They Can't Kill Us All

Wesley Lowery, the Washington Post reporter sent to Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer killed Michael Brown in August 2014 — and himself arrested while covering the protests that followed — built this book from more than a year of on-the-ground reporting and hundreds of interviews. Published by Little, Brown and Company on November 15, 2016, it moves from Ferguson to Cleveland, where twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed; to Charleston, where nine Black churchgoers were murdered at Mother Emanuel AME and where Walter Scott was shot by an officer; to Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray; and back to Ferguson. Lowery profiles the young activists who built the Black Lives Matter movement, the families of the dead, and the police and officials on the other side, while also examining his own profession — how news organizations covered, distorted, or arrived late to the story — and his own position as a young Black journalist reporting on Black death. Lowery was part of the Post team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its database of fatal police shootings, and the book stands as an early history of the movement and a record of the Obama era's unfulfilled promises on policing and racial justice.

Author: Wesley Lowery · Original publisher: Little, Brown and Company (New York), 2016