Please welcome Wesley Lowery.
(cheering and applause)
-What's going on, buddy? -Good.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
First things first, uh, congratulations
on winning the Pulitzer Prize.
-Well, thank you. -That's a, that's an amazing
-Thank you a lot. -honor for you.
-I appreciate it. -(cheering and applause)
And, um, and deserved, as well.
You and your team put together
a really comprehensive database of police shootings.
What surprises me
is that one didn't exist before that.
How is that possible?
It's remarkable, right?
When we started covering these stories,
I started covering them with Ferguson, Missouri.
And you would have the police unions,
the police, they would say, this never happens.
Most officers never fire their guns, these are rare.
Everyone who gets killed deserves it.
The civil rights activists, they would say,
No. Black men are getting gunned down, executed every day.
And so, finally, we were like, wait a second.
-You know, there's a fact here somewhere. -Yeah.
One of them is true, one is not.
How can we get at that?
At the time, there were a few citizen journalism outfits
that were trying to do this, but the federal government
doesn't keep this data.
And so we started piecing it together, day by day,
literally, via Google searches.
My colleagues, Julie Tate and Jennifer Jenkins,
kind of pieced this together to try to figure out
how many people were getting killed,
and-and under what circumstances.
That's a, that's a-- it's a Herculean task to take on.
And, I mean, you were taking it on at a time
when, in America, you could feel tensions rising.
People saying over and over again,
and obviously, due to the rise of cell phone videos,
you know, people were like, can you not see
what is happening to us?
What's fascinating is that, I still get e-mails,
um, there'll be a shooting tomorrow, most likely.
You know, there are three, three people are shot and killed
by the police every single day in the United States of America.
Right? Um, not a, not all of those go viral.
-Most of them don't. -Yeah.
But every time we have a new case that goes viral,
that everyone's talking about, a hashtag that trends,
I'll get new e-mails and new calls.
Some of them from the same people
who have been e-mailing me and calling me every day,
and saying lots of nice-- not nice things.
But they will... they'll call me, and sometimes they'll say,
"Wait, but all the other ones, those people deserved it.
"But this guy, this is crazy. Can you believe
-they-they shot and killed this person?" -Yeah.
The... We have this thing. You know, this has been happening
in black and brown communities for the...
all of American history, right?
Black and brown families have always known, um,
that an interaction with the police could go sideways.
But we, as a nation, essentially, have refused
to believe black and brown people
when they tell us these things.
And so what cell phone cameras have done is,
in many ways, they have exposed our unwillingness
to believe black people when they say,
"Hey, sometimes the cops aren't so nice to us.
"Sometimes they kill us, and we...
and we shouldn't be killed." And we see video after video,
story after story, where...
You-you have ones where they're a gray area.
Should this person have been shot? Should they have not?
Others where the guy's clearly getting shot in the back, right?
And before cell phone camera videos, no one believed
those things ever happened. "Every dead black guy
must deserve it," they would say.
What's interesting about this book though is
you've taken a slightly different approach
to strict journalism,
-Mm-hmm. -and that is you have involved yourself,
which has really personalized the stories,
not just of the victims but of you being in this world.
Because when you went out to Ferguson,
I don't think even you anticipated,
from what I read in the book,
how big this movement would become.
-I mean, at one point, you were arrested -Yeah.
for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course. I was one of dozens of reporters
who at some point got arrested in Ferguson.
It was fascinating, 'cause when I first went to Ferguson,
-I was a political reporter. -Yeah.
I covered Congress, and I thought
that I'd be dropping in for a day,
I'd write a cute little story or something.
Maybe I'd write something for the weekend.
-And I thought I'd be home by that weekend... -Mm-hmm.
...drinking with my buddies where,
you know, where we always go out.
And instead, um, I landed, and I could immediately sense...
Like you could feel it in the air
that this is something bigger, that that is...
This anger has really boiled over in a way
that it had not previously.
And we watch as we go from city to city,
as new activists spring up who get involved,
new shootings occur, and you just have this feeling,
um, throughout these last two years
that this is something bigger, uh, than just one story,
than just an isolated incident, than just...
than just the story of Michael Brown
or Eric Garner or Sandra Bland.
That, rather, this is part of a...
of movement that is caramelizing.
Something fascinating that you wrote here that I'm...
I connected with. Yeah, I'll read the passage.
You said, "There's no right way to approach these interviews.
"In moment, you are literally walking up
"to a heartbroken human,
"someone struggling to avoid becoming completely engulfed
"by a wave of pain and confusion,
"and asking them to find words
"to express those feelings and thoughts.
"And the 24-hour news cycle doesn't help,
"because it so often prompts reporters to ask either clichéd,
"leading, sound-bite, bait or process questions
"to which the response
of the dead man or family's woman adds little."
Which is a really strong indictment,
because what you're saying is, essentially,
because the cycle is based on entertainment,
24-hours news needs something that is catchy and grabby.
You can't ask a person how they feel.
You need it to fit in one sentence.
Of
at the basis of the foundation of this nation, right?
Race in America, race injustice. And we're walking up to you
after your son has just been killed, and we're saying,
"So, how do you feel?
So, do you think you're gonna get justice?"
-Yeah. -Um, and then we're cutting you off
after 15 seconds to put you on the evening news, right?
Um, we're going to a protest where you've been marching
for five hours, you've been crying,
you've carried a sign, maybe you've flown into town,
um, to participate this... in this,
and we're giving you half a sentence in the newspaper.
"So, why are you out here tonight?"
That's not a way to have a conversation about this,
to deal with the nuances, to deal with the complexities.
I think one of the things I tried to do in this book was
tell the stories of the activists who I've met
-as I've gone city to city. -You did a great job of that.
'Cause I believe that if you could understand
one
not as a caricature, not as, oh, that crazy radical
from the TV that night, but as a three-dimensional human being,
their motivations, their fears, why they're in those streets--
if you could understand
then perhaps you can understand the thousand people
and the hundred thousand people
that make up this type of movement.
And so that's kind of what I seek to do, is how do we seize
the humanity of the people behind these headlines.
Because whether you agree with the protest movement or not,
these are real human beings in the street in pain,
and if you can't empathize with that,
there's no... there's nowhere in our conver...
nowhere for our conversation to go.
You've really captured it, and, uh,
one reason I would recommend everyone should read this book
is because it's not just statistics,
it's not just the information, but it's the connective tissue
that shows the human story behind it. I really enjoyed it.
-Thank you so much for being on the show. -Thanks, Trevor.