Shaun King

Shaun KingShaun King at in , 2017BornJeffery Shaun King September 17, 1979 , U.S.NationalityAmericanAlma mater (B.A.) (M.A.)OccupationPolitical party (until 2016)MovementSpouse(s)Rai KingChildren5WebsiteJeffery Shaun King (born September 17, 1979) is an American writer, activist, and co-founder of Real Justice PAC. King uses to promote social justice causes, including the movement.

King was raised in Kentucky and attended in . While at Morehouse, King was elected President of the student government association and was awarded the Oprah Winfrey Scholarship.

After college, he worked as a high school teacher in Atlanta. He then went on to work as a pastor and founded a church in Atlanta called Courageous Church. During this time, King launched a number of internet campaigns, such as aHomeinHaiti.org, TwitChange.com, and .

King is currently a writer-in-residence at ’s Fair Punishment Project and contributes to and The Appeal. Previously, he contributed to the , , the and . In 2018, King co-founded Real Justice PAC, which supports progressive candidates running for district attorney offices, and re-launched 's .

Contents Early life and education King was born and raised in . Although the name of Jeffrey Wayne King appears on King's birth certificate, his mother told him that his actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. By second grade, King's mother, Naomi Kay (Fleming) King, was raising King and his brother as a single parent. King attended Huntertown Elementary School and . King's mother worked at the same light-bulb factory for more than 40 years.

High school assault King reports that he was the victim of racism and hate crimes while growing up Kentucky. King told reporters that one day a pickup truck full of youth attempted to run him over with the vehicle on school property. After reporting the incident to school authorities, King found the authorities protected the youth rather than punishing them. After this incident, King was assaulted while walking to band class. King reported that a dozen youth beat him and the injuries caused him to miss a portion of two years of high school due to multiple spinal surgeries. A band teacher, two fellow students from King's high school, as well as King's wife, posted their recollection of the event to , backing King's account. King has characterized the assault as a racially motivated hate crime.

In 2015, conservative media outlets published multiple pieces seeking to discredit King's account of the assault. Conservative outlets, citing interviews with the investigating detective Keith Broughton and police reports on the case, reported that the fight was a one-on-one between King and another boy over a girl and that the injuries were minor. Keith Broughton, the investigating detective, said he interviewed multiple witnesses, including a teacher who broke up the fight, who characterized the fight as a one-on-one altercation.

College King attended , a private, men's college in , where he majored in history. In 1999, King was elected President of the student government association based on a campaign of inclusion for all students. Midway through his education, he had to take a medical leave. Upon his return, he was named an by Morehouse. Oprah scholars are given financial support and are required to maintain their grade point average and do community service. King fulfilled his community service requirement by tutoring and mentoring students at in Atlanta. After graduation in 2002, King was a research assistant for Morehouse history professor Alton Hornsby Jr.

In 2018, King earned his master's degree in history from .

Career After graduation, King was a high school civics teacher for about a year and then worked in Atlanta's juvenile justice system.

Pastor King left teaching and worked as a pastor at Total Grace Christian Center in . He had been inspired to take up the Gospel when he was in high school; while King was recovering from injuries after an assault, King was regularly visited by his best friend's father, who was a pastor. He recalled growing up without a father figure and said, "I just found myself so impacted by this man coming to visit me that I wanted to be like him.” In 2008, King founded a church in Atlanta called "Courageous Church". He made use of social media to recruit new members and was known as the "Facebook Pastor". In 2012, King resigned from the Courageous Church, citing personal stress and disillusionment.

Internet campaigns In March 2010, while still a pastor, he founded aHomeinHaiti.org as a subsidiary of Courageous Church and used and to raise $1.5 million to send tents to Haiti after the . star was a spokesperson for the campaign.

King's work for Haiti inspired him to launch TwitChange.com, a charity auction site. TwitChange held Twitter charity auctions on eBay where celebrities offered to retweet winning bidders' tweets in exchange for support of a particular charity. One campaign raised funds to build an orphanage in Bonneau, Haiti. In 2010, TwitChange won the Award for "Most Creative Social Good Campaign".

In 2012, King and web designer Chad Kellough founded , a charity site that used voting to select a particular person's story and then raise money for that story until its goal was met. The money went to an organization which provided for the person's needs, not to the person individually. After one goal was met, the next story in line would then get funds raised. HopeMob initially raised funds to build their in January 2012 on the site . Their campaign raised about $125,000.

Journalism King has written extensively about incidents in the Black Lives Matter movement, gaining prominence during the events following the . King wrote an article analyzing the Brown crime scene, and argued that the evidence suggested that officer Darren Wilson's life was not in danger during the shooting.

