What We Can Learn from a Community Activist Who Died Young Suffering from PTSD and Mental Health
When I think of my ex-husband, Kenzie (Carlos Mouton) Smith, I keep playing Kid Cudi’s “Man on the Moon.” That album was released just before we met, and while it was not present in the first moments we dated, it played a central role in showing me who he was.
Kenzie repeatedly played every song from “Solo Dolo” to “Day ‘n’ Night” as he sang the songs off-key, waving his fingers at me like a symphony conductor. The only thing he did not have in common with Cudi’s songs was Cudi’s epiphany for being high. Kenzie didn’t need drugs to be in another world.
One song that stood out to me the most was the title song, “Man on the Moon.” If you ever wanted to understand how this man’s mind worked, all you need to do is play this song, know where he came from, why he worked so hard as the owner of DopeEraMagazine, and how far he rose to become the kind of activist many adored.
At the age of 43, Kenzie died from a heart attack on Saturday, July 20. He was well known as the man holding a cigarette in the background of the viral BBQ Becky video I had filmed when he texted me on April 28, 2018, asking me to help him deal with a woman who wouldn’t leave him and his friend, Onsayo Abram, alone at Lake Merritt.
With the help of writer Joy Elan, we made the video go viral. All parties agreed to use Kenzie as the representative to be interviewed by the media, so I spent the summer preparing countless interviews for him while permitting media use of the video to ensure the story was told worldwide.
The energy from the community flooded our lives. Kenzie was encouraged to run for Oakland City Council District 2. He became a symbol of flipping racism into opportunity. While he didn’t win his election, he was nominated by councilmember Rebecca Kaplan Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission (PRAC). In a recent statement, Kaplan said:
Sending blessings over the life of Kenzie Smith, a dedicated and beloved Oaklander, who put time and energy into helping the homeless and serving our community. I am thankful for his commitment, including his service on the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission, which was dedicated to uplifting others.
Kenzie Smith’s words continue to inspire us: ‘I want to showcase and bring people together. I want to use my light to shine on other people in the community. Whoever I rock with, I’ll shine the light on them. I’ve always been in the background, never been a person on social media.’May his memory be a blessing.
Kenzie Smith’s legacy of service and dedication to the community will be remembered and cherished by all who knew him. His contributions have left an indelible mark on Oakland, and his spirit of giving will continue to inspire future generations.
Kenzie organized park clean-ups, walked neighbors to their homes at night to ensure their safety and put together food and clothing giveaways for the homeless. He followed in the footsteps of the Black Panther Party’s legacy, believing in the programs they had provided and their 10-point platform.
He was an anti-fascist who fought against racism and believed Black liberation was necessary for everyone’s freedom while developing an understanding of intersectionality and the necessity of unifying the community locally to achieve that goal.
When I first met him, he was homophobic. He always saw racism as an issue, but it took many years for myself, my friends, and other activists to educate him on the rights of LGBTQ+ and the intersectionality of their rights with Black rights.
By 2017, he fought alongside LGBTQ+, antifascists, Brown Berets, and Asian activists. He made great alliances and friends with them. He is an excellent example of activism being a learning process; great activists are not born. They are simply willing to listen, learn, observe, and take action.
I mention this because it was extremely hard for someone who came from a Christian background, surrounded by a severely chauvinist homophobic rap industry, to be openly accepting of intersectional activism.
Kenzie understood what the Black Panther Party meant when they raised their fists, symbolizing people’s power, and said, “All Power to the people.” It means power to all people.
Yet, living by those principles proved to be stressful as a Black activist, married to a white woman who had pushed him to pursue his activism dreams in a historically divisive political climate.
He attempted to balance between countless relationships he had built over his lifespan, soaking in their praises, influences, and judgments.
On the day of his death, he was organizing a Lake Merritt Clean fundraiser in support of Community Rebirth One, dedicated to addressing homelessness and mental health challenges for Oaklanders in need.
It is unknown who else is behind the site besides Kenzie. I attempted to contact the email address and have not received a response. It appears “Jun” mentioned in the about section might be the co-owner of Lucky Three Seven, who was killed in a homicide on May 23, 2023. A death like that would trigger trauma for Kenzie, which fits a pattern with how he handled people he knew dying of gun violence.
