This Journalist Covered Gun Violence…and It Almost Cost Him His Life

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, to a deeply personal examination of the African-American experience. Our next guest is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Trymaine Lee, has dedicated his life and career to exploring the intersection between black life and politics. He was one of the first national reporters to cover the fatal shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin back in 2012 and the social justice movement that it sparked. His new book, “A Thousand Ways to Die,” covers gun violence and systemic racism to discovering his own mortality through a near death experience. But as he tells Michel Martin, reporting on such traumatic topics does take its toll.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. Trymaine Lee, thank you so much for speaking with us.

 

TRYMAINE LEE: It’s really a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

 

MARTIN: It’s a really gosh, I don’t even know what to say. It’s a powerful, surprising book that you’ve written. Surprising in some ways, very revealing and very vulnerable for people who only know your work, you know, through your journalism. I think it might come as a surprise that you share so much of your, your own story. So I guess I wanna just start by saying that this isn’t the book you started out to write. Tell us about that.

 

LEE: Not at all. Michel, I didn’t set out to, to open my entire self up and pour myself onto the page the way I did. Originally the, the book that I was writing was about the literal cost of gun violence in this country. The cost in a dollar amount as a way to speak to the cost that we pay as, as communities and families every single day. But as I was writing this book and I almost met my own death, it forced me to really look at widening the aperture on violence and how we experience violence within our community, certainly, but also the silent kind of violence that we carry within us in terms of, of the trauma that we carry. Much of it tied to the gun and gun violence but also the long trail of systemic violence that’s almost required before triggers ever pulled.

 

MARTIN: We should just tell people what happened is you had a heart attack. I, that’s right. I mean, you’re only 38 years old, former college athlete. People can see that. You, you, former college football player. Didn’t have a history of high cholesterol, didn’t have any of those other kind of markers, and you had what is commonly called a a widow maker. I mean, you had a, a blockage in your artery that was so profound that it could have, could have, could have killed you. And the way you described that – I don’t wanna take you through that again, because I’m sure it was traumatic to experience, but you didn’t even go to the hospital right away.

 

LEE: It was a very curious decision as I look back now. But two years into writing this book, I, I suffered this widowmaker heart attack. 98 plus percent blockage in my left anterior descending artery, the, the big one that supplies most of the blood to your heart. And with none of those markers, I had to wrestle with what it was that literally almost broke my heart. And, and at that time, my daughter, who is 13 now, a a big girl, hard to believe at 13, was five going on six years old. And she was asking me, daddy, how and why? And to answer her as I, I promised her when she was still in the womb, that I’d never lie to her. I had to be really honest with myself about what I was carrying. And that was a career of, of chronicling Black death and survival on the front lines of it as a young police reporter on the streets, often finding a young man shot dead that looks just like me, seeing the pain in, in his family’s eyes. That was almost always a him. And seeing my own family’s pain. 

 

But then also carrying a, a family history going back to the Jim Crow south of almost every generation, our family being touched by some sort of, of gun violence, whether it’s the Jim Crow sort, whether it’s at the hand of the state, of state troopers later on. My grandfather’s murder, time and again, we’ve been touched by it.

 

MARTIN: Why do you think you made that connection? Because it isn’t, it isn’t obvious. As you point out, you know, the, a bullet and a blocked artery are very different things. 

 

LEE: Yeah. It, it was, it was all of those things, Michel in, in my physical healing and my emotional and spiritual healing which took a couple years. There wasn’t a day that went by for, for a number of years where I didn’t think about dying, and I was concerned whether I’m gonna make it through the night. It was that kind of emotional weight that I was carrying. But as I got healthier, I, I, I took a journey of mindfulness and meditation and really a clarity set in. And examining like, how did I of all people end up here? 

 

And then I had to think no further than all of the sleepless nights that I had for years for a very long time. It was hard for me to sleep because I’d be wrestling and mulling over the stories I was telling the, the, the literal physical damage on bodies that I was seeing and understanding what it was, what it means, I should say, to carry that and never fully unpack it. And to cope with that, especially as a young man and a young journalist, what I did was throw myself even further into the work or drink or take over the counter sleep medication. I was doing all this stuff to calm my, my, you know, subconscious. And so it all kind of just made sense to me. And it also, it certainly shifted me as a person, as a journalist, as a man. But without question, it shifted the trajectory of the book I was writing.

 

MARTIN: One of the things that you do in the book is you trace, you start out with a lot of the stories you’ve told us, a, as a journalist, which is a person was shot, this was the impact on that person. This is what we know about why it happened, this is where the gun came from. 

 

But what you also do in this book is you trace the people in your life and your family tree who have been affected by gun violence, and then you put them against sort of the backdrop of all the violence that had been taking place around them in their community. Did you know before you started this book that so many members of your  family had been touched by gun violence?

