was in losing the fear of death that I began to understand faith and hope.” (Pg. 5-6)
He clarifies, “Faith is the belief that certain outcomes WILL happen and hope the belief that certain outcomes CAN happen… Faith is rooted in certainty; hope is rooted in possibility---and they both require their own different kinds of work. The work of faith is to actively surrender to forces unseen, to acknowledge that what is desired will come about, but by means that you may never know, and this is difficult… Hope is the belief that our tomorrows can be better than our todays… We acknowledge our limitations in impacting the eventual outcome and rest on optimism as our key act, the primary tool in our toolkit. When we talk about being hopeful for a future in which black bodies are not considered weapons, it’s so easy to deride hope as a platitude… or even as an enemy of progress. Yet there’s another side to hope. Hope can be a driving force.” (Pg. 6-7)
He recounts the ‘Five-Second Rule,’ where while protesting, “police offices would inform me that I was walking too slowly; that I could not pace back and forth in a given area; that standing still was now illegal… We remember … meeting it as a challenge. Instead of tiring us out, it only firmed our resolve. We couldn’t stand still? Okay. We would march all day and night, and we would make the police do the same. We wouldn’t be the only ones exhausted, we reminded them.” (Pg. 18-19)
He acknowledges, “as the HISTORY of this movement is penned. Already the story has been framed and retold by people who were not a sustained presence either in person or virtually before the movement became popular, before we’d build the critical mass of supporters across the world. And it is being taken over either to stand in for a range of intellectual experiences or to reinforce particular narratives that fit personal ends. I think this may be a danger of the internet, of feigned proximity. But those of us who were there, we remember. We remember how quickly the safe houses were established, how smoothly the bail fund operated. We remember the lawyers… who set up clinics to close active warrants of protesters… I remember too all the people that told us that protest was not the way to make a difference, that we were wasting our time, that we needed to try different methods what were more acceptable. When the protests began, I still worked for Minneapolis Public Schools.” (Pg. 20-21)
He observes, “when Michael Brown Jr.’s body lay in the street, the latest death in what was becoming a public record of indiscriminate kills by the police, the notion of accomplishment rang hollow. And so we could not remain silent. A response to murder that involves silence only invites more murder. We could not afford to surrender to the faith in a better tomorrow. We chose protest as a matter of survival.” (Pg. 25-26)
He recounts, “I found myself thinking more and more about what it would mean to do my part. I was… working as the senior director of Human Capital for Minneapolis Public Schools… I was responsible for all staffing in the district---from hiring to salary setting… But I needed to do more… I was watching the news and saw the protests unfold… On TV, it looked like the protesters were angry and unruly. On Twitter, it looked like the police were out of control and reckless. I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes… Joining the protest changed so much. It only took those first two days for me to realize that I’d stay longer than a weekend---indeed, that I’d stay in the streets for as long as it took… I eventually quit my job and moved to St. Louis County permanently…” (Pg. 34-38)
He asks, “Will we always need a response to conflict? Yes. Do we need the police as they currently exist? No. It is not simply that policing is broken… Policing isn’t something to be bandaged up and fixed. The institution of policing is built on … flawed assumptions about reducing conflict over time… Importantly, the problem is not limited to a few bad apples, but rather a bad barrel---today’s culture of policing simply doesn’t match the needs of communities… It’s about a system… that is responding in ways that don’t actually make sense for the people they purport to serve… we don’t need guardians if the guardians kill us, and we don’t need warriors at war with the people needing protection.” (Pg. 47-48)
He explains the process of developing the ‘Mapping Police Violence [MPV]’ database: “[It] sought to build on the work of … the two major databases on police violence that … pioneered a methodology for finding cases online without having to go through the police departments themselves… MPV merged these databases and then filled in missing information about race… and added an armed/unarmed category… MPV was the first comprehensive national analysis of fatal police violence in the United States, and it was in a format that made the information actionable.” (Pg. 51-52)
He notes, “Without data, it’s hard to challenge the assumptions, stereotypes, and justifications that the police push. For instance, law enforcement commonly advances the notion that there is a relationship between community violence and police violence… However, the data plainly does not support this: some police departments kill people far less frequently than others. The level of community violence… did not explain the level of police violence there… police violence reflects a lack of accountability in the culture, policies, and practices of the institutions of policing… We now had the data to help us understand the problem in a more holistic sense.” (Pg. 55-56)
He adds, “When the protests began, I would have said … that police violence was bad people making bad decisions in the midst of a bad system. But now I realize that there are literally structures and systems that protect the police from accountability and encourage the types of behaviors and attitudes that do harm to communities.” (Pg. 58)
He asserts, “I had to learn the difference between whiteness and white people, and how to talk about the difference. The former, an enforced power dynamic that confers power exclusively on white people, is sustained by building and manipulating systems and structures. This dynamic situates white people as normal and nonwhite people or people of color as a deviation from the norm. White people are both the primary beneficiaries AND the carriers of whiteness, regardless of any individual person’s intent. The distinction between whiteness and white people is important, because whiteness is an idea made flesh… And whiteness is rooted in domination… White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to people of color, and it is perpetuated … by institutions that codify and thus reinforce it. Conversely, antiblackness if the set of beliefs, practices, and actions that harm, discard, or exploit people of color, with especial severity for black people.” (Pg. 85-86) Later, he adds, “And though not every white person is a cheater, every white person still benefits from what happened, and that’s the point.” (Pg. 91)
