KC activist KJ Brooks named Teen Vogue’s 21 Under 21 after viral video criticizing police
A Kansas City activist who went viral in a video at a Board of Police Commissioners meeting is getting national recognition.
Keiajah Brooks, 20, was deemed “the Justice Watcher” on Teen Vogue’s list of “21 Under 21,” released Tuesday. The group of young women includes organizers and activists who are demanding change and fighting against injustice.
Brooks, who goes by KJ, told Teen Vogue that people need to use their phones, their “greatest weapons,” to “be preventative in the deaths of Black people, rather than reactionary — protesting — when a Black person is killed.” Brooks, through the intersectional activism organization she co-founded, Tha Chinagona Collective, is launching a “cop-watch program.”
She said four Black men killed by police — Ryan Stokes, Terrance Bridges, Cameron Lamb, and Donnie Sanders — are a few victims of police violence who haven’t gotten justice.
“The system of policing as we know it is terroristic,” Brooks told Teen Vogue, “but our local police department is dangerously flawed and takes on an even more dangerous form of terror, in that [it] disregards the humanity of Black people even further.”
In a tweet, Brooks said she is “honored” to be named and be able to draw more attention to the men police have killed in Kansas City.
Brooks attended many of the protests in Kansas City, as well as jail support actions, when other protesters have been arrested. She also has worked to give back to the community, handing out cash to grocery shoppers as part of the Black Rainbow organization.
In the viral video from October, Brooks criticized the Kansas City Police Department during the monthly Board of Police Commissioners meeting as activists demanded the board vote publicly on removing Police Chief Rick Smith.
“Eating cookies and drinking milk with children does not absolve you of your complicity in their oppression and denigration, Rick Smith,” she said to the police chief.