 

LEE: I, I did not. Michel, I, I grew up always knowing about my grandfather’s murder in 1976, two years before I was born. And, and so I knew intimately or as intimately as I could possibly know the, the space that his absence created and the pain and hurt that it sent through my, my family, my aunts, my uncles, and, and certainly my mother. But it took some investigating, investigating and reporting to discover the first murder in our family back in 1922 in the Jim Crow South, when my grandmother’s 12-year-old brother was shot and killed in a, a neighboring sundown town.

 

MARTIN: What is a sundown town. Explain that for what people, for people who don’t know that term.

 

LEE: Yeah. So, so for many of us, we thought sundown towns were colloquial, meaning these places where Black folks couldn’t be after dark. But in this situation, this particular sundown town, Fitzgerald, the white men of the community actually came together to vote to make sure Black folks didn’t have a proper place in the community and couldn’t be there at certain times. And the, the newspapers contemporaneous accounts of what happened in this town, they said that Fitzgerald handled the negro problem the way no other city in America could. And so this is where my grandmother’s 12-year-old brother Cornelius, was shot and killed. And then my family joins the Great Migration, joined millions of other Black folks fleeing the south for better opportunities in the north in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, all across the north, landing in Philadelphia first and then South Jersey.

 

And then in 1951, another of my grandmother’s brothers was shot and killed by a state trooper under mysterious circumstances. And so to think that in the course of just a couple decades, my great grandparents lost two sons. One in the Jim Crow south, one in the north. But then still 20 years after that, in 1976, as I mentioned, my grandfather was murdered. So, so my grandparents had an apartment in Camden, New Jersey. And a man came to rent the apartment and left a deposit for $160. He disappeared for many weeks. When he came back wanting his, his money back, my grandfather told him that it was non-refundable, and that he could see him in court, and they had a court date set. And instead of going to court, that man came back and shot and killed my grandfather. And so that violence, that murder cascaded through my family. As my mother described it, it’s almost as if you have a limb shorn off your body, and for the rest of your life, you’re trying to adapt and cope. And I think about my own grandmother who lost two brothers and a husband to murder. And then to think that we think about these connections to the violence that we carry within us. That one, the stuff that we inherit, the fact that I exist because of an act of gun violence, because my grandparents met in, in New Jersey. And, and so it was the killing of my great uncle Cornelius that sent us into the migration and that my great, my grandparents eventually met. It’s just all these ties that bind me to, to the violence, but also the pushing forward through the trauma.

 

MARTIN: I’m trying to relive with you how it felt when you learned all this, when you had to take all this in. Can you even describe that?

 

LEE: There have been many moments where I had to sit back and just exhale. But there was a moment when I discovered the death certificate for Cornelius. 

 

MARTIN: Cornelius, the 12-year-old. I was gonna ask you about that. So tell us about that. Tell us about the death certificate. You have a copy of it in the book.

 

LEE: That’s right. And it was so striking in the mundanity of it all. It said age 12, cause of death, gunshot wounds. And, and I couldn’t help but think about young Tamir Rice, who was 12-year-old shot in Cleveland, Ohio, and his chubby face and thinking about Cornelius’s face and how those words, 12 age 12, cause of death, gunshot wounds should never be in proximity to, to each other. And, and what that is like where my own daughter is 13 years old now, and imagine your child being gunned down and there was no law enforcement response, no investigation. There, there was, there was just nothing. Because it wasn’t shocking for a Black boy at that time to be shot, killed, shot and killed. So it was one of many moments where I had to reckon with what my people have had to harbor all these years.

 

MARTIN: I have to wonder, though, did that not weigh on you reporting all this? 

 

LEE: I’ll tell you what, by the time I got to reporting on the darkest parts of that history I did have a clarity and a freedom. So I had been writing the book for two years with the original impetus, the idea of cost. I had my heart attack, and I, I was forced to sit down, my body sat me down, and I had to heal. So for about a year and a half I didn’t put a single word on the page. Maybe, maybe two years. I kind of separated myself from it because in part I attributed recounting some of these stories of, of my earlier career to the heart attack. Right. The weight of, of everything. Sitting neck deep in people’s grief and my own. But by the time I had this clarity about what it was that almost led to my end and almost shattered my heart I felt even more mission-driven to go back to the very beginning, because at that point I knew it, it wasn’t just me. My family was one of millions of Black families who experienced the literal violence of the braided rope and the bullet in the Jim Crow South. But then the idea of, again, widening the aperture on what violence actually is, the systemic violence of being –

 

MARTIN: And what is that? When you say widening the aperture, what do you mean by that? 

 

LEE: That it includes the, the literal violence and then our response to losing someone to that violence or witnessing that violence. But it also means the kind of deprivation that my family faced in the Jim Crow south of being tenant farmers, meaning they were forced to work on land that they would never own. And around settlement time when Cornelius was killed, December is always the time where you, you balance the debt, right, and credits. And without fail, Black families were always ripped off at that time. That’s a form of violence to keep you in debt. And then to join the great migration to land in the, the what was hoped to be a promised land of the North, to find jobs, certainly, less violence, certainly, but slum conditions often. Right. You couldn’t live in certain places. We had communities where they would draw red line around the neighborhood. You couldn’t get insurance. You couldn’t buy or sell because of these deeds of covenants where some of these deeds of covenants had baked into them that if you’re a white person, a homeowner, you couldn’t sell to a Black person. Let alone access to quality foods. Right. Some of these systemic issues that I consider violence that leads to the kind of ecosystem that is right for gun violence still persists today. And so in, in grappling is, it’s so far beyond the bullet of what we’ve experienced.

