5 Quotes by Wesley Lowery

While some nations vow never to forget, our American battle has always been over what we allow ourselves to remember. Our historical record, we know, is subjective. Not every account is written down. The distinction between equity and injustice, riot and uprising, hinges on whose hand holds the pen. So often, it seems, our history is hiding from us, preventing the possibility that we dare look back and tell the truth--afraid of what doing so may require of us now.

And by focusing on the character of the victim, we inadvertently take the focus off the powerful and instead train our eyes and judgment on the powerless.

Ferguson would birth a movement and set the nation on a course for a still-ongoing public hearing on race that stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents – from daily policing to Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation. The social justice movement spawned from Mike Brown’s blood would force city after city to grapple with its own fraught histories of race and policing.

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.

There is nothing that can prepare a family for the heart-clenching shock of losing one of their own. And time and time again, those left behind described to me how so suddenly a normal, mundane weekday had become the worst day of their lives – a black hole of time permanently etched in the video feed of their lives.