"They Can't Kill Us All" Feat. Wesley Lowery

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Editor’s Note: "Welcome to Bri Books podcast! I knew that reading Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery’s book “They Can’t Kill Us All:Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement” would knock me off my feet, but I wasn’t expecting that on the day this episode was recorded, (8/11/17), exactly two days to the date of Michael Brown’s murder in my hometown (Ferguson, MO), that same evening hundreds of grown men and women in Charlottesville, VA would march on a college campus in the name of white supremacy and racism. That reality is hanging over this episode, and I hope the book we discuss, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” encourages and challenges you. I can’t recommend the book enough. Let’s get into it.

 Resources: Ju-Hyun Park’s essay on thefader.com, “Love Needs Fury to Defeat Hate”

DeRay McKesson’s podcast “Pod Save The People,” “BONUS: CHARLOTTESVILLE”  

@wesleylowery – Twitter, Washington Post

 SHOW NOTES

 

 As I prepared to read Wesley’s book, I first read “Wars of Reconstruction” by Douglas Egerton, to remind myself of the systemic obstruction of police and black self-advocacy that immediately followed Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s assassination. The book talks about how the time post-Emancipation Proclamation was the most violent yet politically progressive time in America’s history for freed blacks, as literacy rates and involvement in political and social office grew exponentially. The inclusion of African-Americans in the Union Army definitively helped the Union clinch the war. I wanted to read “The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era,” by Douglas Egerton.

