Philadelphia’s rising Democratic star on another school shooting: ‘I can’t become resigned to it’

Malcolm Kenyatta talks to the Guardian about why the deadly incident at Roxborough high school hit him like a gut punch'

A day after a shooting killed a 14-year-old boy and wounded four other children following a football scrimmage at Philadelphia's Roxborough high school, Malcolm Kenyatta visited his alma mater to talk to students and staffers for the first time in more than a year.

It had been well over a decade since Kenyatta, a 32-year-old Black state legislator in Pennsylvania representing north Philadelphia, roamed those same halls as an ambitious student-body president. One of Pennsylvania's youngest legislators and its first openly gay lawmaker of color, since he was elected in 2018, Kenyatta has advocated for reducing gun violence in a state where Republicans have long dominated the legislature despite having a Democratic governor.