Ferguson
Join the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights as Wesley Lowery explores the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the unrest that followed. Lowery is is a journalist at CBS News and author of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.
Listen to the Episode
Wednesday, March 27, 2024 12:00 pm
The opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’ What’s the difference?
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’
The Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights presents Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary, a podcast from the lecture series and associated course presenting preeminent scholars, thought leaders, and public intellectuals to guide our community through topics necessary to an understanding of systemic racism and racial justice. The series is self-consciously an entry point, designed to provide intellectual and moral building blocks to begin the transformative work of anti-racism in our students, on our campus, and in our broader communities.
Join the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights as Wesley Lowery explores the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the unrest that followed. Lowery is is a journalist at CBS News and author of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.
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View EventMeet the Speaker: Wesley Lowery
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice. He is the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, an innovative “training hospital” journalism non-profit based at American University in Washington DC that trains a rising generation of journalists by partnering them with professional newsrooms to work on projects that fill crucial gaps in media coverage. He is also a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project.
His began his career covering politics but in 2014 was sent to Ferguson, Mo., to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years that followed, he would chronicle the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing a bestselling book and launching Fatal Force — a real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police. That database — which remains the most reliable public data on police shootings — won the Pulitzer Prize, the George Polk Award, and the Peabody Award and was named one of the decade’s top 10 works of journalism.
In the years that followed he led and contributed to investigative projects that examined unsolved homicides in major American cities (Pulitzer Prize finalist), what happens to fired police officers, so-called repeat offender criminal defendants, fentanyl overdoses in major cities (in 2017 and 2022), the failures to catch the deadliest serial killer in American history, and what happens to people who are shot by the police and survive. He’s latest book, American Whitelash, published in June 2023, chronicles the rise in white supremacist violence in the years since Barack Obama’s election.
Lowery hosted “Unfinished: Ernie’s Secret” an investigative podcast that explores the life of Ernest Withers, a legendary civil rights photographer who was also a paid FBI informant. He also served as co-host of “More Than A Vote: Our Voices, Our Vote.” He was an executive producer of In the Cold Dark Night, an Emmy-nominated documentary chronicling the effort to solve the 1983 lynching of Timothy Coggins.
For In These Times, he traced Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s path from to becoming the most powerful progressive in American politics. For GQ, he went deep about marriage and monogamy with Will Smith, talked politics and the press with Trevor Noah, dove into the post-scandal life of Andrew Gillum, and chronicled the last days of death row inmate Dustin Higgs. For Men’s Health he wrote about opiod overdoses among black men in Milwaukee and cities across the country. And for EBONY he has profiled Tessa Thompson and Shamiek Moore.
Recommended Resources
Wesley Lowery recommends the following if you would like to learn more:
Book: The Children, David Halberstam
Book: 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
Book: The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein
Website: The Marshall Project
For more resources from Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary, please visit their Hesburgh Library Guide.