Na Lakan Masego is a young adult who grew up in Red Hook and has long been a passionate activist for racial justice.
He graduated from South Brooklyn Community High school in 2018. The death of George Floyd as a result of police brutality pushed his activism up a notch and led to him start his own group, calling it the New Black Leaders.
According to Masego, he has always been an activist in one way or another but the people around him had not been, so once he saw what his friends were posting about he was moved to create the Facebook group to have a space to talk about this topic.
“My friends on Facebook were actually talking about Black Lives Matter and Brown Lives Matter and the movement in general,” Masego said. “So, I created a Facebook group and over 300 people joined the first three days and people were actually having real conversation. It was huge. People were communicating and having important dialogue.”
This led him to want to have a protest partly since he said there had not really been a protest before in Red Hook.
“People often overlook Red Hook even though it has the biggest projects in Brooklyn and the second biggest in New York City, “Masego said. “That motivated me to put us on the map a little bit and inspire people in Red Hook. I kind of felt excluded from the rest of the movement.”
There was a small protest in the middle of June, and then a BBQ on Juneteenth that was also organized by the New Black Liberated Kings and Queens Leaders.
When he decided to have a larger protest, he recruited his friend Crystal who made a flyer to announce a protest the next week. He initially thought organizing the protest would be simpler than it was.
The flyer was shared on Facebook in his Facebook group, but then it was shared in other Red Hook Facebook groups and older people, long-time Red Hook residents who never heard of the group, panicked. There was some concern based on the current climate at the time, according to Masego.
“When we were planning the protest, it was during the time that riots were happening and people were looting, so a lot of older folks were worried that that was the energy that would be brought to Red Hook,” Masego said. “There was tension for a little while. It was a strange experience because it felt like a lot of people did not want it to happen.”
It soon became clear that this was not an outside group, and Mesego worked together with other local institutions.
“We started at the Miccio Center and passed by the Red Hook Initiative (RHI),” Masego said. “We went down to Barclays Center and down West 9th Street. It was huge, over 1,200 people came. It was amazing, I loved it and it was a moment of a lifetime.”
To get the protest to happen, he first started out by talking to the pastor of Redemption Church, Edwin Pacheco.
The activist also had a lot of back and forth with the previous 76th Precinct Commanding Officer O’Malley. She wanted to know the route but he strongly did not want to reveal it.
“That is a very important part of the protest and you can’t just trust anybody with that type of information,” Masego said. “I gave them a general feel of the route but did not tell them the real route.”
“This movement was not about them, it was not for them, it is not a violent movement,” Masego said. “It is not peaceful but it is not violent. She kept saying that her main issue was that she did not want it to get violent but it would not have been violent anyway.”
He eventually spoke to O’Malley and revealed where they were beginning the protest. He refused to tell the route so the officers followed the protesters.
Masego, along with other members of Strategy for Black Lives, which New Black Leaders merged with in August, went down to Washington D.C. to the March on Washington that weekend. They thought it was necessary to go since the movement they are part of, started down there.
“It was amazing to be there,” he said.
“People were angry and rioting and occupying the streets and expressing themselves in a demanding way,” Masego said. “It was good to see so many different types of people actually supporting the movement.”
Now that New Black Leaders has officially merged with Solidarity for Black Lives, he is hoping to continue these meetings with the new organization. Before the merge they also collaborated with The Indigenous Collective and NYC Students for Justice but the merge officially happened with Strategy for Black Lives since it is one of the most prominent black youth led organizations in NYC.
South Brooklyn Community High School
He went to South Brooklyn Community High School, a transfer high school on Conover Street, for three years.
He initially did not want to attend SBCHS since the school is in Red Hook and he thought there would be many people he knows, and he thought it would be hard to start a new life for himself but he ended up feeling at home in his new environment.
“When I actually became a student, I felt so comfortable and at home because of how diverse and how cultured the teachers are,” Masego said. “In other public schools teachers are predominantly white and female but in South Brooklyn what I noticed is that a lot of teachers are people of color, Latinx and black and just brown in general. The dialogue was different and the way they spoke was different.”
One trip that stands out to the young activist is when the school took him to Washington D.C.
Another impactful trip involved him performing on Broadway before a Hamilton performance in front of 1,500 people where he got to meet an actor.
“It was amazing,” Masego said. “They had us backstage and fed us. I felt like a star that day. It was a beautiful experience.”
He was very pleased and satisfied with the effort and attention he got from his teachers.
“Some classes had a lot of students, but teachers always tried their hardest and did their best to give every single student the attention they needed.,” Masego said. “The teachers worked really hard to make sure that every student understood what was going on in class, and South Brooklyn opened so many doors for me.”
