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

Lowery’s work is set to gain even more attention because his book They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement is now in development to be turned into a series on AMC. This is according to Monica Judge, writer of The Root.

While Lowery was working on his story in Ferguson, he himself was harassed and arrested. He told his colleagues at the Washington Post:

"Multiple officers grabbed me. I tried to turn my back to them to assist them in arresting me. I dropped the things from my hands.

“My hands are behind my back,” I said. “I’m not resisting. I’m not resisting.” At which point one officer said: “You’re resisting. Stop resisting.”

That was when I was most afraid — more afraid than of the tear gas and rubber bullets.

As they took me into custody, the officers slammed me into a soda machine, at one point setting off the Coke dispenser. They put plastic cuffs on me, then they led me out the door."

The terror and fear Lowery felt was also described by another author we're read in the Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series. The author is Bryan Stevenson and the book is Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Bryan describes what happened to him while sitting in his car listening to music:

"Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their threat of lethal force by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of my car, searched it illegally, and kept me on the street for fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors gathered to view the dangerous criminal in their midst. When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up in a computerized background check on me, I was told by the two officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt, they were right: I was lucky."

Stevenson described this incident in his book, Just Mercy and also described it in an article in the New York Times Review of Books in June 2017.

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Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

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