They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  For the two years since Ferguson, it had been more or less my job to bear witness to pain and trauma. Once you’re known as a reporter who covers policing and justice, your email accounts and voice mail boxes become depositories of death: pleading messages from mothers and widows of those who have been killed by officers who beg you to tell their story. Envelopes from inmates stuffed with legal filings and police reports arrived at work addressed to me. As hard as it is to be in receipt of so much rightful pain and sorrow, video of shootings, Tasings, arrests, and beatings is different. There is no way to filter it. The only way to decide what to cover is to watch them all.

  To date, the hardest video for me to watch had been the extended version of Tamir Rice’s death, in which his sister frantically raced to his body, only to be tackled by officers. But even that video hadn’t brought me to tears. The video feed of Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, was different.

  “Fuck! I told him not to reach for it, I told him to get his hand out!” the officer screams at Reynolds.

  “You told him to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license,” she insists in response. “Oh my God, please don’t tell me he’s dead. Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went like that.”

  Responding officers eventually removed Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter from the car where Castile was dying. In the video, as they take her into custody, Reynolds, who up until this point has been unbelievably composed, begins to lose herself to what has just happened. She cries, and then she prays. She pleads with Jesus, a broken woman begging for divine intervention. As Reynolds then begins to scream, her four-year-old daughter interjects, “It’s okay, I’m right here with you.”

  I sprang up from my desk and ran to the newsroom bathroom to throw up. Then I began reporting. Soon I was on the phone with Castile’s sister, who was gathered with her family in a Minnesota hospital. She sobbed as she told me the only thing they knew: “He’s gone.”

  The shootings of Sterling and Castile together prompted a reawakening. Among the cities that hosted major protests was Dallas, where the police had gone to great pains to support the protesters, cordoning off areas for demonstrators and posing for photos next to signs calling for reforms and justice. Unknown to the crowd, a single gunman would soon prey on this gathering, specifically attacking white police officers in what he later told police negotiators was a targeted retribution for the police killings of black men.

  A week later, another lone wolf attacked officers in Baton Rouge, killing three. The deaths and injury of the officers in these two cities again shook the nation, underscoring with renewed urgency the depth of the anger and distrust toward police still coursing through America.

  The attacks on police officers enraged the law enforcement community, who for years had worried about such targeted attacks. In a country with millions of easily accessible guns and an increasing national distrust of institutions—specifically the police—it wasn’t hard to imagine the ease with which someone determined to harm officers could carry out such an attack. “With the number of police shootings that have occurred that seem to be totally unjustified, somewhere in this country, someone was going to do such a thing,” John Creuzot, a former prosecutor and judge in Dallas, told me after the shooting.

  Civil rights groups, and the young activists behind the protests that had propelled the movement, quickly condemned the shootings. But opponents of the protest movement blamed the rhetoric of the Movement for Black Lives for the murders of the officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge—a tactic not unlike the one employed by those who blamed Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders for the riots of the 1960s.

  After the Dallas attack, President Obama convened a thirty-three-person conference at the White House, a conversation that ran for four and a half hours, which the president told attendees was among the longest single-subject conferences of his presidency. The attendees were a mix—young activists like DeRay Mckesson, civil rights stalwarts like Al Sharpton, police chiefs and heads of several major police unions, and government officials including Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “The president lived up to his reputation as a former law professor,” NAACP president Cornell William Brooks told me after the meeting. “He spent quite a bit of time listening, probing, and guiding the discussion, occasionally deploying the Socratic method to get some of the day’s best responses.”

  Among the first exchanges was one between St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman, who sharply defended his officers’ actions in response to massive protests that had broken out after the death of Philando Castile, and Mica Grimm, a local Black Lives Matter activist, who had been leading the demonstrations. Coleman called some of the protesters “disgraceful,” while Grimm shot back that it was their democratic duty to take to the streets—and the democratic obligation of the police to protect them. “I responded by telling him that the protests aren’t going to stop until we see actual change,” Grimm told me later. “And that begins with seeing an officer held accountable for killing somebody.”

  I’d first met Grimm months earlier, when I traveled to Minneapolis to cover the demonstrations in Minneapolis after the police shooting of Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man. As I followed a parade of marchers, Grimm was seated in the back of a pickup truck near the front, shouting protest chants into a bullhorn. But she spoke more softly in the White House. This was her first trip to Washington, DC, much less to the White House. As she sparred with the mayor and the police chief of her city, she received an unexpected expression of support. One of the other police chiefs in the room slid her a handwritten note, written on a sheet from a White House notepad. “Don’t be deterred from speaking truth to power,” read the note, written by Dean Esserman, the chief of the New Haven Police Department.

