National spotlight turns on flagpole climber Bree Newsome of Charlotte

Bree Newsome’s Saturday morning climb up a Columbia flagpole turned the 30-year-old Charlotte activist into a national celebrity in a matter of hours.

Newsome, whose full name is Brittany Ann Byuarim Newsome, describes herself as a singer, songwriter, activist and consultant. She works for a group called Ignite NC, which takes on a range of social justice issues, and

Earlier this month, the Levine Museum of the New South posted an interview with Newsome in its “New South Dialogue” series. She describes herself as the daughter of educators whose mother focused on helping students of color, children of poverty and those who don’t speak English at home.

“I was exposed to these issues when I was a child, and in retrospect I suppose it influenced me more deeply than I realized at the time,” she said in that interview. “While I always cared about these issues, I didn’t truly become an activist until two years ago. It was the attack on voting rights in North Carolina that ‘activated’ me and I moved from being a sideline supporter to an activist.”

Newsome represents a new generation of activists working with groups that aren’t household names. She lists among her affiliations Students and Youth United for Progress in NC (StAY UP NC), Tribe CLT and People’s Power Assemblies. She was involved in a Charlotte protest last fall calling for justice in the shooting death of Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed black man shot by a white Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer.

The Levine Museum interview also lists a background in the arts, including a degree in film and television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a 2011 stint as artist-in-residence at Saatchi & Saatchi, a New York communications and advertising company. It says she performs with the Charlotte-based funk band Powerhouse.

This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 2:44 PM with the headline "National spotlight turns on flagpole climber Bree Newsome of Charlotte."