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Jeffrey Shaun King (born September 17, 1979) is an American writer, entrepreneur, preacher and civil rights activist. He is noted for his use of social media to promote religious, charitable and social causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement. Since September 2014, he has been a contributing writer for Daily Kos.

In August 2015, a blogger for the conservative Breitbart website alleged that King had misrepresented his biracial identity. King responded that the allegations were lies, claiming that, according to his mother, the man listed on his birth certificate is not his biological father, that his biological father is a "light-skinned black man" and that he was black; he said he never identified as white and only later understood his biracial heritage.

Education

King was raised in Versailles, Kentucky, and later attended Morehouse College, a private historically black men's college in Atlanta, Georgia, where he majored in History. 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 provided scholarship support to cover their costs and are required to maintain their grade point average and do community service.

King's community service was to tutor and mentor students at Franklin Lebby Stanton Elementary School in Atlanta. After graduation, King was a research assistant for Morehouse history professor, Alton Hornsby Jr.

Career

After graduation, Kings was a high school civics teacher for about a year and then became a motivational speaker for Atlanta's juvenile justice system. He was then a pastor at Total Grace Christian Center in DeKalb County, Georgia. In 2008, King founded a church in Atlanta, Georgia called "Courageous Church." He made use of social media to recruit new members and was known as the "Facebook Pastor".

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. This 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. A notable campaign raised hundreds of thousand of dollars to build an orphanage in Bonneau, Haiti.

In 2012, King resigned from the Courageous Church citing personal stress and disillusionment. That same year he founded HopeMob, a charity site that using voting to select a particular person's story and then raise money for that story until its goal was met. The money went to the organization that provided what the person's needs, not to the person individually. After one goal was met, the next story in line would then get funds raised.

In 2014, he and two co-inventors, Ray Lee and Vincent Tuscano, were awarded U.S. patent 8,667,075, "System and method for implementing a subscription-based social media platform". This patent was filed by the startup he founded @Upfront. In 2015, he wrote the self-help book The Power of 100.

Activism

King has written extensively about incidents in the Black Lives Matter movement, gaining prominence during the shooting of Michael Brown. King wrote an article analyzing the Brown crime scene, and argued that the evidence suggested that officer Darren Wilson's life was not in danger during the shooting.

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

In August 2015, he launched Justice Together, an organization to identify police brutality and lobby local politicians for change.

Tamir Rice fundraising controversy

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."

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. Eventually, the money raised was seized by the court and placed into a trust for the Rice family. King and the Rice family's legal counsel, Benjamin Crump, then started a second charity drive for the Rice family, with the proceeds going directly to the family. An additional $25,000 was raised.

Personal life

King grew up in Versailles, Kentucky and attended Huntertown Elementary School and Woodford County High School. He is married with five children. Three of his children are biological with his wife and two are by custody and adoption. He has had foster children, nieces and nephews stay with him.

High school assault

One of his experiences in high school was what he considered a hate crime assault. King stated a "dozen 'rednecks'" had beaten him and the injuries caused him to miss a portion of two years of high school due to multiple spinal surgeries. The detective who investigated the case in 1995 described King's injuries as "minor". The associated police report noted that the incident revolved around a fight involving a student who defended his girlfriend after being allegedly threatened by King. A band teacher, two fellow students from King's high school, as well as King's wife, posted their recollection of the event to Facebook, backing King's account. An unnamed family member told CNN's Don Lemon that the fight was because King was a white guy dating a black girl. A number of other eyewitnesses have described the assault as clearly being motivated by King being perceived as black, describing how he was routinely attacked with racial slurs because of his curly black hair.

Questions regarding race

In August 2015, Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart reported on posts by pseudonymous blogger "Vicki Pate", who alleged King had misrepresented his biracial identity. She based this claim on his birth certificate, which was part of the public record and lists white parents. Yiannopolous questioned if King had misled Winfrey by accepting an Oprah Scholarship to Morehouse College, a historically black school. A Morehouse spokesperson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that King's race had nothing to do with his time at the College and that the Oprah Winfrey Scholarship at Morehouse is based on need and merit, not race.

King denounced the allegations as "lies", writing in a blog post on DailyKos and in a statement to The Washington Post that his birth certificate did not reflect his biological parentage, saying: "I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother's past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man". King says he received a full scholarship to Morehouse due to his grades and leadership skills, and that "I wasn’t appropriating or faking, but living out my life." He was told by his mother he was black.

King said the personal attacks had resulted in "a constant stream of harassment and ugliness" targeting him and other activists. He charged that the claims were politically motivated and designed in an attempt to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement, calling them "a huge distraction from really important stories that needed to be told."

His wife, Rai, wrote a Facebook post supporting him, saying that "Regarding his race, he has never lied. Not once", and that his life "is a unique expression of this country's sordid and ridiculous history with race". Several of King's classmates and friends have backed his position. Corey Richardson, a Morehouse classmate, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “He is black. A light-skinned black guy. That is what he is."

