1media/McCarrel Poem - Down South - .png2023-10-28T12:51:11-07:00What it means to be an activist40MarShawn McCarrelplain2023-12-12T07:15:33-08:00
Marshawn McCarrel was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. After graduating from Franklin Heights High School in 2011, McCarrel, alongside his brother MarQuan, founded the non-profit Pursuing Our Dreams (POD) in 2013 to benefit people in the community facing housing insecurity, after MarShawn's experiences with homelessness following his graduation.
“That’s a human being. That’s a pulse. We’re feeding everyone, we’re sending the message — today I got you; tomorrow, I could be right there.” - McCarrel
In tandem with his non-profit work with POD, McCarrel also wrote poetry and participated in writing events within Columbus, beginning in high school and continuing to write in tandem with his later community and activist involvement.
On February 9, 2016, McCarrel shot himself on the steps of the Ohio Statehouse. His death was preceded by several years of work in activism, chronicled on both his personal Facebook and Twitter/X account, and documented through interviews and publications in various news sites. After McCarrel's suicide, and the death of several other activists with ties to the Ferguson protests of 2014, in March of 2019 multiple news outlets published articles pertaining to these deaths—intimating an underlying relatedness between them. This implication came to overshadow the actual origin of death for many of these activists. MarShawn McCarrel serves as one example of this overshadowing.
