Keiajah “KJ” Brooks joined fellow activists in interrupting a Kansas City Board of Commissioners meeting, and individually called out all of the board members.
A video of a Missouri activist's incendiary address to the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners this week has been viewed more than 9 million times in two days — and changed the life of the woman who delivered the remarks. Keiajah "KJ" Brooks, 20, says that the attention and support she has received since the clip went viral will allow her to work full time as a community organizer and activist.
"I know a lot of people from the outside looking in might say, 'Oh, she quit her job for 15 minutes of fame' — but if you know me, you'd know that this is what I've wanted to do: deep, intentional grassroots work,"
she said.
Brooks is a leader in the Kansas City Black Lives Matter movement and cofounder of the Chingona Collective, "a multicultural, queer-inclusive, intersectional organization led by Black, Indigenous, and Latinx women who live lives dedicated to the liberation of our peoples domestically and abroad." Keiajah says that signed up to deliver remarks at Tuesday's police commissioners board meeting on behalf of "all the Black people who have been terrorized by the [Kansas City Police Department]" and described the board's members as being complicit "in the brutalization and murder of Black people in Kansas City."
According to data from the Mapping Police Violence project, Kansas City has the 10th highest rate of police killings of any city in the United States.
Police Chief Rick Smith has come under fire for his department's handlings of the protests that erupted in the city over the summer following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The KCPD has also been criticized for a lack of transparency and accountability after three Black men — Ryan Stokes, Terrance Bridges, and Donnie Sanders — were killed by police in recent years.
Brooks began her fiery remarks in the video by warning the board members,
"Fair warning: I’m not nice and I don’t seek to be respectable."
"I’m not here begging anything of soulless white folks and self-preserving Black folks," she continues in the video. "You get one life, and you all — every one of you in this room — have chosen profits over people, and that's pathetic. So I’m going to spend the next two minutes reading y'all for filth, something I’m sure no one has ever done."
Brooks then went on to call out the board's individual members in very personal terms.
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