After months of back and forth with Hillary Clinton, one of the most prominent leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement has formally endorsed her candidacy.
DeRay Mckesson announced his decision in an op-ed for The Washington Post. But he also spoke at length about his endorsement of Clinton during a conversation that taped earlier this week for David Axelrod’s “The Axe Files” podcast, produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN. The episode will be released next week.
“I met with Hillary before there was actually a platform around racial justice. So, in that first meeting there were about 10 of us, and we were pressing her on some concrete things that we wanted to see show up in the platform,” said Mckesson. “And many of those things have actually shown up.”
Mckesson, who was among a delegation that met Friday with Clinton, cited her commitment to invest in low-income neighborhoods, community-based police training and other social justice priorities as being persuasive in his decision.
“She’s made some commitments that I think are actually strong anchor commitments that we need to continue pushing on,” he said. “My sense, too, is that she’s done the homework and understands (these issues) at a deep level; that she is not just leaning on the policy people to whisper in her ear.”
Mckesson took issue with those who suggest that a victory by Donald Trump would ultimately benefit the cause of change, even if the short-term impacts are negative.
“There are some people who believe that Trump would usher in what I keep calling ‘a productive apocalypse’ — that in a Trump presidency, so much would happen that would be bad that it would force things to come to the surface. That we’d finally have to confront all of these tough issues. And I think that that is a dangerous notion.
“The impact of that on black and brown people would be so treacherous, that I think we can’t afford that,” Mckesson said.