Shaun King

King is currently a writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project and contributes to The Intercept and The Appeal. Previously, he contributed to the New York Daily News, Daily Kos, the Tom Joyner Morning Show and The Young Turks. In 2018, King co-founded Real Justice PAC, which supports progressive candidates running for district attorney offices, and re-launched Frederick Douglass's The North Star.

In 2019, King launched a website named after Frederick Douglass's The North Star, an influential nineteenth-century anti-slavery publication. King's The North Star site has articles, podcast episodes, and videos for a subscription fee.

Police credited King with providing a tip that helped lead them to suspect Eric Black Jr., who later admitted he was involved in the shooting. He faces a charge of capital murder. On January 6, Texas authorities charged Black Jr. Prosecutors named a second person, Larry Woodruffe, as an additional suspect in the shooting. Police do not believe Jazmine’s family was the intended target and that they may have been shot at "as a result of mistaken identity."

The incident was revived in late July 2019 when Cantrell committed suicide in his jail cell, where he was being held on separate robbery and evasion charges. Just before he died, he allegedly told his lawyer that he was concerned about the death threats his family was still receiving in the aftermath of his false involvement in Jazmine Barnes’ murder.

On January 15, 2019, King tweeted that he was pursuing legal action against social justice activists on Twitter who questioned his previous fundraisers. His attorneys sent cease-and-desist letters to an unnamed number of people; one a young queer black activist named Clarissa Brooks who stated in a response, "This was a heavy-handed and unnecessary act by someone claiming to be committed to justice and uplifting Black people." David Dennis Jr. wrote in News One that the purpose of the cease-and-desist letters seemed to be "old-fashioned intimidation and forcible silencing."

On September 12, 2019, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wrote a lengthy article raising multiple concerns in regards to King, especially related to fundraising. On May 26 2020, Kali Holloway wrote a lengthy article for thedailybeast.com that raised multiple concerns in regards to King, especially related to fundraising, and seven former employees of the site King launched with great fanfare painted a darker picture.

In 2018, King earned his master's degree in history from Arizona State University.

Seven-year-old Jazmine Barnes was killed in a drive-by shooting in Houston at 7 a.m. December 30, 2018. The unknown assailant pulled up alongside the family's truck and opened fire, injuring the mother and other child. King used his Twitter and Instagram following to spread information and awareness. He also collected information from eyewitnesses to help the Harris County Sheriff's Office. King and former classmate S. Lee Merritt offered a $25,000 award for information leading to an arrest of the unknown suspect. After no information for 24 hours, the reward was later raised to $60,000, with $35,000 from their private funds, and an additional $25,000 from donors.

In 2018, King co-founded Real Justice PAC, a political action committee to help elect prosecutors who support criminal justice reform at the county and city levels.

On May 20, 2018, King accused a white Texas state trooper of raping Sherita Dixon-Cole, a black human resources professional. The trooper arrested Dixon-Cole for drunk driving, and King based his accusation on statements she and her family made to King and Philadelphia lawyer S. Lee Merritt. King's social media posts, which identified the trooper by name, went viral, and threats were made against the arresting trooper as well as another trooper with the same last name. The Texas Department of Public Safety released nearly two hours of body-cam footage on May 22 that exonerated the trooper. Merritt subsequently apologized for the false accusation and national attention he had brought to the case. King deleted his social media posts after the body-cam video was released.

In an October 11, 2017 article in The Washington Post, Shaun King was credited with leading a successful months-long and far-reaching social media campaign which led to the identification and arrest of three of the men behind the August 12, 2017, assault on DeAndre Harris during the Unite the Right rally. 18-year-old Daniel P. Borden from Mason, Ohio; 33-year-old Alex Michael Ramos of Marietta, Georgia; and 22-year-old Jacob Scott Goodwin from Ward, Arkansas, were arrested for the parking-garage beating. The Washington Post described how the attack on Harris became a "symbol of the violence and racial enmity that engulfed Charlottesville when white supremacists, Klan members and neo-Nazis clashed with counterprotesters." Two were subsequently convicted while two others are awaiting trial.

King announced that he would leave the Democratic Party after the 2016 election due to allegations of corruption and lack of neutrality in the party during the primaries.