1:03 – Wesley’s first book is a reporter’s notebook of sorts, chronicling his work as a reporter dispatching from Ferguson, MO at the height of the shooting death of Mike Brown. From there he found himself flying to Cleveland, Baltimore, and too many cities to cover too many people who had become hashtags in the light of police violence and the death of black men and women at the hands of police 1:30 I knew Wesley’s book would knock me off my feet but I wasn’t expecting that on the day we recorded, 3 years and 2 days to the date of Brown’s death, hundreds of men and women would march on a college campus in the name of white supremacy and racism. That very real pall is hanging over this episode, and I hope our conversation encourages and challenges you. 2:00 – Resources: Ju-Hyun Park’s essay on thefader.com, “Love Needs Fury to Defeat Hate” DeRay McKesson’s podcast “Pod Save The People,” “BONUS: CHARLOTTESVILLE” 3:15 – This episode has special place in my heart because Ferguson is my family hometown. My mom grew up there at a time when her own mom was the first black person to live on the block. By the time my grandmother died when I was 18, there were no white people left in the entire neighborhood. 3:55 – Wesley thanks for being on this episode. Watching my hometown become a hashtag was interesting for me. Tell us about where you grew up. 4:10 – Thank you! It’s important to me, as someone who writes about places I’m not from to really listen and learn the context of those places. I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in STL and Ferguson before having to write about it in a longform way. I had dozens, then hundreds, of conversations that hopefully help me portray things that are accurate and right true to the people who lived the lives I’m depicting. 4:45 – Wesley spent his childhood in 2 places, first in a Jersey suburb until his early teens. At 13, moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb on the East Side of Cleveland. It used to be held to be true that the East side is where blacks lived, west is where ethnic whites, Slavic, Italian, city workers, cops and firefighters on the west side. East side was where black families lived. “Shaker Heights was one of 2-3 cities that began instituting public school bussing before the supreme court order. It’s a hyper-progressive community, has always ben extremely diverse. I grew up in a place where we were constantly having conversations about race, racism, prejudice, stereotyping. I was in programmers as a high schooler focused on mentorship and achievement. And having tough conversations. It prepared me for the work now.” 6:35 – I love that your book really humanizes protestors. It adds color and dimension to their lives outside of moment they became known as protestors with capital P. what did you learn from the act of protesting, when you were reporting in Ferguson, that you brought back to newsroom in terms of how you tell stories. 7:02 – “One of the things I still think of a lot, that is how those of us in the media and who haven’t protested, want to subscribe and ascribe solutions/ motives to protests. Most of us who work in media have never attended a protest we were participating in. many of our decision makers like in DC have never themselves felt like this is how they’re going to petition the government. 7:45 – “The reality was in Ferguson, Baltimore, charlotte, Milwaukee, this was an organic overflow of pain and anger. no one was calling the residents of Ferguson saying come outside and be upset. They were looking out their window and seeing the body of a teenager and saying this is where I draw the line I deserve better for my government. 8:07 – “We hear of people very often who are dismissive of protest, is why don’t they why don’t they go vote? Write a letter to congressman? That type of mindset fundamentally misunderstands protests. People who take to the street do so because their government has otherwise not listened to them when they’ve petitioned them in other spaces. Protest is in many ways, a means of voicing and demanding an audience for otherwise unheard needs. I think that’s not something that those of us who often have our needs heard that people can appreciated. 8:50 – “There’s this deep skepticism sometimes, and we always hear these conversations, people who say, “If you want to win me over, why did you block the highway?” It fundamentally.it fundamentally misunderstands point of disobedient protests, and why they’re taking to the streets. 5:29 – “People aren’t taking to street to convince you in your house they’re right about something. They don’t care about you. That’s not the point of this. They’re directly communicating what the powers that oversee their government, etc., and they’re saying, you value order. 9:40 – Chris Hayes’ book “A Colony in the Nation” talks about this idea of order. That we, in the majority, what we care about is traffic lights that at work, busses that run on time, no traffic jam, my street being clean. In many ways, we prioritize the order of our spaces or the rights and liberties of other people. That we care about things seems peaceful and calm, and the way you made my street orderly is by stopping and frisking every black person on my street or harassing them for their music, I don’t care about that because t’s orderly. It’s my comfort.” 10:30 – With conversations about highway, its people saying, why would you disrupt my order with your silly concerns about your lives? You see drastic disconnect in priority. And like I said earlier, there’s a standard misunderstanding of the point of these protests. 11:00 – In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. says this isn’t about negotiating or gaining a seat at a table. It’s not about winning allies or friends. It’s about making the conditions of this political problem so untenable that it makes it impossible for the powers to be to do nothing. Not only are we upset with you, but these people who have been inconvenienced are calling your office. It’s calling you to do “something,” which means you’re gonna call and say, “what is it you really want?” 11:45 – “For those of us who value order, we can often underestimate the power of political disorder as a tactic. 11:55 – Part of the currency that helped Wesley report so deeply is that you could’ve even classmates of protestors or the young brother of any of the young boys who got killed. How did you take it from reporter’s notebook to workable manuscript? 12:35 – “Procedurally it started by me sitting back and looking at the first anniversary, and tracing back my previous year. Where’d I gone? Ferguson, Cleveland, New York City, Charleston, Baltimore. How did pit stops tell the story of what was going on and tell the story of what became a protest movement? 13:15 – “I sat down and would begin with stories I’d written from city, and grabbing.in the emails, grabbed, all the unedited feeds id sent in from protests, people I’d interviewed previously. 