16 September 2017
Jedidiah Brown rides the school bus that he organized and paid for with donations raised through Facebook Live requests in an effort to transport protestors to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, just outside of Chicago for the Kenneka Jenkins protest.
There’s a lot of hard, unpaid invisible labor in advocacy. You see people protesting in the streets, but a lot goes on behind the scenes that no one sees. Jedidiah shows up for families that have experienced extreme violence and trauma. In Chicago’s poor, Black communities, the social system is designed to segregate and deny people access to the larger society. Jed shows up in situations of tragedy and discord and tries to mediate between the people and a system that is deeply unfair and often hurts them. He’s just a guy who’s tried to get involved with other people’s lives in an effort to help them because most of the time, no one will.
