Our Sunday Long Read this week is Ernest Owens's New York Magazine interview with Black Lives Matter icon and Campaign Zero co-founder Johnetta Elzie on her start as an activist in Ferguson, Missouri and the near decade of peaks and valleys since the fateful days of the Michael Brown shooting.
Johnetta Elzie wants to remind you that she — and not DeRay Mckesson — was there first.
Ever since Elzie left Campaign Zero, the police-reform organization she and Mckesson founded along with Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Samuel Sinyangwe, she has refused to give on-the-record interviews about what went wrong. But now, she says, she’s ready to be blunt and honest — qualities Elzie argues have been “missing from the movement for a very long time.”
On August 9, 2014, Elzie was on the scene in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after Michael Brown was shot; she was there when his body was still on the ground.
“I saw a tweet from someone who said there was a Black man who got shot by the cops and was left dead in broad daylight,” Elzie, a native of St. Louis, says. “I went down with a few of my friends to see what was up, and my life was never the same.”
Brown was only 18 years old when he was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. Witnesses to the incident claim that during the altercation between Brown and Wilson, the former put his hands up to surrender before getting shot six times — inspiring the chant “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Protests would prompt a militarized response from the police. The public outcry got international attention.
During those intense weeks, Elzie met with Packnett Cunningham, who was the executive director of the St. Louis branch of Teach for America. According to Elzie, Packnett Cunningham wanted to introduce her to a man named DeRay Mckesson, also an affiliate of Teach for America. Mckesson had been working in Minneapolis as a schools administrator but came to Ferguson to protest. The plan was for the three of them to connect to find better ways to support efforts on the ground.
Shortly after their meeting, Mckesson launched the Ferguson Protester Newsletter as a digital hub to send information to activists across the country on what was happening in the area. Elzie and Packnett Cunningham soon joined him. Mckesson, who earned a massive following on social media for his notable presence at protests (he stood out in photographs in his signature blue bubble vest from Patagonia), found Sinyangwe, a Stanford grad and tech whiz, on Twitter. This connection would lead to the formation of Campaign Zero, which would become one of the most visible policy-driven organizations calling for police reform in America.
For many years, it was just that — an endeavor led by four unique personalities, each with his or her own superpowers: Mckesson was the outward-facing big-ideas guy, Elzie was the community-outreach voice, Packnett Cunningham was the communications-and-policy wonk, and Sinyangwe was the tech-and-data guru. Their efforts took them from the streets of Ferguson to the White House — a feat that earned them admiration and some skepticism.
In 2016, Wired named Campaign Zero one of the 20 most influential tech-driven political organizations in the country: “Campaign Zero’s founders are taking ideas long embraced by on-the-ground protesters and using the power of social media to persuade politicians to embrace those ideas, too.” According to Sinyangwe, who previously served as the board treasurer, the organization would eventually come to be worth more than $40 million.
Today, Mckesson is the sole co-founder still attached to Campaign Zero — the other three have either resigned or been fired. In addition to Elzie, Mckesson and Sinyangwe are speaking openly for the first time about how Campaign Zero got to this breaking point. (Packnett Cunningham declined to comment for this article.)
Like similar stories of movement organizations that have been thrust into the spotlight, this is a tale of how something so promising collapsed because of ego and misguidance. But it’s also one that measures the evolution of progressive views — and how the ideas behind Campaign Zero got left behind.
Elzie's oral history of the rise and fall of Campaign Zero is definitely worth experiencing, and it remains as a cautionary tale that we don't always get to control the movements that happen and the people who join them.
Remember that not everyone has your exact agenda, a valuable piece of advice no matter what organization you find yourself a part of.
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