They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  I interviewed store owners and residents who had been left behind, who still had as many questions as answers, and who were only further embittered by the second round of violence after the nonindictment was announced. And then I decided I couldn’t stay another day. I closed my eyes as the low, deep hum of the airplane began its rumble, lulling me to sleep for what felt like the first time since I’d arrived in Ferguson.

  During the previous month, as we played the excruciating waiting game, attacks against journalists covering the story on the ground had spiked to levels that surpassed even the vitriol that Ryan Reilly and I had faced after our arrests. As they awaited word that Darren Wilson would not be charged, critics of the now-vibrant protests attempted to hack away at the sanity and credibility of the reporters telling the story.

  The protests had created a countermovement of skepticism, anger, and hate, driven by some who genuinely believed that the coverage of Ferguson was overblown and amplified by others with more sinister motivations. These legions of skeptics insisted that the entire story was a fraud, that Mike Brown had deserved his fate, and that tensions in Ferguson were completely stoked by the media—based not on historical injustice, but on real-time race-baiting. The photos and videos that we had posted from the protests had unnecessarily fanned the flames, these critics insisted. And by demanding answers of the Ferguson Police Department, by wanting to know why this young man had died, the critics declared, we were now responsible for the social unrest in the streets.

  A St. Louis blogger took a picture of me interviewing some demonstrators at a massive downtown rally and published it in a piece that suggested I was “marching with protesters.” Meanwhile, back in DC, conservative political sites had made me a routine target—suggesting that I wasn’t really black and, in what was perhaps the most infuriating moment of my experience covering Ferguson, publishing my parents’ home address and details about several of my immediate family members drawn from information found on my mother’s Facebook page. I spent Thanksgiving as what felt like the only national reporter still stuck in Ferguson; my mother spent the day being taught by horrified family members how to change her social media privacy settings.

  The young protest leaders had it, by far, the worst, finding themselves besieged by online harassment and physical threats. Local organizers like Ashley Yates and Tef Poe, young voices among the most prominent at the demonstrations and rallies during the early days in Ferguson, were followed to and from protests by police cruisers. Others, like Charles Wade, a fashion stylist and philanthropist who had helped raise money for the budding Ferguson protest groups, found their email accounts being hacked or their credit card information posted publicly by Internet trolls who wished them harm.

  “People were calling my mom’s business, flooding their voice mail with hate,” Wade told me. “There are times when it feels like too much, when you just want to escape back to being a random person on Twitter, and not a target.”

  When he told me that, I immediately understood. Feeling besieged with hostile messages, I’d withdrawn during my final stint in Ferguson. Other than a handful of other reporters, I was talking to almost no one, spending my days pacing my hotel room, working the phones as I tried to suss out new details of when the grand jury investigation would conclude. Days before the decision, I received a text message from Colin, one of my closest friends from high school, who was still living back home in Cleveland. The police had shot and killed a twelve-year-old who had been playing in a park. I don’t think I ever responded; I was too caught up with Ferguson to process a shooting in Cleveland.

  As my plane landed at Reagan National Airport, my phone began buzzing.

  The grand jury in New York City had made its decision: the officer who months earlier had employed the choke hold that killed Eric Garner would not be charged with a crime. Hundreds had already taken to the streets in just the hour and a half that I had been in the air.

  I began calling the young organizers I knew in New York, many of whom had traveled to St. Louis during the previous months, and reached out to the organizers still in Ferguson who had already begun planning demonstrations for the night. Rather than ask to be delivered home, I directed my taxi driver to head to the corner of Fifteenth and M, to what was then the location of the Washington Post’s offices.

  When I arrived, the bosses called me into an office. I could take a day or two off, they said, but then they wanted me to get back on a plane. Not to New York, but to Cleveland.

  I was running late, but I made it just in time to see the last of about two hundred protesters storm into Cleveland City Hall, their signs and T-shirts declaring BLACK LIVES MATTER and JUSTICE FOR TAMIR as they marched up to the council chambers for the body’s final meeting of the year.

  That night there was a stinging winter breeze blowing off Lake Erie and drifting through a largely empty downtown Cleveland. Typically, this section of the city would be quiet at this time of night, just after dinner on a weekday, with city employees gone from the public buildings—courthouse, administrative offices, City Hall—that line these blocks. But on this night, there was a strong, steady sound of dissent.

  “This is a movement, not a moment,” declared Lorenzo Norris, a local pastor, as he led the racially diverse if largely young group of protesters into the council chambers. The Cleveland protesters were incensed by a recent federal review that had concluded that their police officers routinely exerted excessive force during routine interactions and pulled their guns (and their triggers) inappropriately. That probe had been sparked by another shooting, the “137 bullets” shooting in November 2012, during which Cleveland police officers opened fire on a car that had led them on a chase, only to later discover that both of those killed had been unarmed. Like their protest brethren in Ferguson, the Clevelanders contended that local elected officials hadn’t done enough. “We want change,” Norris told me as I caught up with the group. “We must have change.”

  The City Hall demonstrations came a few weeks after the police shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, which my friend Colin had texted me about back in Ferguson.

