Ashley Yates

Ashley Yates is an activist, poet and artist who hails from Florissant, Missouri. She is a member and co-founder of Millennial Activists United, a group of primarily young Black women activists, who spontaneously emerged in the days following the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Like other young activists in Ferguson who realized the media was either under reporting or demonizing protestors, she began using Twitter to tell the story of what was happening on the ground. Yates is also one of the organizers of Ferguson October (A Weekend of Resistance), which put out the call for activist allies around the nation to join local activists to show solidarity with Ferguson as the epicenter of the movement. Consistently articulating the demands of Ferguson youth activists for radical reform at the national level in the wake of Mike Brown’s death, Yates’s views on the Mike Brown tragedy and the importance of youth resistance to police terrorism have been featured in theFeministWire.com and the Wall Street Journal, and on HuffingonPostLive, Democracy Now, and MSNBC.