There is an indelible picture of Mckesson taken on his first full day in Ferguson. He is standing by the side of the road, right fist raised defiantly in the air; in his left hand, he holds a cardboard sign that reads: “My Blackness Is Not a Weapon. #handsup #dontshoot.” Behind him are the dull greenery of St. Louis in August and hints of the one-story, uniform brick houses off West Florissant. After a night of photographing and documenting everyone else at the protest, Mckesson, the education executive with a six-figure salary, finally turned the camera around on himself, revealing the awkward resolve of a student-body president who had lost confidence in all those systems and was trying something new.

In March, Mckesson and Elzie traveled to Selma, Ala., for the 50th-anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, the pivotal moment in the civil rights era when protesters marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were brutally attacked on national television by Alabama state troopers. I stood with Mckesson on the bridge. “We’re really up high,” he said, staring down at the brown waters of the Alabama River. “Can you imagine having all those troopers on horseback riding toward you, trying to beat you down? Where do you run? You definitely can’t jump over the side here.” All day, hundreds of tourists had been walking over the bridge, solemnly touching its supports and snapping selfies in front of its historical markers. If Mckesson was feeling the sway of the 50th anniversary, he betrayed no emotion. Instead, he asked me how far I thought the drop was down to the river, and started searching Google for answers.

Mckesson and Elzie have each expressed ambivalence over whether the youth movement should try to draw from the popular image of the civil rights movement. They worry that the constant comparisons with something that happened 50 years ago will dilute the immediacy of today’s protests. Much as they admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — each is well versed in his writings — they feel his legacy has been distorted. He is held up as an avatar of genteel protest, invoked by conservative politicians and leaders in the black community as a way to discredit their movement. Mckesson and Elzie frequently point out that King was in fact a revolutionary who believed in the power of confrontation, and that it’s a crime against American history to confuse the real King with an appealingly passive one. To make their point, they participated in an action called #ReclaimMLK, which sought to counter “efforts to reduce a long history marred with the blood of countless women and men into iconic images of men in suits behind pulpits.”

“Also,” Elzie often says whenever someone brings up King as a way of questioning their work, “they killed him too.”

If you ask Mckesson and Elzie why there is no central figure in today’s movement, they will again insist on the advantages of leaderlessness. If you bring up legislative reform, they will point out that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been all but rolled back and that their aims go well beyond small changes to the criminal-justice system. If you bring up nonviolence as the only civilized way to effect change, they will recite King’s words: “A riot is the language of the unheard,” or they will say they don’t condone rioting, but they understand it. Their resistance to confining the civil rights movement to a museum made Mckesson and Elzie an awkward fit for Selma, which was filled with people doing just that.

At dinner that night in Montgomery, Mckesson and Elzie received the news that a 19-year-old unarmed black man, Tony Robinson, had been shot and killed in Madison, Wis. They spent the meal with their heads bent over their phones, compiling and tweeting out all the information they could confirm through their sources in the Madison protest community. Piece by piece, a digital portrait of Robinson emerged: a photo of him in a graduation gown, his arm around a female friend; a few tweets he sent out in the days before his death. Then, around midnight, dinner long gone by, Mckesson sighed and held up his phone to show Elzie a photo of the front steps of Robinson’s home, which were streaked with blood. “That’s where they dragged him out of his house,” Mckesson said.

The next morning, in the lobby of the education center at Selma’s George C. Wallace State Community College, Mckesson and Elzie took selfies with Diane Nash and her son Douglass Bevel. In the early ’60s, Nash, along with Bernard Lafayette Jr., John Lewis and others, founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.). She also helped organize the Freedom Riders, helped lead the march from Selma to Montgomery and played a key role in the push to integrate lunch counters throughout the South. Between photos, Nash talked to another admirer about a call she had received from one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides, who pleaded with her to cancel an action because Kennedy thought there was a good chance people would be killed.