King became a contributing blogger for the politically liberal website, the Daily Kos, in September 2014. His contributions to the website have focused on , violence in , and , as well as allegations of , especially toward the black community.

On October 2, 2015, King joined as a senior justice writer, where he would focus on reporting and commentary on social justice, police brutality and race relations. On December 28, 2016, announced that King had been hired as a political commentator for . King left the Daily News in August 2017.

King has written extensively about his experiences as a biracial person.

The North Star In 2019, King launched a website named after 's , an influential nineteenth-century anti-slavery publication. King's The North Star site has articles, podcast episodes, and videos for a subscription fee.

Activism Police brutality In August 2015, he launched Justice Together, an organization to identify police brutality and lobby local politicians for change. To the surprise of many of the group's members, King unilaterally disbanded the organization in the fall of 2016. In September 2016, King proposed an Injustice Boycott for December of that year.

Assault of DeAndre Harris In an October 11, 2017 article in , Shaun King was credited with leading a successful months-long and far-reaching social media campaign which led to the identification and arrest of three of the men behind during the . 18-year-old Daniel P. Borden from ; 33-year-old Alex Michael Ramos of ; and 22-year-old Jacob Scott Goodwin from , were arrested for the parking-garage beating. The Washington Post described how the attack on Harris became a "symbol of the violence and racial enmity that engulfed Charlottesville when white supremacists, Klan members and neo-Nazis clashed with counterprotesters." Two were subsequently convicted while two others are awaiting trial.

Harris was later served with an arrest warrant sought by 48-year-old Harold Crews, North Carolina's chairman and a real estate lawyer, who alleged that Harris had hit him with a flashlight during an altercation prior to the Market Street Garage brawl. Crews used a law by which alleged crime victims who have filed a police report can get a warrant if they can convince a local judge to sign it. In the interview with the Washington Post, King responded, "I am disgusted that the justice system bent over backwards to issue a warrant for one of the primary victims of that day, when I and others had to fight like hell to get that same justice system to prosecute people who were vicious in their attacks against Harris and others. Now, we're seeing white supremacists celebrate on social media, bragging about Harris's arrest. They're hailing this as a victory." Harris was later acquitted of misdemeanor assault by a local judge.

Tamir Rice fundraising King has raised money for multiple causes including the shooting, and various incidents where the Black Lives Matter movement has been involved. Through the fund-raising website, YouCaring.com, King raised $60,000 for Rice's family. Rice, a 12-year-old resident of , , was killed in 2014 by two Cleveland city policemen after they responded to a complaint "of a male black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people."

After learning the child had not been buried as of five months after the shooting, and the child's mother had moved into a homeless shelter, he started the fund to assist the Rice family; however, family attorney Timothy Kucharski stated in May 2015 that neither he nor the Rice family had heard of King or the fundraiser, nor had they received any money. The money raised was then seized by the court and placed into Tamir Rice's instead of being freely available to the family. King and the Rice family's new legal counsel, , then started a second charity drive with the proceeds going directly to the family. An additional $25,000 was raised.

Jazmine Barnes shooting Seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes was killed in a in at 7 a.m. December 30, 2018. The unknown assailant pulled up alongside the family's truck and opened fire, injuring the mother and other child. King used his and following to spread information and awareness. He also collected information from eyewitnesses to help the . King and former classmate offered a $25,000 award for information leading to an arrest of the unknown suspect. After no information for 24 hours, the reward was later raised to $60,000, with $35,000 from their private funds, and an additional $25,000 from donors.

Police credited King with providing a tip that helped lead them to suspect Eric Black Jr., who later admitted he was involved in the shooting. He faces a charge of capital murder. On January 6, Texas authorities charged Black Jr. Prosecutors named a second person, Larry Woodruffe, as an additional suspect in the shooting. Police do not believe Jazmine’s family was the intended target and that they may have been shot at "as a result of mistaken identity."

On Twitter, King initially posted the mugshot of a white male, Robert Paul Cantrell, who he identified as involved in the shooting. King said in a deleted tweet, "We've had 20 people call or email us and say he is a racist, violent asshole and always has been. Just tell me everything you know." Police later said the man was not connected with the crime, and King deleted the tweet, though not until the man had received threats on social media.

The incident was revived in late July 2019 when Cantrell committed suicide in his jail cell, where he was being held on separate robbery and evasion charges. Just before he died, he allegedly told his lawyer that he was concerned about the death threats his family was still receiving in the aftermath of his false involvement in Jazmine Barnes’ murder.

