Tracing External Narrative
From MarShawn's friends and family, their online posts and media interviews were and are opportunities for them to remember MarShawn and commemorate the work that he did. These posts speak to a continuation of MarShawn's legacy in regard to his activism, and also in regard to the person that he was in his identity that was so closely linked to his work.
Leatha Wellington, MarShawn's mother, sustains MarShawn's narrative and legacy by pushing others to engage with the work MarShawn did, in tandem with preserving Pursuing Our Dreams through the promotion of events like Feed the Streets.
Hanif Abdurraqib was a friend of MarShawn's and a fellow poet who met the activist when they both attended Writing Wrongs events, an open mic series based in Columbus, Ohio. In a Columbus Monthly piece from March of 2020, Abdurraqib stated that, "He [MarShawn] was someone who I wrote alongside and knew well. He was such a beautiful writer, such an immensely skilled writer. And he wrote about the city that he loved, and then fought for a city that other people could also love."
Like MarShawn's mother, Abdurraqib attempts to situate MarShawn's work as a writer within his legacy as an activist—extending upon the narrative that MarShawn created during his life of his dedication to social justice and his desire to form and strengthen a sense of community.
With respect to this community, many fellow activists and protestors came forward in the wake of MarShawn's death to discuss the personal impact that he had on their lives and their social activism. In a Democracy Now! interview from 2016, members of the Mosaic program, a high school humanities program that MarShawn had attended, discuss their relationships with MarShawn. Moasic student Jacob Seitz explained how MarShawn instigated his own interest in social justice: "And he, personally, at least for me, inspired me to be an activist...he just really inspired me to go out and help my community." Director Steve Shapiro spoke about the strength of MarShawn's memory in tandem with his legacy, "most people are remembering MarShawn for what he did, what his work was and in all of the memorials afterwards, everyone’s commitment was to carry on MarShawn’s work—to take what he was passionate about and what he was committed to and each of us rededicate ourselves to creating a more just, a more fair, a more equitable world."
However, this dedication that Shapiro emphasizes is one that leads many involved in activism to struggle, as MarShawn's story outlines.
An activist and then-Columbus State Community College student, Zahra Farah, stated in a Washington Post article that she met MarShawn at a protest and spoke to him about her struggles to continuing engaging with protests when it seemed that very little progress was taking place. She further stated that, "'He was like, 'You're here right now, and you're obviously using your efforts to do something better.'"
Farah's statement comes from a longer piece that The Washington Post published in response to MarShawn's death—in which they discussed the ways in which his death prompted a larger conversation about mental health struggles within activism and specifically for black activists.
Also quoted in The Washington Post article referenced above, Dante Barry, the executive director of social justice organization "Million Hoodies Movement for Justice", discussed his perspective of MarShawn and his death: "Barry knew McCarrel well and said he hoped his friend's death spurs an honest conversation among top activists about the culture of the protest movement".
"'Organizing saves people's lives...But we also don't do a good job of saving the lives of the people who are organizing'" - Barry
An NBC article that came out days after McCarrel's death also reiterates this point. A co-founder of the Atlanta-based BLM chapter, Dre Propst, discusses MarShawn's death in relation to his own experiences with losing a loved one to suicide and in relation to the mental health struggles associated with activism: "this work can be draining and traumatic...Sometimes being face-to-face with the injustices; sometimes interacting with the mothers whose sons have been murdered; sometimes when you drive by and see families on the street; it can all be draining, straining and traumatic."
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- The Ferguson Conspiracy Sidra Arshad