MAY 23, 2024
ARC TOWARD JUSTICE 2024
DOORS 5:00PM
MUSIC 5:30PM
FORUM 6:00PM
A book signing and free public reception will immediately follow the program.
Town Hall Forums are always free. No registration is required. Seating is open; first come, first seated.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Wesley Lowery is one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice.
He is the author of American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress.
It tells the story of how the election of the nation’s first Black president fanned long-burning embers of white supremacy, igniting a new and frightening phase in a historical American cycle of racial progress and white backlash. It was a New York Times best-seller, one of NPR’s books of the year, and described as “indispensable” by Ibram X. Kendi.
Following the police killing of Michael Brown, Lowery launched 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.
He is also a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project. 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.
Each year, the Arc Toward Justice marks the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and the uprising that followed with a talk by a national voice on racial justice. This year we welcome Wesley Lowery a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice.
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More About Wesley Lowery
Lowery 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.
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.
- Webby Award for Best News and Politics Podcast (2021)
- The Frederick Douglass 200 (2019)
- Christopher Isherwood prize for autobiographical prose (2017)
- Ebony 100 (2016) • The Root 100 (2015 & 2016)
- Apex Society Power 30 under 30 recipient
- RARE 40 under 40 recipient
- Lotos Foundation Prize in the Arts and Sciences (2017)
- Wayne State University “Spirit of Diversity” Award (2015)
- Emerging Journalist of the Year, The National Assoc of Black Journalists (2014)
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