The Education of Daunasia Yancey
She’s young, black, female, gay—and ready for her mug shot. Meet the new face of Boston’s civil rights movement.
Daunasia Yancey wore a red felt flower in her hair and a megaphone over one shoulder. She’d just led a focus group on making schools safer for transgender students at the Beacon Hill headquarters of the Boston Alliance for Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Youth (BAGLY).
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Yancey has been an activist since she was 13 years old, when she fought to found a gay-straight alliance at her Newton middle school. She grew up in the post-Ellen era; gay marriage was sanctioned by law by the time she was in high school. Her political training came through local LGBT youth organizations, not from clergy fired in the kiln of the civil rights movement or seared by Boston’s busing crisis. She is heir to a protest culture that owes as much to feminism, ACT UP, and “Silence = Death” as to Martin Luther King Jr.
Now, at 22, she’s establishing herself as a leader in the growing movement against police brutality and racism. As an organizer in Boston’s chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM), a national activist network, she led hundreds of people down Newbury Street in October. In November, after a grand jury decided not to indict the white police officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, to death in Ferguson, Missouri, she helped muster a march of more than a thousand people that poured through Boston’s streets, from Dudley Square to Mass. Ave. Fifty-one protesters were arrested that night.
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Suddenly the gate opened. A uniformed arm reached out. It grabbed Joyner. It pulled her inside. She was gone.
She threw her body against the gate and the police on the other side. “PUSH!” she screamed at the crowd at her back, and the crowd obeyed, swarming up the steps. The pressure of a thousand bodies leaned in on the gate. The police shoved back against it. Voices were yelling and the gate yielded. Yancey saw an opening, and dove for the cops’ knees, trying to squirm through them like a little kid, and then she was on the ground. Her glasses fell off, and the crowd pushed behind her, and a police boot collided with her side. Now she was crawling, like a soldier, on her stomach, to where Joyner was prone—face-down, 110 pounds, with a handful of officers holding her down—screaming in a high-pitched voice that terrified Yancey, “Get off me! Get off me!”
Yancey reached her friend and put a hand on her body. “I’m here,” she said. “You’re okay.” She and Joyner lay there together. And they breathed.
Well worth the read. http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/01/29/education-daunasia-yancey/2/
