Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery has been at the forefront of reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement since the days following the shooting of Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo. His reporting on the ground in the aftermath of the shooting has won national acclaim, and his idea for collecting data on police shootings earned the Post a Pulitzer Prize last year.
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 is now in development to be turned into a series on AMC, and Into the Badlands writer LaToya Morgan is set to write and produce the series along with Brad Weston.
Lowery’s book was published by Little, Brown and Co. in 2016 and was acquired by Weston’s Makeready studio last fall, according to Deadline. It focuses on “how decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs has led to the high-profile cases of police brutality in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore and elsewhere and the birth of Black Lives Matter movement seeking justice for the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray.”
Morgan has an overall deal with AMC, and the potential new series will take Lowery’s work and explore both present and past events through the eyes and stories of fictional characters.
Lowery told The Root that he is very excited about the new project and especially thrilled to have it helmed by Morgan, whom he considers to be a black female powerhouse when it comes to television writing.
“This is her project. I wrote the book and I’m really excited to work with her and help her,” Lowery said. “I’m most excited to be placing this material in the hands of an absolute star in television writing and a black woman with organizing under her belt.”
Lowery was a political reporter when he was first sent to Ferguson in 2014. He had no idea that he would spend so much time reporting on the topic of police shootings and race relations, and in the three years since Ferguson, his entire career has changed. Telling the stories of black and brown people and their interactions with police has become his mission.
“To have a storyteller like Latoya come in and take my work and use that as inspiration for her artwork and her writing and her work is overwhelming,” Lowery said.
Lowery explained that the project is in the beginning stages at this point. Morgan will begin creating her characters and writing her stories and eventually turn over a pilot to AMC, which will then decide if it wants to move forward and order more scripts.
“Who knows what’s going to happen, or if anything is going to happen?” Lowery said. “A lot of books get optioned. I think that the fact that they have interest and want to have black storytellers telling black stories is a good first step.”
We totally agree.
These stories need to be told, and they need to be told from a black perspective by black people. Using Lowery’s book as source material and having a writer like Morgan at the head of the project is a good sign that we will see this project on the small screen soon.