13:40 – “In one case I’d interviewed Jonathan Butler in Ferguson. I literally just man-on-the-street interviewed him. The next year, he launches hunger strike and university of Missouri. Before he was hunger strike student. I’d take all the material from take period of time, copy and paste the articles and drafts back in, and say, how do I convert this whole thing into first person? How’d I get there? I’d write it long, whittle it down, and convert it into a guide into how I did some of the reporting. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t always the most comfortable with writing in first person I’m not someone who came up writing in 1st I was always doing 3rd persons. I was hesitant to insert myself in the story that way. 15:00 - “In a way, especially when people don’t understand he media and literacy is low…there’s real value in showing people how we do what we do—woke up. Story happening. People don’t assume that reporting process for everything they rad anymore…I think there’s real value in walking people through these processes of how we get these stories how we see them, how we choose the story. 16:00 - “If I tell you how I got here, why seeing, what I was seeing, could help you understand the subjective decisions that were made. That’s part of what I was trying to do. 16:20 – You succeed at that. Your book knows you’re in the story but not the subject of the story. In the first chapter, you say there’s a moment when I became a thing. But you moved past it. Was that a strategic decision? 17:00 – “That was a purposeful decision. 2 days after arriving in Ferguson, my friend Ryan and I were arrested covering the protest. We were first of dozens of journos who would find themselves arrested. Eric holder commented on it, we became these political footballs… 17:35 – I knew to write this book there would be people saying you got this because fame. No, no, I helped cover Boston Marathon bombings for Boston Globe before this. Got a lot of blowback from people ho didn’t know me or work. By writing this, I wanted to dispense of my moment of fame at the very beginning. I wanted to say yes, I’m that guy, let’s deal and never talk again. This book isn’t’ about me. Its’ about all these young people and these families who lost loved ones and had been so gracious as to allow me to tell me their stories. 19:00 – “I really wanted to, through this book, tell the story of the young people who stepped into the streets. From someone whose covered this protest movement from close to the beginning, I find myself frustrated. I spent time talking to activist’s demonstrators, I found almost all of them to be thoughtful, intelligent, deliberate. But I’d see this caricature of many of them in the media by and large especially in conservative media….and I’d hear this from my colleagues, editors, and also my readers. And I felt frustrated. I knew all these people personally at this point, and for whatever reason, it wasn’t being communicated to a broader audience. 20:12 – “I’d written dozens, maybe over a hundred articles about Black Lives Matter, about protests, police shootings. And I’d still get emails from subscribers saying I don’t get this. 20:29 – “For me, I think that to be a reporter writer is to be a translator. I’m dispatched to a place. I’m witnessing something that’s happening. It’s my job to translate what has happened to a bunch of people who can’t be there, to explain it to them. I’m writing articles about a protest, and you send me an email saying I don’t understand what this protest is about, it means that at some point in my translation I have failed you. 20:52 - “So, the goal of writing a book was to say, what if I can do it in a longer form? What if I can write everything I know about this down? And if I do that someone who is genuinely interested can sit down and read all the stuff I know, see all these different people and places, and then maybe if they don’t agree with the politics of the protestors, maybe they can understand. That’s the goal of what I was doing.” 21:20 – I sometimes wonder, if I’d be going home…I always wonder, how would I have served that community? Would I be protestor? Organizer? Religious sense? 21:46 – For you, in Cleveland, do you ever wonder how, if you’d been home and been a civilian, how you would’ve voiced your frustration? 22:00 – “I think that’s something a lot of us think about. Is, if this happened where I live what would I do? If I’d been there what would’ve I do? There’s this feeling, every time we hear of new case, see a new video, there’s a moment where everyone simultaneously has a guttural need to do something. You watch Philando Castile video, the Eric Garner video, you say that’s wrong I want to do something about it. You hear it all the time. 22:40 – “I thought a lot about how if I’d made one or two different decisions in life, how I very likely would’ve been on a different side of these protests. I think of how if I’d gone student government instead of student newspaper. Or if I’d stuck with political science major instead of barely getting my journalism degree. I wonder if those would’ve changed any of these moments. And I don’t know the answer to that. 23:10 – “I’ve always been an inside the room at the table type. But I do wonder, had I stayed out of journalism, had I not been a writer and reporter tethered to this idea of fairness and distance (not personally involved,) if the events of the past few years would’ve been enough, for someone like me, who valued respectability politics who valued working through systems, would it have been enough for someone like me to step in the streets. I don’t completely know the answer to that, but I see a lot of people for whom it was enough, and I think I might’ve been in the same boat. I see peers and colleagues of mine. And for them, the crisis in front of them was enough to demand a new tactic. 24:40 – “I like to think that if I’d been in another field at another time, that would’ve been enough for me too. 24:50 – That said. What I like about the field I’m in is that in that moment of crisis, pain and trauma, when new names start trending and there’s a new hashtag, I have something I can do every single time. When I see Michael Brown, Jordan Edwards…I don’t have to sit in this moment of pain and trauma. I don’t have to sit here and wonder what I can do. I pick up the phone I start calling people. I start writing things down. And I start collecting the information that hopefully will allow other people to process what has happened. And empower them, to if they so desire, act and do something themselves. 25:33 - So, I think the role of the journalist and reporter is important. Especially at times when the federal government may not be so inclined to address the systemic issues that still exist in our CJS, I think it’s more important than ever for journalists to write down true things so in the future we can write down what was happening in the summer of 2014 2015 2016 2017. And that’s what I think of when I wake up wondering, I have something I can do.