In 2015, conservative media outlets published multiple pieces seeking to discredit King's account of the assault. Conservative outlets, citing interviews with the investigating detective Keith Broughton and police reports on the case, reported that the fight was a one-on-one between King and another boy over a girl and that the injuries were minor. Keith Broughton, the investigating detective, said he interviewed multiple witnesses, including a teacher who broke up the fight, who characterized the fight as a one-on-one altercation.

On October 2, 2015, King joined New York Daily News as a senior justice writer, where he would focus on reporting and commentary on social justice, police brutality and race relations. On December 28, 2016, Cenk Uygur announced that King had been hired as a political commentator for The Young Turks. King left the Daily News in August 2017.

In August 2015, he launched Justice Together, an organization to identify police brutality and lobby local politicians for change. To the surprise of many of the group's members, King unilaterally disbanded the organization in the fall of 2016. In September 2016, King proposed an Injustice Boycott for December of that year.

After learning the child had not been buried as of five months after the shooting, and the child's mother had moved into a homeless shelter, he started the fund to assist the Rice family; however, family attorney Timothy Kucharski stated in May 2015 that neither he nor the Rice family had heard of King or the fundraiser, nor had they received any money. The money raised was then seized by the court and placed into Tamir Rice's estate instead of being freely available to the family. King and the Rice family's new legal counsel, Benjamin Crump, then started a second charity drive with the proceeds going directly to the family. An additional $25,000 was raised.

In August 2015, Milo Yiannopoulos questioned King's biracial identity in an article for Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos reported that King's birth certificate lists Naomi Fleming and Jeffrey Wayne King, both of whom are white, as King's parents and that a police report cited King's race as "white."

King became a contributing blogger for the politically liberal website, the Daily Kos, in September 2014. His contributions to the website have focused on civil rights, violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and Charleston, South Carolina, as well as allegations of police brutality, especially toward the black community.

King has raised money for multiple causes including the Tamir Rice shooting, and various incidents where the Black Lives Matter movement has been involved. Through the fund-raising website, YouCaring.com, King raised $60,000 for Rice's family. Rice, a 12-year-old resident of Cleveland, Ohio, was killed in 2014 by two Cleveland city policemen after they responded to a complaint "of a male black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people."

In 2012, King and web designer Chad Kellough founded HopeMob.org, a charity site that used voting to select a particular person's story and then raise money for that story until its goal was met. The money went to an organization which provided for the person's needs, not to the person individually. After one goal was met, the next story in line would then get funds raised. HopeMob initially raised funds to build their platform in January 2012 on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Their campaign raised about $125,000.

In March 2010, while still a pastor, he founded aHomeinHaiti.org as a subsidiary of Courageous Church and used eBay and Twitter to raise $1.5 million to send tents to Haiti after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria was a spokesperson for the campaign.

King's work for Haiti inspired him to launch TwitChange.com, a charity auction site. TwitChange held Twitter charity auctions on eBay where celebrities offered to retweet winning bidders' tweets in exchange for support of a particular charity. One campaign raised funds to build an orphanage in Bonneau, Haiti. In 2010, TwitChange won the Mashable Award for "Most Creative Social Good Campaign".

King left teaching and worked as a pastor at Total Grace Christian Center in DeKalb County, Georgia. He had been inspired to take up the Gospel when he was in high school; while King was recovering from injuries after an assault, King was regularly visited by his best friend's father, who was a pastor. He recalled growing up without a father figure and said, "I just found myself so impacted by this man coming to visit me that I wanted to be like him.” In 2008, King founded a church in Atlanta called "Courageous Church". He made use of social media to recruit new members and was known as the "Facebook Pastor". In 2012, King resigned from the Courageous Church, citing personal stress and disillusionment.

King attended Morehouse College, a private, historically black men's college in Atlanta, Georgia, where he majored in history. In 1999, King was elected President of the student government association based on a campaign of inclusion for all students. Midway through his education, he had to take a medical leave. Upon his return, he was named an Oprah Winfrey Scholar by Morehouse. Oprah scholars are given financial support and are required to maintain their grade point average and do community service. King fulfilled his community service requirement by tutoring and mentoring students at Franklin Lebby Stanton Elementary School in Atlanta. After graduation in 2002, King was a research assistant for Morehouse history professor Alton Hornsby Jr.

Jeffery Shaun King (born September 17, 1979) is an American writer, civil rights activist, and co-founder of Real Justice PAC. King uses social media to promote social justice causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement.