Journalist documents ‘stream of black death’

“How do you sleep when you know that soon you’ll need to tell the story of the death of yet another black man?”

That’s the question journalist Wesley Lowery asked himself while lying restlessly in bed this past July when he learned he’d be covering the story of yet another black man killed by the police.

At that point, it had been almost two years since Lowery — part of a team of Washington Post reporters who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of police shootings — had been arrested after the police asked him to leave the Ferguson, Mo., McDonald’s where he’d been charging his phone.

“They Can’t Kill Us All” is Lowery’s account of Ferguson and its aftermath, during which he covered what he chillingly but accurately designates the “constant stream of black death” he witnessed, from the protest movement that emerged after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson through ensuing uprisings in cities including Cleveland, Baltimore and Charleston.

Lowery can get lost in the minutiae of those separate stories. He occasionally repeats himself.

For all that, I highly recommend his book, and not just because the story he tells about why black lives should matter can’t ever be heard often enough.

What makes “They Can’t Kill Us All” more than a ripped-fromthe-headlines chronicle is Lowery’s combination of solid reporting, emotional commitment to his story as a black man and a reflective turn of mind.

“One of the lessons of Ferguson was that the story was never about the specifics of the shooting,” Lowery writes, in outlining his own method as a reporter: Don’t just contact the victim’s grieving and overwhelmed family, but also the civil rights leaders and neighborhood associations, former politicians and police chiefs, defense attorneys and local police union.

Focusing on this context, Lowery moves past our collective tendency to assess the details of each shooting or what sort of person each of the victims was; such a “shortsighted framing,” he insists, places the burden of proof on those victims – itself a means of conveying that black lives don’t matter.

At 26, Lowery also has his pulse on the divide between those protestors who believe change can come from within and the growing number convinced it can’t.

“Even the historic Obama presidency could not suspend the injunction that playing by the rules wasn’t enough to keep you safe,” Lowery observes. What protection could Obama offer, he continues, “when, as James Baldwin once wrote, the world is white, and we are black?”