They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement

197 Pages·2016·1.77 MB·English

by  Wesley Lowery

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
THE STORY
Chapter One
FERGUSON: A CITY HOLDS ITS BREATH
Chapter Two
CLEVELAND: COMING HOME
Chapter Three
NORTH CHARLESTON: CAUGHT ON CAMERA
Chapter Four
BALTIMORE: LIFE PRE-INDICTMENT
Chapter Five
CHARLESTON: BLACK DEATH IS BLACK DEATH
Chapter Six
FERGUSON, AGAIN: A YEAR LATER, THE PROTESTS
CONTINUE
Afterword
THREE DAYS IN JULY
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Newsletters
Copyright
For Jance, Ty, and Feeney, from a boy they helped grow into a man
INTRODUCTION
The Story
O
kay, let’s take him.”
Within seconds two officers grabbed me, each seizing an arm, and shoved me
against the soda dispenser that rested along the front wall of the McDonald’s
where I had been eating and working. As I released my clenched hands, my cell
phone and notebook fell to the tiled floor. Then came the sharp sting of the
plastic zip tie as it was sealed around my hands, pinching tight at the corners of
my wrists. I’d never been arrested before, and this wasn’t quite how I’d
imagined it would go down.
Two days earlier I’d been sent to Ferguson, Missouri, to cover the aftermath
of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black eighteen-year-old.
The fatal gunshots, fired by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, were followed
by bursts of anger, in the form of both protests and riots. Hundreds, and then
thousands, of local residents had flooded the streets.
They demanded answers. They demanded justice.
In the first forty-eight hours on the ground I filled a notebook: the soft words
uttered through thick tears by Lezley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, as she stood
for the family’s first press conference since “Mike Mike’s” death; scenes of
destruction, including the burned-down QuikTrip gas station and the rows of
storefronts that now had thin wooden slabs nailed atop smashed-out windows;
scribbles I’d managed while tucked in the back corner of the overflowing
sanctuary of Greater St. Mark’s as the Reverend Al Sharpton led an impassioned
call and response: “No justice, no peace!”; and the green and brown stains along
the corner of my notebook from the moment I was mercifully tackled to the
ground, my first night in Ferguson, by a homeowner I was interviewing—a tear
gas canister had landed next to us while we spoke on his lawn.
There are few things as exhilarating as parachuting into an unknown place
with a bag full of pens and notebooks in pursuit of “the story.” And when the
phone calls, and coffee meetings, and frantic scribbling are through, piecing it all
together.
But Ferguson was different because during the early days it was deeply
unclear what, exactly, “the story” was. Whatever it was, I now—my arms tugged
back behind my back—had become a part of it. I wasn’t happy about it.
More than 150 people were taken into custody by the Ferguson and St. Louis
County police departments in the week and a half that followed Mike Brown’s
death on August 9, 2014—the vast majority for “failure to disperse” charges that
came as part of acts of peaceful protest. I was the first journalist to end up in
cuffs while covering the unrest.
That claim soon became a bit of a technicality, not unlike the twin sibling
who declares him-or herself “older.” By the time I had been led out of the
restaurant and into the bright sunlight still shining down on St. Louis early that
evening, another reporter, the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly, whom I had met
for the first time earlier that day, was also being led out of the restaurant,
shouting that the officers had just slammed his head into the door on the way
out.
For the Ferguson press corps—which would eventually swell from dozens of
daily reporters for local St. Louis outlets and regional reporters for national
shops into hundreds of journalists, including ones from dozens of foreign
countries—the McDonald’s on West Florissant Avenue became the newsroom.
Not that we all had much choice in the matter; the modest-sized dining room
with a single television on the wall and movie rental box in the back corner was
the only spot within walking distance of the street where Mike Brown had been
killed that had all three of the essentials required by a reporter on the road:
bathrooms, Wi-Fi, and electrical outlets.
Because the protests were largely, in those first days, organic and not called
by any specific group or set of activists, they were also unpredictable. Some of
the demonstrators came to demand an immediate indictment of the officer.
Others wanted officials to explain what had happened that day, to tell them who
this officer was and why this young man was dead. Scores more stood on
sidewalks and street corners unable to articulate their exact demands—they just
knew they wanted justice. Covering Ferguson directly after the killing of Mike
Brown involved hours on the streets, with clusters of reporters staked out from