The site describes something I often witnessed Kenzie go through in the years I knew him. It says Kenzie “experienced profound loss and struggled with feelings of confusion and disorientation. Losing his closest friend (Jun) who had been a source of motivation and encouragement, left him grappling with depression and anxiety, prompting him to take a break to focus on his mental health.”
The Man on the Moon
After I divorced Kenzie, he went to counseling. He always went to counseling after we had a falling out, which was great because, at least, he tried. It was always one step at a time with him, a cycle he could never fully get out of because he was swimming too deep in his thoughts.
He worked hard to do everything right: work a 9-5, Dope Era Magazine, and community work. He would go so hard all at once and then burn out instantly. He would just stop altogether. All the drive and compassion would drain out of him, and he would fall into “don’t give a fuck” mode.
Things would start to become neglected, depression would grow, and then something traumatic would occur, triggering a peak rock bottom moment that would force him to reset once again and reboot. This time back from counseling was different. He told me something that made sense of it all. He was bipolar.
Suddenly, everything became clear to me. He experienced compounding trauma and near death experiences (one time, he woke up in a morgue) throughout his life. That imbalance had him struggling internally every day, and most of the time, he kept it to himself until he started to unravel and fall apart.
Please understand I am not attempting to diagnose a dead man’s mental space. He was my best friend for 9 years. I lived with him through most of those years. I’m expressing my observations as respectfully as possible, knowing he often attempted to express them himself and wanted people to understand what he was going through.
I am certain he was neurodivergent. We both are just on different spectrums. That is why we understood each other. We often felt like outcasts that most people could not understand. We weren’t supposed to be ourselves.
We knew nothing was wrong with us when we were being our weird, distinct selves. We were the “squares,” while everyone around us was content fitting into whatever shape they were told to be. We were constantly underestimated and treated as an insignificant class beneath our peers.
The world had so much wrong with it, and we simply refused to fit in. We could not believe we were the dysfunctional ones for refusing abuse, so we felt strongly we had so much to prove.
Add to that the layers of different kinds of trauma we both had through childhood into our adulthood. Staying in survival mode for decades. We were the underestimated underdogs. The question is, who were we trying to prove ourselves to?
I first met Kenzie at an E-40 video shoot in late 2009. I was a photographer with models excited to be in the shoot. He was striding about in a green and yellow athletics jacket with matching A’ s-colored Air Force 1’s. He always wore a matching baseball cap. Back then, he was “Based Magazine.” The branding of his glimmering face was ever present—slapping you in the eyes for a hypnotizing effect—imitating diamonds in the sun.
We had been talking on the phone a lot. He gave me a very important test: Name every Bay Area rap song he played from the 90s, including the song title and artist name. If I failed, I was not worthy.
He called me out of the blue and demanded that I name a song randomly every day. I knew even the most underground Bay Area artists, so I passed. It was the weirdest test I never asked for, but at least he had some standards.
Kenzie started to tell me stories about growing up in The Manor in Richmond, CA. Born Sept. 23, 1980, his real name was Carlos Smith. Most people called him “Los.” He hated that name, so he started calling himself Kenzie, a name he picked up off a white girl in a mostly white school his mom had sent him to for a time.
His soft-spoken raspy-voiced mother loved talking shit, sometimes making surprisingly raunchy jokes followed by mischievous giggling while coyly covering her mouth like (oops, did I say that). She protected her youngest son, forcing him to spend the first twelve years of his life either in the home or church so he would not be influenced by the devastating impacts of street life his older siblings fell victim to.
Kenzie looked up to well-known rapper Mac Dre. He had many fond memories of the rapper visiting The Manor. He told tales of the rapper hanging out with legendary d-boys he grew up around, including his older brother, who he said was well acquainted with Mac Dre. Kenzie deeply looked up to his brother as someone who meant the world to him, someone who he lost to gun violence by the time he became a young adult. That older brother left Kenzie a clothing store called “Town Biziness,” which had been located at the top of Fruitvale by the Farmer Joe’s in a building now an H&R Block.
Caption: Kenzie spent most of his childhood in church and often flipped back and forth between his rugged, expert street rap media persona and preaching Deacon demeanor. Photo credits unknown.
Towards the end of 2009, Kenzie and I had become good friends, but it seemed we would part ways. He was planning on joining a rapper and his entourage on tour while I continued caring for my daughters, working, and doing my photography. Just before he was supposed to leave, I learned Kenzie had been shot. I was shocked; he was not involved in crime or beef, so it didn’t make sense. It took days for him to call me and tell me what had happened.
He was in front of his mother’s house while smoking a cigarette. A guy from his neighborhood came up to him and asked for a cigarette when a shooter appeared. Kenzie and the other man darted into Kenzie’s mother’s home through the patio doors and into her living room, where she always sat watching TV.
Kenzie learned that the shooter was aiming for the guy asking for a cigarette, and the shooter had been someone known in the rapper’s entourage he was going on tour with. He felt betrayed as no one checked on him. He wasn’t sure if it was an accident or on setup. At that point, it was easy to become paranoid since, as Kenzie put it, the rapper and his entourage didn’t seem to care. Kenzie had just been caught up as a casualty of street politics.
He almost dies from losing so much blood. The hospital took indigent care of him because he has no insurance, providing him no more pain relief than Tylenol. Days later, he called me and asked me to come to his mom’s home to help him dress his wounds.
As I go into the home, I see bullet holes above the couch in the living room. He had ran into the house and pushed his mom to the ground, saving her life. I looked at the floor where his body had lay. A pool of stained, dried blood remained. In the kitchen, Kenzie sat slumped, depressed. He expressed that no one was there for him in his time of need. I was the only one who came.
I looked at his wounds. One on his back, the bullet grazed him. The other in his arm, a large hole so big the size of a quarter. I could see muscle tissue practically down to the bone. I had to come back and clean his wounds every day to prevent them from getting infected. The wounds were in positions where he couldn’t do it himself.
We had become good friends. I felt an air of death around him, and I felt like I needed to pull him out. He was not meant to be there.
The trauma of the shooting gave him such intense PTSD he could no longer go back to The Manor, where his mother lived, without shaking. The only place he felt safe was with me. He gave up on Based Magazine, deleted his Twitter page, which was blowing up in popularity, and hid away in my crazy mother’s house in Pacifica, playing “Man on the Moon” on repeat.
I have been reflecting on this memory since he brought it up again the last time I saw him last year because it was such an essential moment in his life. I know it had a profound effect on him. How he felt his community failed him in his time in need, how he was shot for no reason as if his life was worth nothing, and later on, as the years went by, he saw so many of his loved ones shot and killed from his community.
His pain grew. His hypertension grew as he held on to so much grief in his heart. As someone used to eating fast food he did not take good care of himself physically no matter how hard I tried to change his habits. He did not care about his physical health, he was struggling so much with his mental health. It’s a vicious cycle in which at times created so much rage inside him. He started to tap into that energy and direct it into activism years later after a bad encounter with a police officer.
Fight Like a Black Panther
One night after work, Kenzie came home shaken to his core. He sat in disbelief, eyes staring off wide into the distance as he told me a story of him leaving work as a police officer sped his vehicle in front of him, jumped out of the car, and immediately pulled a gun out, demanding Kenzie hand over the work bag. Kenzie said he froze, dropped the bag, put his hands up, and told the officer he had done nothing wrong. He was leaving work, and his manager was right behind him. The officer refused to listen and continued to demand he hand over his bag, claiming he fit the description of someone who stole a similar construction bag.
The officer started to appear as if he was going to shoot. Kenzie’s manager ran out, telling the officer Kenzie did work there and was just leaving work. That was not persuading the officer who continued demanding Kenzie give him his bag. What may have saved Kenzie was a second Black police officer driving up, assessing the situation, and realizing what was happening. This officer pulls the first police officer back and de-escalates the situation.
At the time, I couldn’t comprehend. I disassociated. What can I say or do to change what had happened, to make him feel better? I didn’t know. I was stumped. My trauma responses had me pull away and observe rather than comfort. Maybe in part because he was not great at comforting me when I needed it, and I resented him for it. Maybe partly because I was not raised in a comforting home, so I didn’t know how.
After a night of him having a meltdown, I started to understand the gravity of the situation. I had to put myself in his place and imagine what it would be like to have someone with power hold a gun in my face, yelling at me, telling me I was a criminal while on the verge of pulling the trigger.
He already felt the painful sting of hot bullets piercing his body. He knew what it was like to lay on the cold ground as blood poured out of his body. He was reliving these moments. Not only that, he was processing how he was experiencing yet another racist moment in his life, where someone had passed judgment on him for being a dark-skinned Black man, and their judgment deemed him not worthy to live.
I’m unsure how long his depression over this event happened, but it was for a while. He started reading Malcolm X and watching the 1995 film Panther.
“We need something like the Black Panthers now. Why can’t we organize like this today?” He kept asking. He wanted so badly to do something like the Black Panthers. It was 2014 going on 2015. Black Lives Matter protests were growing as footage of unarmed Black men and women were circulating. He didn’t want to just march, he wanted to politically organize with the same solidarity, political education, and strategic action as he saw referenced in the dramatized film.
I asked Kenzie, since he was so well connected if he could find a way to contact an original Black Panther and ask them for advice. In hindsight, that’s probably not the most original idea, but being in Oakland, I figured he’d run into some good advice.
Next thing I know, he’s excited. He’s going to continue the legacy of the Black Panther Party. All he needs to do is read certain books and memorize the ten-point platform. I didn’t have the full details of who he was talking to initially; Kenzie mentioned Elaine Brown often. Later, he was often around Saturu Ned, who would call him “Godson.” Kenzie purchased a Black Panther patch and a $30 Black letterman jack from Old Navy.
Kenzie started going to Black Lives Matter marches in his new Black Panther jacket, providing protection for anyone who needed it and being there just for the symbolic statement. He always understood the importance of symbolism. He believed this statement would provoke a more radical influence. Nothing could make him stand stronger in his beliefs than when he stood tall in that jacket.
He told me original Black Panther party members permitted him to wear those patches in public on the condition he kept a good, disciplined image: treat people with respect, do not initiate fights, avoid them, and if he had to fight, it was in self-defense only.
By the summer of 2016, he was well known for showing up in a Black Panther jacket. In preparation for the Black Panther Party 50th Anniversary events that would go on for a full weekend in the middle of October, he told me to purchase my own $30 black Old Navy jacket and two Black Panther patches and be prepared to remember the ten-point platform.
Initially, I thought he was out of his mind. No one was going to accept me being in a Black Panther jacket. But he said he didn’t care. I was the one who had been supporting him, and now he wanted me to go to protests with him. So I trusted his vision and bought myself two Black Panther patches and a black Old Navy jacket. I wore it for the first time with him at the Black Panther 50th Anniversary event. To my surprise, I was pretty well accepted, and from that point on, I obtained years’ worth of political education, wisdom, and knowledge from original Black Panthers, thanks to Kenzie.
Once Donald Trump won the presidency, those jackets got a lot of use though 2017. Kenzie went to the chaotic protest at UC Berkeley on February 2, 2017, without me because I had fallen ill. He came back that night dancing around my bedroom, telling me stories about some group of racists who tried to jump him for wearing a Black Panther jacket, but another mysterious group dressed in all black came to back him up, ready to fight. He was so giddy and eager to fight back. This was when he met Antifa and continued networking with them, building strategy plans for future rallies.
The first violent rally we attended was on March 4, 2017, at Berkeley Civic Center, where Bay Area Proud Boy leader Kyle Chapman made a name for himself as “Basedstickman.” Chapman bear maced me and Kenzie, and we both ended up in different news reports showing our eyes covered from the bear mace in our Black Panther Jackets, me with a bat tucked in my backpack.
I had no intention of starting a fight. Kenzie insisted I bring a bat in case someone attacked me, and there was plenty of reason to believe I would need the bat since Trump supporters were smashing their Trump flags against people’s heads. From that day on, Kenzie wanted Chapman to face him in a one-on-one fistfight, which Chapman would never accept.