He suggests, “Consider the issue of mass incarceration. I think that three things will always remain true: first, there will always be rules; second, there will always be people who break the rules; and last, there will always need to be some form of consequences. And when I say rules here, I mean standards the communities set as norms. And when I say consequences, I mean a structured or standardized response to the breaking of said rules. Now, everything is open to change. We SHOULD have more public conversations about how to enforce the rules. To be sure, some people may need to be separated from society as a consequence of their behavior, but if rehabilitation is the goal… it should not look like solitary confinement.” (Pg. 110-111)
He says, “Even if people were not regular churchgoers or especially religious otherwise, the church still held an important role in the way they thought about the black community. For this reason, it was disappointing when churches turned us away or called the police on us or were simply absent during the unrest. And for some, challenging these churches was off limits. It reminded me that that black church… is about more than faith per se; it is also a model of black power… But to us, the presence of power also means the presence of responsibility.” (Pg. 114-115)
He had previously said, “It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God, but that I believed in Storm more. The X-Men seemed somewhat more relatable to me than a Jesus who died for my sins… I went to church because I had to. Church was… not about God so much as it was about other things.” (Pg. 105) Later, he adds, “the movement has not been rooted in a belief in God. And thus religious belief has not been the anchor it once was. And I have been thinking about what it means to win in the absence of a belief in God… We know that the institution of the church isn’t the only moral compass, but that ideas of good and evil come from many places---Storm taught me that before I ever understood any teachings from church… I learned more about God and faith in the protests. But Storm raised me.” (Pg. 116-117)
He recounts, “We met with President Obama in an attempt to influence an agenda at the national level that could potentially help create a model for states and cities to follow in leveraging the power of the federal government to hold police departments accountable.” (Pg. 126) He ran for Mayor of Baltimore in 2016 (finishing sixth in the Democratic primary), but concludes, “That I fell short in running for office, or a president I admired fell short of the actions I sought, or ever that the candidate I supported lost, does not dissuade me from the notion that engagement matters.” (Pg. 133)
He summarizes, “Ferguson was a phenomenon. It was neither the logical nor inevitable conclusion of a particular wave of organizing or organization, nor the result of a small set of people gathering to start a movement. The truth of that phenomenon, how it started, what galvanized it, what sustained it, why it mattered to the world, and what its legacy is---those stories are finally being told now, by the people who lived them.” (Pg. 170)
He states, “I never imagined that a story of the ‘founding’ would emerge or that there would be an attempt to define a set of people as the ‘founders’ of the movement. That some area labeled as such and accept it surprises me. That the founding is credited to me and others despite our making no claim to and actively rejecting the title of ‘founder’ makes me realize that that easy-to-understand story is more palatable than the complicated reality. The founders of the movement were the protesters in the streets.” (Pg. 172)
He explains, “I am a man who loves men, living in a body that so much of the world has been taught to hate. But I have found communities of men like me, ready, able, and willing to live as boldly as possible… because they know that their lives deserve it.” (Pg. 187)
He concludes (in ‘Letter to an Activist’), “Our work needs no more martyrs. You can fight these fights and live. You can experience joy and beauty too. If you are not constantly refueling yourself, you will have nothing to pour into this work. If you’re ever afraid, you must learn to walk toward the fear.” (Pg. 210-211)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the Black Lives Matter movement, and particularly its manifestation in Ferguson.
July 6, 2020
DeRay has done an incredible job to simply explain the movement of BLM and the amazing he has done to elevate this.
Great insight to our current history as it plays out in front of us and the importance of modern history which is often forgotten or not correctly recorded.
Great insight to our current history as it plays out in front of us and the importance of modern history which is often forgotten or not correctly recorded.
June 5, 2020
A good read that helps you understand why it is and just how unfair the policing policies are and Deray's own story of his growing up and understanding just how difficult the world is for those of colour. It does however fill you with hope that through knowledge and determination to help bring about change there will be a better world for all.
June 16, 2020
This book is a must read for so many reasons but if anything it explains aspects of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, police brutality, racism and the importance of protesting that is so relevant right now.
July 7, 2020
Incredibly written, such straightforward yet deeply poetic prose and a beautiful introduction to race theory through first person storytelling.
“Protest is telling the truth in public.”
“Protest is telling the truth in public.”
July 13, 2020
I don't even really have all the right words to explain how meaningful this book is.
I want to meet DeRay and give him a giant hug, and let him know how much I loved his writing.
I want to meet DeRay and give him a giant hug, and let him know how much I loved his writing.
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November 15, 2020I won't rate this as I don't want to affect the average however I could not connect with this writing at all. I have no idea why but it felt like words on a page rather than a story.
December 27, 2019
Lessons from the front line of Ferguson, Missouri. Interesting and thoughtful but a little repetitious at times.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews