Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Wesley Lowery visited Central Michigan this week to talk about reporting on police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Lowery was one of the journalists on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man.
Ben Thorp spoke with Lowery about his reporting and his book, “They Can’t Kill Us All”.
Ben: You have a line in the book where you say with the shooting something felt different, it felt like something was different in terms of what eventually lead to a lot of national attention. Do you think it was in part this reporterly involvement?
Lowery: I do think that the media played a role both in terms of one being sucked into the story and then amplifying the story. But I also think that from the very beginning it was very clear that the anger and frustration in the streets felt very different. There was something about this moment about this frustration.
You have to remember we live in a very different political moment now but in 2014 Barack Obama had been reelected. He was in his second term. But a lot of those voters didn’t tangibly feel like their lives had gotten better, that their lives had gotten safer. People were saying look I’ve got a black president and I voted for him twice but black kids are still getting shot in the streets. There was a real frustration.
I think I write in the book at one point that people misunderstand, I think, protests and demonstrations sometimes. Because the response is why don’t these folks go vote? In a lot of cases if you are taking to the streets it’s because it feels like the traditional channels haven’t worked. You want something to stop, you want something to change, and you don’t have time for people to tally the ballots or the next election. You’re going to go stand in the street and say you need to change this right now. There was an urgency in those moments that was tangible from the moment you stepped off the plane in St. Louis.
You can listen to the full interview here: