Wesley Lowery

A front-line account of the police killings and the Black, young activism that sparked the birth of the racial justice movement Black Lives Matter. Lowery, a Washington Post reporter, provides the narration of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, and the weeks of protests and rioting that broke out in the aftermath. He also challenges readers with the question of why so little progress has been made on the racial front during Barack Obama’s presidency, despite its promise and potential for such a transformative advancement.

Wesley Lowery became renowned, together with other of his colleagues at The Washington Post, for establishing an informal database that collects information about the shooting of Black people by police officers in 2014 and 2015, in the absence of a comprehensive federal government database.

Lowery, Wesley, 'The Birth of a Movement', Guardian (17 Jan 2017), pp. 23-25.

This Guardian 'Long Read' article is an adapted extract from Lowery's book They Can't Kill Us All, London, Penguin, 2017. The article is available (free) at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/17/black-lives-matter-birth-of-a-movement