Political positions King announced that he would leave the after the 2016 election due to allegations of corruption and lack of neutrality in the party during the primaries.

Real Justice PAC In 2018, King co-founded Real Justice PAC, a political action committee to help elect prosecutors who support at the county and city levels.

Controversies Questions regarding race In August 2015, questioned King's biracial identity in an article for . Yiannopoulos reported that King's birth certificate lists Naomi Fleming and Jeffrey Wayne King, both of whom are white, as King's parents and that a police report cited King's race as "white."

King responded that the man listed on his birth certificate is his and that his mother has told him his is a light-skinned black man. Family members and classmates have stated that they understood King to be growing up.

The police officer who listed King's race as "white" stated that he believed King to be biracial and that everyone who knew King presumed he was mixed. He went on to state that he had only listed King as "white" because "biracial" was not an option on his form. King and his supporters expressed concern that such questions were an attempt to distract from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sherita Dixon-Cole On May 20, 2018, King accused a white Texas state trooper of raping Sherita Dixon-Cole, a black human resources professional. The trooper arrested Dixon-Cole for drunk driving, and King based his accusation on statements she and her family made to King and Philadelphia lawyer S. Lee Merritt. King's social media posts, which identified the trooper by name, went viral, and threats were made against the arresting trooper as well as another trooper with the same last name. The released nearly two hours of body-cam footage on May 22 that exonerated the trooper. Merritt subsequently apologized for the false accusation and national attention he had brought to the case. King deleted his social media posts after the body-cam video was released.

Fundraising controversies King has been accused of raising funds for causes that were never received by those he was fundraising for. According to , he founded an organization called Justice Together, which he raised several thousand dollars for and then abruptly shuttered. He started a different organization a few months later called "Justice. That's All." that he also closed a few months after founding.

In one case, a former member of the organization who asked to have donation returned said that King refused to refund her money. An investigation by of detailed discrepancies in amounts raised for different charities such as a Haiti relief project, and in one case, starting a crowdfunding project for the family of without their knowledge. Activists on Twitter questioned if he took the $100,000 reward money for information that led to the arrest of the men who shot Jazmine Barnes.

On January 15, 2019, King tweeted that he was pursuing legal action against social justice activists on Twitter who questioned his previous fundraisers. His attorneys sent cease-and-desist letters to an unnamed number of people; one a young queer black activist named Clarissa Brooks who stated in a response, "This was a heavy-handed and unnecessary act by someone claiming to be committed to justice and uplifting Black people." David Dennis Jr. wrote in that the purpose of the cease-and-desist letters seemed to be "old-fashioned intimidation and forcible silencing."

King has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. He wrote an editorial explaining the purpose of taking legal action and addressed some specific critiques levied against him.

On September 12, 2019, activist wrote a lengthy article raising multiple concerns in regards to King, especially related to fundraising.On May 26 2020, Kali Holloway wrote a lengthy article for thedailybeast.com that raised multiple concerns in regards to King, especially related to fundraising, and seven former employees of the site King launched with great fanfare painted a darker picture.

Personal life Shaun is married with five children. Three of his children are biological with his wife, and two are legally adopted. He also has fostered children.

Awards References External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to . PeopleEventsDeaths protested2009–20132014201520162017201820192020Other cases protested MediaSupportive groupsGroups associated with oppositionRelatedHostsMainOtherFormerPartnersOther [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1]Retrieved from "": Hidden categories: Shaun King - Wikipedia

Shaun King comes under scrutiny over botched news organization

alt / , «Shaun King» Facebook «Shaun King» Facebook SHAUN KINGAbout Shaun King Today, there are crucial conversations rippling across North America—conversations happening on so... 1 975 951 2 150 002 Facebook , . , . : The Action PAC , Shaun King · · · · · · · · · Facebook © 2020 · 🚨I need you to understand this 🚨

· Brothers Lance and Neko Wilson are both incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic; Lance has already tested positive. Their brother Jacque, a lawyer, is working to get them out while looking after their father, 85-year-old Mack.

Mack had read heart-wrenching letters from his sons before—the criminal legal system has extracted a heavy toll on his family over the years. But hearing about a COVID-19 outbreak in the prison where Lance is held was too much. Jacque found Mack on the floor of his Modesto home; he had had a panic attack.

“All he could say is I do not want my son to die in there, that he is not a bad person, why is this happening to me,” Jacque wrote in a court declaration.

theappeal.orgBoth incarcerated brothers are at an increased risk of complications from COVID-19—and one has tested positive.

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