  Tamir Rice was shot and killed on the afternoon of November 22, 2014, after Cleveland Division of Police Officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, responded to a call about a man with a gun outside a recreation center. The man who called the police told the dispatcher that the person was possibly a child playing with a toy, information that was never given to Loehmann and Garmback.

  The officers believed they were responding to an “active shooter.” Loehmann and Garmback approached the boy in their cruiser, pulling directly up to a park gazebo where for the last hour Tamir had been throwing snowballs and pretending to fire the toy weapon. Their cruiser slid on the snow-covered grass as Loehmann leaped out from the passenger-side door. “I kept my eyes on the suspect the entire time,” Loehmann said. “I was fixed on his waistband and hand area. I was trained to keep my eyes on his hands because ‘hands may kill.’”

  Loehmann claimed he yelled for the boy to show his hands, but that instead of complying, the boy lifted his shirt and reached into his waistband. Loehmann said that when he saw Tamir’s elbow moving upward and the weapon coming up out of his pants, he fired two shots.

  Video of the shooting, captured by a security camera installed in the parking lot just a few feet away, showed that it took less than two seconds after the officers arrived for Tamir to be shot dead. It’s unclear if Tamir even knew who had pulled up on him before he was on the ground, a bullet lodged in his chest.

  “At its core, Tamir’s death is a tale of stunning systemic police incompetence and indifference,” wrote Phillip Morris, the sole black metro columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in a column penned after it was revealed that Cleveland Police had hired Tim Loehmann, the officer who shot Rice, without checking his references or running a serious background check.

  Had the city done that, they would have uncovered job reviews from the suburban department
where Loehmann once worked that describe him as “weepy” and “distracted.” A former supervisor, in a November 2012 note, made it clear he would not recommend that Loehmann, the son of a police officer, be given a badge and a gun, going on to say that the officer could not be trusted to follow simple instructions from commanding officers.

  Months after that note was written, Loehmann entered the Cleveland police academy and in March 2014 was sworn in as a city police officer. Less than eight months later, a bullet from his department-issued weapon pierced the chest of a sixth-grade boy playing in a park.

  “The city of Cleveland killed Tamir Rice when it issued Tim Loehmann a gun,” Morris wrote.

  “The boy’s blood now flows over all of our hands.”

  Later that night, once the City Hall protest was wrapped up, I drove over to see Colin.

  Colin and I had been like brothers since meeting early in high school. In many ways we couldn’t be more different. He is confident and outgoing, well dressed and poised. When we met I was still quite dorky, a teen with wire-rim glasses who was too socially nervous to score any invites to house parties on the weekends. A basketball standout with cunning charisma, Colin was the alpha male in the group of popular young black men a year behind me. The son of one of Cleveland’s most successful businessmen, he carried with him a sense of swagger and style—which, in early high school, simply meant that his clothing fit properly.

  Some of my awkwardness could probably be attributed to the aura of racial ambiguity and confusion I carried with me to Cleveland when I moved there in eighth grade, well after most childhood cliques had been formed. My family moved to Shaker Heights, an East Side suburb that for decades was heralded as having one of the best and most diverse public school districts in the nation. My father is an oft-underemployed writer and editor, and my mother is a dental hygienist. Each expense I proposed growing up—from a twenty-dollar field trip to forty dollars for a new pair of khakis for homecoming—was a battle with my deeply frugal mother. More often than not, she’d say yes, but as I got older I tried to ask less and less, hoping that any extra cash would flow down to my younger brothers. I relied more on the money I banked from odd jobs and lawn mowing and, later, my gig as a busboy at a country club.

  But in many ways Colin and I couldn’t have been more similar—we both came from deeply loving families who cared more than anything else that we achieved. Ours were the kind of family that chose where to live based on the best-available public school education, where we’d be surrounded by a diverse set of peers, and where we could otherwise thrive.

  Colin and I found each other while working for the middle school newspaper. I had joined as a last-ditch effort to find friends during the second half of my eighth-grade year. Colin was a seventh grader, thin and energetic, who wasn’t quite sure if writing would be his thing, but who was happy to make a few friends a year older. And, as it often works in middle school, that set of insignificant circumstances sparked one of the most meaningful relationships in my life.

  “So did you see the video?” Colin asked me as we dapped and hugged, making our way into his living room, plopping down on the same couch where we’d watched Cavs playoff games during LeBron’s first stint in Cleveland. We weren’t exactly surprised by Tamir Rice’s death. We knew the Cleveland police weren’t known for their rigor or calculated decision-making—in fact, in the last decade, the Department of Justice had issued not just one but two sets of findings that concluded the department routinely violated the civil rights of the city’s residents. As young black men from the suburbs riding through the city in cars a little too nice to have either of us behind the wheel, we’d had our fair share of colorful interactions with Cleveland’s finest.

  But before I could even answer Colin, a familiar voice burst from the stairwell.

