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Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

There are no stories in the riots, just the ghosts of other stories. So says a voiceover in Handsworth Songs, the Black Audio Film Collectives dense and resonant response to the 1985 riots in Birmingham. Its a notion that infuriated Salman Rushdie, who wrote a strident essay for the Guardian in which he claimed the film-makers, too wedded to avant-garde hermeticism, had spurned the opportunity to offer a loudspeaker to marginalised immigrants. He was on the side of a dominant style of journalism in which reporters race to burning neighbourhoods to track down and interview locals who can explain, preferably in outraged sentences, why people are angry, who is to blame for the mess, and what will happen if things dont change.

They Cant Kill Us All is Wesley Lowerys memoir, compiled from the Washington Post reporters messy notes, which aspires to tell the story of Ferguson, Missouri where, in August 2014, weeks of protest and rioting broke out in the aftermath of the shooting of an unarmed black American, Michael Brown, by white police officer Darren Wilson. Its author came to public attention when he became the first journalist to be imprisoned albeit for barely 20 minutes for covering the arrest. He later played a key role in the Posts Pulitzer prize-winning fatal force project, a database that, in the absence of comprehensive federal government data, assembled information on police shootings in 2015.

He excels in his evocation of story gathering in the digital age , where a hashtag can be as galvanising as a photograph

What was Ferguson? Its a name, a kind of brand, a fuzzy signifier. For Lowery, there are no isolated incidents, yet the medias focus on the victim and the officer inadvertently erases the context of the nations history as it relates race, policing, and training for law enforcements. While conservative pundits, often with barely suppressed glee, used it as a byword for dysfunction, many black men and women hauled it into a much longer history of racial terror within America. Did it give birth to the social movement Black Lives Matter? If it didnt kickstart, it certainly intensified a national and perhaps even international debate about whether Barack Obamas presidency had really ushered in a post-racial era.

The people Lowery encounters come across as soundbite sources rather than fully fleshed-out individuals. Although he spends more time hanging out in the communities hes reporting on than many of his colleagues, the character and texture of those neighbourhoods are missing. His medium-roast prose Knowing that a police officer is responsible causes a special, deep pain for the families of those who killed cant compare with the lyricism of Jesmyn Wards Men We Reaped (2014) or the caustic heft of Gary Younges Another Day in the Death of America (2016).

Where he excels is in his evocation of story gathering in the digital age. His Ferguson is viral, logged and distributed by online activists and citizen reporters, a hybrid newsfeed, broadcasting platform and ongoing group therapy space. A hashtag can be as galvanising as a photograph or an eyewitness account. Journalists are cameramen, podcasters, format-neutral.

Lowery, committed but exhausted, says that since Ferguson more or less my job has been to bear witness to pain and trauma. Its worse for his subjects. A protester promises him: One day, one month, one year from now, after you leave, its still going to be fucked up in Ferguson.

They Cant Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery is published by Penguin (9.99). To order a copy for 8.49 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter by Wesley Lowery review - The Guardian