  When it was his turn to speak, DeRay Mckesson drilled into Obama with a long list of complaints. He told the president that the language he used to describe the protesters had “come a long way,” but he implored Obama to stop sprinkling into his speeches and addresses to black audiences urgings to vote. As Mckesson explained it, many in the community interpreted Obama’s exhortations as condescending and reductionist. Mckesson asked the president to tell the FBI to stop having its agents drop in at the homes of prominent activists—in the weeks before the Republican and Democratic conventions, Johnetta Elzie, Bree Newsome, Mckesson himself, and at least half a dozen other prominent activists were visited by federal agents, which they believed to be an attempt to intimidate them. And, Mckesson noted, the president had been quick to visit Dallas after the officers were killed there, but even two years later had yet to set foot in Ferguson. “Well, I’m glad you have a long list for me,” the president quipped in response.

  As he facilitated the conversation, Obama often glanced to his left, at Brittany Packnett, a thirty-one-year-old Ferguson protester and Campaign Zero cofounder who speaks with unwavering confidence and poise. This was at least the third time Packnett had met with Obama, who after one meeting had been so struck by her command of the room that he pulled her aside to encourage her to one day run for office. Her father, Ronald Packnett, had been a prominent black minister and activist in St. Louis before dying in 1996 at the age of forty-five. Her mother, Gwendolyn Packnett, remains a well-known educator, community leader, and philanthropist. “My dad was an activist, and mom has always been in community leadership,” Packnett recalls. “So, truth be told, my first protest was probably while I was still in a stroller.”

  Packnett recalls a childhood of relative privilege. Her parents, who had both grown up in households with meager means, had worked to ensure that their children could have the things they hadn’t. They lived in a nice section of St. Louis, drove good cars, and went to esteemed private schools. But Packnett recalls being raised with a “double consciousness,” having access to money and privilege but also feeling deep pride in her identity as a black woman, and as a black Christian. She read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and sat patiently next to her parents at evening Bible studie
s. “Our social responsibility was the most important thing,” Packnett told me about her upbringing. “And I was raised in a liberation theology. We worshipped a table-flipping revolutionary Jesus with brown skin and Afro hair.”

  One evening when she was eight years old, her father and younger brother came bursting through the front door, her brother in tears. They had been out for a drive and had gotten pulled over. As the officer had approached the vehicle, he had asked Mr. Packnett to step out of the car, and then had thrown him onto the hood and put him in handcuffs. The officer didn’t believe that this black man could possibly own the Mercedes he was driving.

  The entire family was outraged, and Packnett’s brother was traumatized. Her father, who was among the most politically connected black men in St. Louis, called the police chief and demanded that the officer apologize personally, in front of his son.

  As she grew older, Packnett became an outspoken minority in her predominantly white private schools, sprinkling her class assignments with asides about equity and racial justice and helping to organize a regular seminar on diversity and inclusion. That drew backlash in the hallways of her majority-white high school. She recalls that one particular student, a young white man from a prominent local family who was a year ahead of her, began following Packnett around in the hallways, mocking her. “Is my whiteness oppressing you today?” he would ask as she moved from class to class. She would ignore him. Then, one day, she didn’t. She turned around, just outside the women’s locker room, and told him to stop speaking to her that way. In return, he spit in her face.

  Packnett said her track coach, one of her mentors in high school, insisted she tell the principal, who forced the boy to apologize. Immediately, the memory of her late father’s interaction with the officer who pulled him over flashed back into her mind. That officer, like this boy, had been made to apologize. But had either actually been held accountable? Or did the system send the message that abuse of a black body can be negated and papered over by an “I’m sorry” no matter how reluctantly uttered?

  “It’s this idea that all a person had to do was say ‘I’m sorry,’ and then they never had to be held accountable for their actions,” Packnett said. “Thinking about those two incidents is, for me, a constant reminder that this system was never built for us in the first place.”

  In the years since, Packnett had occupied a seat at some of the same tables at which her parents had sat, her activism undeterred by that incident. In college, at Washington University in St. Louis, she organized demonstrations and rallies on behalf of the campus food service workers, ultimately helping them win their first across-the-board wage increase in years. By the time Michael Brown was killed, she was working as executive director for Teach for America—St. Louis, spending many days in meetings with donors, leaders of nonprofits, and community leaders. She saw herself as an inside-the-room advocate for radical change. “I had let a certain amount of comfort and privilege take hold of my social justice work,” she said. “I wasn’t sacrificing my body very much anymore in physical protest.”

  That changed in August 2014, when she showed up outside the Ferguson Police Department a few days after Michael Brown was killed. With demonstrations swelling beneath the summer sun, some city leaders invited Packnett inside the police station for a private meeting with the chief. It was the type of convening that often occurs in the days after a shooting—the powers that be assemble a group of black leaders, insist they are doing everything they can, and request that these leaders help cool the crowds. This time, Packnett said no. She wouldn’t attend the meeting. She was staying outside.

  “Sitting in a room with a corrupt police chief inside a building while traumatized black people protested outside was not the right step,” Packnett recalled. “It was time to stop sitting in the ivory tower and hypothesizing and actually get back to doing what I knew in my spirit and in my upbringing was necessary to change these policing systems.” By the end of the week, she was a protest regular.