  “Is that Wesley I hear?” Colin’s mother exclaimed as she made her way into the room, and I jumped up from the couch, took off my hat, and wrapped her in a hug. As we pulled back, she paused, her hands still on my shoulders and a huge smile creeping across her face. She’d watched me grow up, quite literally, in this living room, from that scrawny kid with the glasses who was the editor of the high school newspaper into a national correspondent for the Washington Post whose voice she’d occasionally hear bursting from a television at the beauty salon.

  “Now, let me guess, you’re writing about that Tamir Rice shooting, right?” she said. “Isn’t that just so awful?”

  For the next few minutes the three of us ran through the conversation that had taken place in countless other living rooms. Colin was immediately skeptical of the account of the shooting given by the officers and believed that the since-released video of the shooting raised even more questions. And besides, it was just a kid with a toy playing in a park, he reasoned. He shouldn’t have ended up dead.

  But why would that child be allowed out in the park alone, with a toy gun? Colin’s mother demanded. Being out in that neighborhood, pointing a realistic-looking weapon at people, seemed like a death wish. Where were his parents, or his siblings?

  “Yeah, but parents can’t be everywhere,” I offered up in response, then added with a chuckle, “Lord knows, you and my mom raised Colin and me right, but we still found our fair share of trouble when you weren’t looking.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Colin’s mother said with a sigh as she made her way out of the room. “You boys be safe tonight. No trouble. Well, not too much trouble.”

  At some point in high school, my best friends and I all had a running joke about “the talk,” which most of them had been given by a father or mother or some other relative. The underlying theme of this set of warnings passed down from black parents to their children is one of self-awareness: the people you encounter, especially the police, are likely willing to break your body, if only because they subconsciously view you not only as less than, but also as a threat.

  Find almost any high school–age black male and ask him about “the talk.” Neither of my parents ever really gave it to me, but I heard “the talk” secondhand from the mothers of a few friends. Besides, when you grow up in a mixed-race home—my mother is white, my father black—no one has to tell you that one half of your family looks different than the other and that you need to pay attention. Close attention.

  Say “yes sir” or “yes ma’am” to any officer you encounter. If you get pulled over, keep your hands on the wheel. As we rode around in Colin’s car listening to Cleveland rap—Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Chip Tha Ripper, and a young guy from our high school who would eventually adopt the name Kid Cudi—we’d keep our wallets in the center console. That way, we wouldn’t have to reach into our pockets. Above all, we knew to never, ever run in the presence of a police officer. That’s just asking for trouble.

  Growing up, we didn’t speak directly about race often in our house, but my parents made certain that my two younger brothers and I knew who we were, and where we came from. Each of us carry a Swahili middle name. It’s hard to doubt your blackness with a middle name like Jabari, which means “the bravest.” Tucked next to the Bible study course books on our living room bookshelf sat a library that could have belonged to any African-American history professor—The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Roots, The Wretched of the Earth, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Go Tell It on the Mountain. The characters in my childhood bedtime books were black. And one year, maybe third or fourth grade, I remember my dad loading my brothers and me into the family station wagon to head to a library a town or two over to attend a nighttime program that explained the significance of each day of Kwanzaa. An ornament from that program still hangs on our family Christmas tree each year.

  “I never had to tell you or your brothers that you are black,” my father said to me in December 2015, in the matter-of-fact cadence that we both often transition into when speaking. “The world was going to do a pretty good job of telling you all that. My kids didn’t need to be told they were black; they’re smart. I just had to make sure you were
surrounded by the right examples and the tools to succeed.” Instead of rules, we had expectations. We were their ambassadors, representing their parenting and the last name Lowery everywhere we went. A bad grade, or a call home from a teacher because we’d acted up—which, in my case, happened not infrequently—was a grave embarrassment. We were too smart and had been given too many opportunities to squander them.

  As I sat in my childhood living room listening to my father, I considered for the first time in my life that every decision my parents had made during the bulk of their adulthood had been about calibrating the best outcomes for their kids. The most important calculation had been where we went to church—the cornerstone of our family. Both of my grandfathers worked in the ministry, my father’s father a Baptist pastor and my mother’s father an engineer who to this day devotes his free time to mission work, helping to start several seminaries and serving as one of their lead grant writers.

  Before Cleveland, our family lived in Teaneck, New Jersey, where we were regulars at First Baptist Church in Hackensack, a welcoming if at times struggling congregation that was as diverse as it was loving. Upstairs, in one of the conference rooms, a Spanish-language congregation met at the same time we were downstairs in the sanctuary. One day, I told myself then, I’d learn Spanish so I could go be a missionary to Guatemala or Ecuador or one of the other far-off places where my friends from church and their families had come from. When we moved to Cleveland in the early 2000s, we quickly joined Cedar Hill Baptist Church, once a pseudo-megachurch that had shrunk to a few hundred members. Like our church in New Jersey, Cedar Hill was diverse and had an international feel. The membership included blacks and whites and Asians and a good number of African immigrants. While we met in the sanctuary, a Chinese congregation met down the hall, in one of our conference rooms.

  The next consideration was the diversity of where we lived—our parents had kept us in public schools, almost exclusively in suburbs with as many black residents as there were white ones. We were raised surrounded by success, both black and white.