Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert interview with DeRay McKesson, Black Lives Matter Activist – January 18, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qffCO1b-7Js

____________________________________________________

Stephen Colbert’s radical vulnerability: Talking frankly about race could be a game-changer for his moderate white audience By Sonia Saraiya

Colbert’s seat-switching with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson shows Colbert wants to do more than chat

Last night, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” invited on activist DeRay McKesson to discuss the current state of the civil rights movement on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. McKesson was host Stephen Colbert’s third guest, after actress Patricia Heaton and musician Quincy Jones; he was kind of buried into the lineup, after the celebrity headliners but before the musical guest. But for regular Twitter users, McKesson is his own brand of celebrity; the activist has over 276,000 followers on Twitter, and as Colbert noted, is one of 10 people followed by Beyoncé

McKesson got to that level of popularity by being an instrumental online supporter and organizer of the Black Lives Matter movement, which hopes to bring awareness and action to institutional racism against black people, specifically when it comes to police action. This became the center of national attention in the summer of 2014, following the controversial flashpoint of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The case brought renewed attention to the plight of vulnerable black targets at the hands of the police; in the past year, names like Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and Laquan McDonald have raised serious, unanswered questions about what happens to black lives when they are remanded to police custody. McKesson has been at the center of that—on the ground at the site of protests in Ferguson and Baltimore, and present for the aftermath of the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. That level of involvement prompted both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to meet with McKesson and his fellow activists with #CampaignZero. Both presidential candidates were presented with policy initiatives to end police violence.

On Colbert’s show last night, this man briefly got to add “talk show host” to his long list of accomplishments.