Atlanta-based community organizer Da’Shaun Harrison (DaShaunLH) went up against some of the most powerful groups in Atlanta — as a college student.
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned in the Birmingham, Alabama, city jail on charges associated with "parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing, and picketing." During the eight days he spent behind bars, alongside fellow civil rights leaders Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth, King wrote the famous “Letter From the Birmingham Jail,” also known as “The Negro Is Your Brother.
Contemporary grassroots organizing in Atlanta has been shaped by the community-based, regional ethos of college students and young people like Da’Shaun Harrison. As an Atlanta-based community organizer, Harrison has helped create an infrastructure for issue-based activism working toward liberation and self-determination in the South.
Between August and November of that year, Harrison participated in mass protests of Brown’s death. Then a grand juryit would not indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown. “I remember sitting in my dorm room in White Hall, watching that on the TV, and deciding something had to happen," says Harrison. "I feel like I had all these feelings and critiques and I knew that there was something more that I could do.