Somehow, just the two of us had made the Proud Boys believe there was an organized number of Black Panthers in the Bay Area they had to worry about. By 2018, they started channeling communications through me, attempting to manipulate approval for safe, hassle-free access to the rally. Kenzie always said, “Only if Kyle Chapman agrees to an organized public one-on-one fight.”
Kenzie and I worked together throughout 2017, especially on spreading the word about Proud Boys and their plans for organized protests in Berkeley and San Francisco. I did research and gave it to Kenzie, and Kenzie worked with his vast network of activists to make strategy plans.
A journalist recently asked me what Kenzie was like. This is how I remember him. He loved going out, being around people, dancing and singing to music he loved. He also loved 80s TV shows and nostalgia. He had a child-like innocent nature about him, he never killed the child in him which was why he had such a vivid imagination and vision
Product of the Dope Era
When I think about what Dope Era Magazine represented to Kenzie, it always goes back to the day news broke that rapper The Jacka died. That man carried so much importance to Kenzie. Kenzie was well-connected, but most of those connections were not deep. Dominic “The Jacka” Newton spoke to Kenzie often, and Kenzie would always talk about their weekly conversation, which became more frequent around that year before his death. They had been speaking on a deeper level, and when Newton died, another part of Kenzie I had no idea about was unearthed. Kenzie had previously been immersed in the Islamic faith.
So when Newton was gunned down in the streets of Oakland on Feb. 2, 2015, it was another event that spiraled Kenzie into depression. He started talking about becoming Muslim and hanging around Muslim friends.
He talked about Newton constantly and told me he had conversations with the deceased rapper at night. Kenzie had known me for speaking to and hearing spirits, and now he had started to take me seriously, asking me if I saw his friend when he visited him. So I would sit with Kenzie and meditate, focus his energy, and ask him, what is your friend telling you? What does he want from you? The only reason he is still here is because something is unresolved.
Kenzie told me he needed to take his faith seriously and do more for his community. He also told me he had been telling Newton he wanted to start a magazine site again. He said they had been talking about the need for a media outlet that featured local artists without the politics of either paying for access or being signed to a record label. These issues block many artists from getting their music heard.
Shortly after, Kenzie asked me what I would do if he started a magazine with his brother Stanley Cox, aka Mistah F.A.B. He asked me to help him produce the content.
It made sense he would go this route. Cox was working on launching his new clothing brand, Dope Era, with a gimmick, selling clothing out of the back of the car like rappers used to sell their albums back in the day to get their start. Mistah F.A.B. already had notoriety, yet he also had difficulty accessing media. Nobody knew who Kenzie was. Kenzie had some well-known networks but would still be starting a media entertainment brand from scratch. He would need a big name to help lift his media company off the ground.
It was an opportunity to prove myself in the content creation field. But it was a bad deal because there were no contracts or agreements beyond what Kenzie told me. Kenzie would be the owner of Dope Era Magazine with creative control. I would create the content on the condition that women were featured and they didn’t have to sell sex to get put on. Cox would utilize us when we had enough buzz to make it worth his time.
The best way I could describe the experience—saying it was like the movie New Jack City—would be an extreme dramatization. No crime or drugs were involved, but some hints and notes sounded familiar.
I never saw Kenzie speak to Cox in the years before Dope Era Magazine when we had been together. He rarely talked about his relationship with him, and when he did, he could only seem to express frustration. Maybe it was because Cox referred to him as little brother even though Kenzie was more than a year older. Or maybe it was Cox’s attitude when we first came around—he couldn’t be bothered to look up from his phone when Kenzie talked to him about the magazine. We had to prove ourselves, and initially, there was no sense of direction. There was never any funding.
When we started to gain traction, and there was a lot of engagement, we were embraced as part of the Dope Era family. Cox embraced our style and even our politics while celebrating our achievements. He was excited to interview Too Short for us and invited us to the studio and on stage to countless shows.
I understood that Kenzie saw Dope Era Magazine as a gateway to do what he loved while connecting with his community. He incorporated his love of Bay Area music, its history, and the overall entertainment industry with the politics he was starting to develop. He had never been politically motivated until he wore the Black Panther jacket.