  But soon enough, the movement would call on her to sit at the table again. She applied for and was accepted to a spot on the Ferguson Commission, the task force convened by Missouri governor Jay Nixon after the unrest in 2014. Next, impressed after meeting her at his first sit-down with the young activists who had been awakened in Ferguson, President Obama invited Packnett to join his President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

  “Everyone has a role,” Packnett said after the post-Dallas White House meeting. “There are some people who need to be the revolutionary, and there are some people who need to be at the table in the White House. And I knew it was my job to translate the pain I had seen and experienced in the streets and bring it into these halls of power.”

  Packnett explains the protest movement as a series of escalating waves. Its conception came from the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Davis, which mobilized black Americans in a demand for justice. Its grand birth, first in Ferguson and then throughout the nation in the fall of 2014, was prompted by the deaths of Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown, the cases that showed those same black Americans that justice for those killed by the police was not forthcoming. As the list of names grew—each week, each day providing another—so did the urgency of the uprising that would become a movement. The year 2015 brought a third wave of anger and pain: Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Sam DuBose—another round of death in which the now-pained calls for police accountability became insistent demands. The year 2016, which began sleepily, quickly saw the beginning of what most likely will become a fourth wave. As President Obama prepares to leave the White House, it remains to be seen whether the movement birthed by the broken promise of his presidency will live on through the season of his successor.

  “The protests will continue,” Packnett said confidently when I called her from Cleveland on the first night of the Republican National Convention in July. “Regardless of who is elected, we’re going to work to continue this level of engagement with the next administration; there’s just too much at stake.” While the targeted killings of the officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge prompted some commentators and other members of the media to declare the Movement for Black Lives dead, the activists and organizers who have been the foot soldiers have not gone quietly into the night.

  A few days later came the nonfatal shooting in North Miami of behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey, who was lying on the ground with his hands in the air, begging not to be shot, as he tried to soothe his autistic patient, when an officer fired his gun three times. Kinsey’s hands were up, he yelled “Don’t shoot,” and the officer fired anyway. “I was thinking as long as I have my hands up…they’re not going to shoot me,” Kinsey told local television station WSVN from his hospital bed. “Wow, was I wrong.”

  In the days after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, thousands of people used an online tool provided by Campaign Zero to petition their local elected officials to demand police reform. Just before July 18, as the political media gathered in Cleveland for the GOP convention, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in more than thirty cities across the nation in a weekend of activism they titled Freedom Now.

  “We have no choice but to keep going,” Packnett told me. “If one of the central demands of the movement is to stop killing us, and they’re still killing us, then we don’t get to stop, either.”

  July 2016, Cleveland

  Acknowledgments

  To the families and friends of those who in death have become national figures, Rorschach tests in a divided nation’s debate of race and justice: thank you for sharing your pain, your mourning, and your humanity with the nation, and for extending patience and love to reporters like me who have shown up at your door at life’s worst moments.

  In the acknowledgments of his first book, journalist Chris Hayes described Vanessa Mobley as his “intellectual copilot.” I heard from Chris almost as soon as I signed with Vanessa, letting me know how lucky I was to have la
nded the best editor in the game. By then, I already knew.

  Her brilliance lies in her ability to reveal to me the things I knew but could never have said, to access the understanding I possess but never could have otherwise voiced. Her diligence and intellect forced me to heights that I could not have fathomed when we began. It has been an honor to copilot this project with her.

  This book never would have made it into Vanessa’s arms had it not been guided there by an amazing team. Thank you to Mollie Glick, for forcing me to sit down and write the original proposal for this book, even when I didn’t think I could or wanted to. Anthony Mattero, my literary agent and friend, has pushed me and this project forward. Thank you to my agent, Traci Wilkes Smith, and the entire team at CSE, for believing and building in me.

  The heartbeat of this project are the young people whose stories occupy its pages. For two years they have answered my calls, responded to my inquiries, indulged my theories, and helped me understand the depth of this moment. Without their stories, their work, and their candor and willingness to share both with me, there would be no book. To Johnetta Elzie, Alexis Templeton, Kayla Reed, DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, Clifton Kinnie, Bree Newsome, Kwame Rose, Shaun King, Jonathan Butler, Payton Head, Martese Johnson: telling your stories has been an honor.

  And the many whose names and stories may not grace these pages, but whose work has nonetheless driven this movement and whose words and actions have crafted and challenged my understanding of what activism can be: people like Rachelle Smith, Dante Barry, Samuel Sinyangwe, Mervyn Marcano, Michael Skolnik, the folks at the Advancement Project, and the too-often-unsung Chelsea Fuller, my sister, confidante, and North Star.

  Contextualizing the events of the last two years would have been impossible without conversations with people far smarter than I am: Chris King, Khalil Muhammad, Phil Goff, Ryan Julison, Chuck Wexler, Neal Peirce for sharing with me notes from his study of St. Louis, and many others.