Minneapolis – Westminster Town Hall Forum: Arc Toward Justice 2024

Wesley Lowery 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 reignited long-burning embers of white supremacy. It was a New York Times best-seller, was named 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.

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)

Registration

This event is free and open to all.

There is no ticketing or registration. Seating at Westminster is on a first-come, first seated basis. Doors will open at 5:00 p.m. Music at 5:30 p.m. Forum will begin at 6:00 p.m.