References

1. ^ Lowery, Wesley; Miller, Michael E. (August 20, 2015). "Activist Shaun King says man on birth certificate isn't his biological father". Washington Post.
2. ^ Doug Criss and Dana Ford (August 20, 2015). "Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King addresses race reports". CNN. Retrieved August 20, 2015.
3. ^ Southall, Ashley (August 19, 2015). "Activist Shaun King Denies Claims He Lied About Race and Assault". The New York Times.
4. Lartey, Jamiles (August 21, 2015). "Black Lives Matter activist refutes allegations that he lied about his race". The Guardian.
5. ^ Shaun King Speaks Out Against Breitbart's Racial Allegations. Jeff Sharlet. GQ, August 27, 2015.
6. ^ Scott, Jeffry (November 8, 2010). "Pastor harnesses online giving". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
7. "Ripple Effect of One Act of Kindness - Oprah Scholarship". Oprah.com.
8. Seraine Page,“Local Oprah Scholar on final show”, coastalcourier.com, June 1, 2011.
9. Hornsby, Alton (2004). Southerners, Too?: Essays on the Black South, 1733-1990. University Press of America. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-7618-2872-3.
10. ^ Troy Anderson, “Innovative entrepreneur Shaun King has matered the art of using social media for social good”, rebelmagazine.com, March 2012.
11. "Bishop Johnathan Alvarado Focus of Prosecutors", 11 Alive Atlanta, video at 0:29
12. Scott Marshall, “Shaun King: Courageous Church, Atlanta”, outreachmagazine.com, June 7, 2011.
13. Marcia Wade Talbert, “Tweets for Good: Atlanta pastor transforms microphilanthropy with celebrity Twitter auctions”, BlackEnterprise.com, June 1, 2011.
14. "TheGrio's 100: Shaun King, leveraging social media for greater good". theGrio.
15. ^ Thorpe, Devin. "Shaun King Brings Hope(Mob) to Crowdfunding". Forbes.
16. Gross, David (September 16, 2010). "Pay for celebs to tweet for you (and charity)". CNN.
17. Audi, Tamara (September 23, 2010). "Celebrities Auction Tweets to Raise Money for Haitian Orphans". The Wall Street Journal.
18. ^ Nicola Menzie,“HopeMob CEO and Retired Pastor Shaun King Talks Churches, Technology, New Startup”, Christian Post, August 20, 2013.
19. Amy Neumann, “Social Good Stars:HopeMob's Shaun King”, Huffington Post, August 13, 2012.
20. Shaun King entry on AngelList
21. “Upfront Awarded Far-Reaching Patent for Premium Mobile Content”, press release, March 6, 2014.
22. System and method for implementing a subscription-based social media platform, September 12, 2013 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor2-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor2-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor3-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor3-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help)
23. “Shaun King, author, “The Power of 100”, The Marilu Henner Show, January 7, 2015
24. Thomas, Dexter (July 22, 2015). "Suspicion over 'glitches' in Sandra Bland arrest video shouldn't surprise us". Los Angeles Times.
25. "Meet our newest writer, Shaun King". Daily Kos. October 1, 2014. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
26. "Search results from Daily Kos". Daily Kos. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
27. ^ Sujay Kumar, Fusion Magazine (political magazine), 31 August 2013
28. Ross, Chuck (August 17, 2015). "More Damning Details Emerge About Black Lives Matter Activist's Hate Crime Claim". The Daily Caller.
29. "Tamir Rice Shooting - Cleveland Police Dispatch Radio". YouTube. November 24, 2014.
30. Izadi, Elahe; Holley, Peter (November 26, 2014). "Video shows Cleveland officer shooting 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 26, 2014.
31. Tom McCarthy in New York, Tamir Rice: video shows boy, 12, shot 'seconds' after police confronted child, Guardian.com; retrieved November 26, 2014.
32. Lowery, Wesley (May 4, 2015). "As investigation enters fifth month, Tamir Rice's mother has moved into a homeless shelter". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
33. "Funds Raised for Rice Family Get Caught in Legal Morass; New Fundraising Effort Under Way". Cleveland Scene.
34. ^ Wesley Lowery (May 5, 2015). "Online activists raised $60K for Tamir Rice's family — so where did all that money go?". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 19, 2015.
35. “Versailles leaders discuss Shaun King's critical comments”, WKYT.com, August 31, 2015]
36. Michele Richinick, "Black Lives Matter Leader Shaun King Denies He Lied About Race and Assault", Newsweek.com, August 20, 2015.
37. "Woodford native Shaun King responds to questions about his race", WKYT.com, August 21, 2015.
38. Stevens, Alexis (August 20, 2015). "Activist Shaun King, a Morehouse grad, denies lying about race". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
39. Anderson, Troy (March 2012). "Innovative entrepreneur Shaun King has mastered the art of using social media for social good". Rebel Magazine. Mediabistro.
40. Ross, Chuck (July 21, 2015). "Ferguson Activist's Hate Crime Claim Disputed By Police". The Daily Caller.
41. ^ German Lopez (August 21, 2015). "The Shaun King controversy, explained". Vox.com.
42. "Black Lives Matter activist, Shaun King, might be white". NY Daily News.
43. Cris, Doug (August 20, 2015). "Is Black Lives Matter's Shaun King lying about his race?". CNN.
44. Stableford, Dylan (August 20, 2015). "Shaun King: 'White man on my birth certificate is not my biological father'". Yahoo!.
45. ^ Bentley, Rosalind; Suggs, Ernie (August 20, 2015). "Activist Shaun King says he hasn't lied about his race". Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
46. ^ King, Shaun (August 20, 2015). "Race, love, hate, and me: A distinctly American story". DailyKos.
47. Shaun King's Wife, Rai King, Takes to Facebook to Shut Down Rumors. Brammer, Imani. Essence, August 21, 2015

External links

• Shaun King on Twitter
• Shaun King on Facebook
• JusticeTogether.org

• Living people
• 1979 births
• American political writers
• Civil rights activists
• Morehouse College alumni
• People from Woodford County, Kentucky
• African-American studies scholars
• African-Americans' civil rights activists
• 21st-century African-American activists
• Politics and race in the United States
• Multiracial affairs in the United States
• Shaun King race debate