the early afternoon into the early hours of the morning. At any point a resident or
a group of them could begin a heated argument with the police or a reporter. A
demonstration that had for hours consisted of a group of local women standing
and chanting on a street corner would suddenly evolve into a chain of bodies
blocking traffic, or an impromptu march to the other side of town.
And as the summer sun gave way to night, the prospect of violence—both the
bricks and bottles of a would-be rioter and the batons and rubber bullets of local
police officers—increased exponentially. As long as the protesters and the police
remained on the streets, reporters had to as well.
Not since the Boston Marathon bombings a year and a half earlier had I
covered a story for which there was such intense, immediate appetite. Earlier on
the day I was arrested, I tweeted digital video and photo updates from the spot
where Brown had been shot and killed, from the burned-out shell of the
QuikTrip gas station torched in the first night of rioting, of the peaceful crowds
of church ladies who gathered that afternoon on West Florissant—a major
thoroughfare not far from where the shooting occurred that played host to most
of the demonstrations—as well as the heavily armored police vehicles that
responded to monitor them.
For years, updates like these would have been phoned into the newsroom,
with a reporter describing the unfolding situation sentence by sentence as a
rewrite guy molded the news into already existing articles. Now they could be
published instantaneously.
But an iPhone battery only lasts for so long, so with the deadline for the story
I was writing for tomorrow’s newspaper looming, I left the protest and made the
three-block trek to the McDonald’s, bought a Big Mac and fries, from across the
room greeted Ryan, and holed up in the corner of the dining room to let my
phone charge.
It wasn’t long later when the riot-gear-clad officers entered, suggesting we all
leave because, with protests still simmering outside, things could get dangerous
once the sun went down. Then, when it became clear that we were happy to wait
and see how things developed outside, they changed their tune. Now the officers
were demanding we leave.
I was annoyed, but covering protests and demonstrations often means taking
direction that doesn’t make sense from police officers who aren’t quite
concerned with your convenience, much less your ability to do your job. I kept
my phone, which was recording video, propped up in one hand as I shoved my
notebooks into the same fading green backpack I’ve carried since my senior year
of high school. As I packed, I attempted to ask the officer now standing in my
face if I’d be able to move my rental car from the parking lot. He didn’t, he said,
have time for questions. Once I’d finished packing, I walked past him, making
my way toward the door.
As I walked to the exit, the officers decided that all this had taken too long. It
had been about one minute since they had first told me to leave when I heard one
officer say, “Okay, let’s take him,” and then felt their arms grab me from behind.
Now I stood on my tiptoes, insisting to Officer Friendly that I was, in fact,
complying with his demands even though he was insisting that I wasn’t.
“My hands are behind my back!” I shouted to the uniformed men now
pressing their weight into me as they ran their gloved hands down my front and
back pants pockets, which contained an abundance of pens and exactly zero
weapons.
“No, you’re resisting, stop resisting,” an officer barked back at me, before I
was led out of the building.
On August 9, 2014, the Saturday when six bullets fired by Darren Wilson
entered Mike Brown’s body, I was sailing in Boston Harbor with two of my
former Boston Globe colleagues. Seated snugly in a small sailboat settled out
deep in the water, we stared up at the city skyline drifting farther from us and the
planes coming into Logan Airport descending low over our heads.
This was one of what had been half a dozen return trips to Boston in the
seven months since I’d left a job as a metro reporter for the Globe, my first full-
time reporting gig after college, to join the staff of the Washington Post. For the
year or so that I had worked in Boston, I wrote breaking news for the metro desk
and chipped in on the political desk, covering crime scenes and campaigns,
police tape and ticker tape.
One day, I’d be in the backseat of an SUV listening to a mayoral candidate
coax money out of the pockets of donors as underpaid and overcaffeinated staff
members tried to run damage control. (“Everything said in the car can be off the
record, right?”) The next day I’d get an early-morning call from Mike Bello, the
Globe’s deputy city editor and a hard-charging, no-nonsense assignment editor
who was among the favorites of my many bosses.
“Mornin’, pal,” he’d say in low, growling yet friendly Bostonian. “Did I
wake you?”
“Of course not. I was just getting ready to come into the office,” I’d always
reply.