One of the most outspoken leaders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, DeRay McKesson, will be a guest lecturer at the Yale Divinity School (YDS), teaching a one-credit course when classes begin in the fall.
YDS announced McKesson, whom they describe as a “civil rights activist and social media leader,” as the first in a series of lecturers in their new “Transformational Leadership for Church and Society” program. McKesson is set to focus his course on the “Transformational Leadership in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.”
According to the syllabus for the course, McKesson will discuss activism through social media. “DeRay McKesson will present case studies about the work of organizing, public advocacy, civil disobedience, and social change, through both Leadership of Presence, and Leadership in the Social Media,” the syllabus reads.
Required readings in the course include a Huffington Post article entitled, “How the Black Lives Matter Movement Changed the Church,” and a New York Times article titled, “Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us.”
Numerous books were listed on the required readings as well. One notable book on the list is “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates’s book, in its description will cover how, “Americans have built an empire on the idea of ‘race,’ a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion.”
Yale sophomore Aryssa Damron said McKesson doesn’t have the qualifications normally held by Yale professors, and said students are seeing their money go towards bringing “professional protestors” to campus instead of real professors.
“I hate seeing that Yale is creating leaders who are going to divide instead of leaders who are going to unite,” Damron told “Fox and Friends” on Saturday.
YDS is hosting two other guest lecturers in their program that is funded by a $120,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
United States Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Reverend Nancy Taylor are teaching the two other one-credit lectures with McKesson. All three courses are based on similar issues of social justice and equality. McKesson is the only guest lecturer in the program who is not a graduate of Yale Divinity School.
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