ST. LOUIS — Within days of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, Maria Chappelle-Nadal huffed amid a crush of protesters, waving a cardboard cutout of the white governor’s face above her head.
“Black community!” she shouted. “This is your governor! This is your governor that can’t care less about the black community!”
In the weeks and months that followed, DeRay Mckesson, a public school administrator turned activist, frequently provided blunt Twitter critiques of the police response in Ferguson.
“SWAT vehicle pulls up. Officer emerges. Points gun at us. America,” he wrote in one post.
Now Chappelle-Nadal and Mckesson are among a number of activists nationwide attempting to turn their raw activism into political muscle.
Chappelle-Nadal, currently a state senator in Missouri, is looking to unseat U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr., an eight-term incumbent whose father was a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus. Mckesson has thrown his hat into the crowded Baltimore mayoral race, his first run for office.
Their campaigns are betting on — and in some ways measuring — the strength of a young, energized electorate that has grown out of the protest movement over the past year and a half. It is an evolution that started with outrage over the death of Brown, a black, unarmed teenager who scuffled with a white police officer who eventually shot him. And it grew into a movement for racial justice as similar police shootings raised ire around the country.
Protesters have called for systemic government overhauls — from city halls to police departments to courts. They have challenged establishment politicians, even those with strong racial justice résumés. And they have demanded elected officials who not only look more like the communities they serve, but also will fervently push the issues they care about.
“Candidates can take advantage of all these new people who want to do something,” said Sulaiman Rahman, founder of Black Voters Matter, an organization that teamed with the crowdfunding startup Crowdpac to help new candidates start political campaigns.
Like other candidates around the country, Chappelle-Nadal, 41, and Mckesson, 30, have presented themselves as radical alternatives to the status quo, representing the true voice and will of the people.
A Black Lives Matter leader, Rashad Turner of St. Paul, is running for the Minnesota House on the Green Party ticket and said he would press for criminal justice and education reforms without kowtowing to any particular party. In Philadelphia, Movita Johnson-Harrell, a community organizer who lost a son to gun violence, said being elected to the state House would be an extension of the work she already does to help marginalized people through things like volunteering at soup kitchens.
Their turn from activism to electoral politics mirrors a tradition as old as the fight for civil rights, with the likes of John Lewis, Chokwe Lumumba, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan and Ron Dellums winning elections for public office partly because of their work as activists.
The efforts also resemble the Tea Party insurgency on the right. Some hopefuls are causing intraparty tumult, challenging incumbents who have bona fide liberal, racial justice credentials. Although the activist campaigns are long shots, they can benefit from drawing on disaffected constituents to help.
“The people who are stepping up to volunteer are actual members of the community, primarily Hispanic and black people,” said Stefanie Brown James, a political strategist in Washington.
The grass-roots nature of Mckesson’s campaign was evident in his contributions. Within an hour and a half of starting an account on Crowdpac, he had surpassed Crowdpac’s previous record of 100 donations for a single candidate. He has also far eclipsed the most money raised by a candidate — $20,000 — in Crowdpac’s 10-month existence. As of Saturday morning, Mckesson had raised over $57,000 from 913 donations.
Yet some activists accuse Mckesson, a Democrat, of focusing too much attention on himself, including recent appearances on Stephen Colbert’s and Trevor Noah’s late-night shows.
Activists have complained that Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat, was not so activist oriented before Ferguson, and still is not. They say, for instance, that she did not support some of the police accountability legislation they have proposed or their efforts to disrupt proceedings at the state Capitol.
Still, the Ferguson uprising has given Chappelle-Nadal a platform to attempt to unseat a powerful incumbent who has won all but one of his House elections with at least 70 percent of the vote. Clay’s congressional district includes Ferguson.
“The events of Ferguson pushed me to actually think about it,” she said of running for Congress. “It is at a critical mass now where people are being disenfranchised because they don’t have someone who is going to be proactive and speak loud and proud about the issues of concern.”
Many people criticized Clay for taking several days before visiting Ferguson after Brown’s killing. He was in Washington working the political channels to help the community, he said.
Two days after Brown’s killing, Clay sent a letter to Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general at the time, asking the Justice Department to investigate the shooting. The department has since released a scathing report about Ferguson. (Some activists argue that this would have happened without Clay’s intervention.)
Clay later promoted legislation to require independent investigations of police shootings. He also met with officials in President Barack Obama’s cabinet to urge the demilitarization of police departments, he said.
“I believe in working within the system,” Clay said.
What remains unclear is how some of the new activists will govern differently if elected.
“There are many ways to challenge both inside and outside to make structures work in the service of people’s lives and to be equitable,” Mckesson said, though he has yet to unveil a specific road map for doing so.