His Instagram became popular with engagement when he started asking people to participate in naming the top ten Bay Area artists. They also loved when he posted pictures of himself standing from behind, showing the Black Panther jacket with his fist raised. I’d write political articles explaining who the Proud Boys were, the rallies we had attended in Berkeley, and break down gentrification in Oakland.
Kenzie found female artists to feature, and he even found a good female writer, Joy Elan, who later wrote the article that helped explain the BBQ Becky story so we could make it go viral.
This was also when we started organizing to feed and clothe the homeless. Kenzie had always wanted to do this, but for the first time, I insisted we should go to the encampments and asked what they needed first. We went to several encampments and learned they already received a lot of food. They preferred blankets and lamps so they could see at night. So we purchased a bunch of blankets and lamps, giving them out to the same encampments we had visited.
Kenzie had become a bridge of consciousness, connecting the nostalgia of 80s baby millennials raised in a Dope Era with understanding how the Dope Era resulted from the civil rights movement, Black Panthers’ organizing, and COINTELPRO.
Everything hit right on time. Donald Trump announced he was running for president. Black Lives Matter protests escalated. The Ghost Ship fire changed Oakland forever (one of the people who died was a friend of ours, Alex Ghassan, who lived in the same apartment complex as us and was going to collaborate on Dope Era Magazine). First Fridays stopped allowing cars to park at the gas station where everyone usually hung out. Trump became president. It seemed like the world was falling into chaos. Many people started looking to us for answers, and we started to give them those answers. We also gave space to many artists no media outlet would have acknowledged.
Because I invested the money in the magazine while producing most of the content, maintaining the website, creating the magazines, paying for the printing, and doing the back end of tracking sales, invoicing, and taxes, Kenzie made me a co-owner. He downright encouraged it.
To protect the magazine, I filed for a business license with the city of Oakland, and I filed for Dope Era Magazine LLC, making sure both of our names were on the paperwork.
The website I managed also started to gain good SEO traffic.
Kenzie networked, set up the interviews, made impressive sales, was my bodyguard, and created a very engaged, exciting community on Instagram. If he had not sent me down this path, I don’t know if I ever would have become a journalist. It was an incredible life lesson.
We worked together on the magazine from October 2015 to January 2019, when we separated and I filed for divorce. Kenzie took over from there. We were not staff, employed, or paid. But when you are behind the scenes, you are just the alchemists making the magic happen. What the public perceives is never thought about the truth behind that curtain, and it does not matter in the moment of it all.
Conclusion
Kenzie Mouton had an eidetic memory for people’s faces, names, and details of who they were; He only needed to meet someone once to recognize them. He knew how to read people enough to gauge what he believed to know what they wanted to hear. Often, it worked, getting him access to just about anywhere he wanted. That was how he got backstage to so many shows; he always knew someone, and if he didn’t, he would find a way to make a new friend.
He needed socialization like a flower needs water and solitude like a flower needs sun.
He was a rose growing out of concrete.
The impact of his death in Oakland was intensely felt. It’s incredible how one person could hold so many relationships in the palms of his hands. Someone described him as an alchemist. He was a visionary. He could see people for what they were capable of and think of how they could be useful in his visions. He could be considered a downright opportunist. But effectively, all activists are.
What makes an effective activist can not be measured in social media followers and speeches. It is measured in how many people’s lives one touches in the community, making it healthier than they left it. Effective activists are not always seen or heard doing their acts of humanity.
It might be little things like giving a poor elderly neighbor a ride to the store or giving your gloves to a homeless person out in the cold. It might be patiently reading to a child whose parents tirelessly work or providing haircuts to unemployed people looking for work.
Kenzie became a community pillar, taking the time to look at his neighbor, shake their hand, and tell them, “I care for you. I believe in you.”
Did the community need him, or was it he who needed his community?
He showed everyone what he thought the community should be and how he wanted to be treated. I am sure he hoped that all he was doing would not only set him free from his depression and pain but also set an example for others to follow.
Kenzie did indeed shine a light and unify. Kenzie the unifier.
May you finally rest in peace.
In death, there is rebirth.
May our community rejoice in all the seeds you planted and be reborn.
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