 

MARTIN: One of the, the interesting historical facts that you talk about is how firearms were literally traded –

 

LEE: That’s right. 

 

MARTIN: – for African slaves for people who were about to be enslaved. I had never thought about that. I just, could you say more about that?

 

LEE: Yeah. Discovering that that was another one of those discoveries that, you know, brought so much to bear. These, this idea that there is, what I’ve described as this psychic connection, this ethereal connection to, to guns and Black folks. And so, in my exploration, I really wanted to go back, not just to the beginning of my family’s exposure to gun violence, but really examine the dynamic between Black people period, before we even got here, and guns. And so for many of us, we were educated to understand that Black folks were either simply just kidnapped or they were some natural byproduct of wars that were already occurring on the continent of Africa. And then Europeans eager to take advantage of a, a labor force to supply, you know, labor needs for you know, the western world came over and made some deals when in reality what we see and the abolitionists of the time were, were noting this is that European powers, especially as gun technology is rising in the early 18th century, were plying regional African powers, different warring factions with guns to create instability, to create war, to create more enslaved people.

 

And so, the idea that our bodies were literally bartered for guns, and that we were forced out of Africa with the muzzle of a gun at our backs, and then introduced to the western world, which would’ve been hellish for, for these enslaved Africans and greeted by more white men with more guns to maintain what would be a hundreds years system of servitude and violence, I think that can’t be lost on us. That our literal bodies were traded for guns, and we continue on to experience a specific kind of gun violence.

 

MARTIN: One of the things that you point out in the book is that African Americans disproportionately experience gun violence, particularly police violence. But I do have to say a lot of white people in America get killed with guns. 

LEE: That’s right. 

 

MARTIN: So I just have wondered if you thought about that, if you were kind of reflected on that.

 

LEE: Well, well certainly, and in the book I say that you know you know, gun violence in America isn’t a Black American problem alone. It’s an American problem. And even though we are disproportionately, disproportionately killed by police and faced disproportionately gun violence period, about 40 plus percent of the gun deaths in this country are white. And so, in some ways, not to counter the, the notion in the book, because I wanted to use a specific lens here. As long as gun violence in, in, in this country is considered a Black American issue, then we don’t have the, to address any of the other broad issues like the, the nature of gun death in white communities, or the pipeline from legal to illegal in this country of guns. And, and so certainly it’s an American problem. We think about the issue around school shootings and these mass shootings, which disproportionately impact white folks. And so clearly this is just one slice, one lens to view a very, very American issue. And part of our issue with guns is that it’s so connected to this sense of patriotism, and dare I say manhood, so much of our manhood is attached to violence in this country. And so no wonder white folks as well as Black are being killed so, so frequently with them.

 

MARTIN: One of the points that you make in the book is because gun violence is so often associated with Blackness, often in very dehumanizing ways. I, I have to ask you about that. Doesn’t that in some way kind of reinforce the problem that this is a Black problem and therefore it doesn’t command the attention and the urgency that it would if it were, if it were seen as the national problem that it is?

 

LEE: Well, I think there are a couple issues here. I think it, because it happens so frequently and it’s so disproportionately in our communities that it’s also ignored. It’s treated as garden variety, treated as routine. It’s treated as normal. And, and so therein, our trauma and our hurt and pain and loss, financial and otherwise goes ignored. And so until we can point to the problem and speak to the specificity in which race has played a role in how we’ve experienced this gun violence, because white folks aren’t dying by the gun because they’re Black, but we are, because we’ve been conditioned and cordon off in certain communities with, that have been disinvested in and deprived in. So we’re experiencing not – that’s why it’s a thousand ways to die long before you get to the trigger being pulled, there’s a host of other issues that need to be addressed that manifest and culminate in disproportionate gun violence.

 

And so it’s almost like policing. We’re both under policed and overpoliced. It’s also like media coverage. Our communities are also undercovered and sensationalized, but we can’t continue to ignore the problem. And especially for Black folks, and this is a bigger question for Black and white, actually. We have to understand that we are not the violence that we’ve experienced, right? There’s nothing inherent or innate in us, lest we forget in recent weeks the president’s own words, when he talked about the threat of occupying major cities in this country, and he said, it’s not a matter of five years, 10 years or two years, these people are born to be criminal. And so what I want to do in this book, and I wanna make it clear for Black and white, but especially Black folks to understand this, that there’s nothing inherently violent or wrong with us if we wanna truly understand the violence we’ve experienced. Let’s look at the machinery around us and the long continuum that got us here. And so we’ve experienced it a certain way. And so it requires a, a certain research reporting, analyzation and recording of it. 

   

MARTIN: Trymaine Lee, thank you so much for speaking with us.

 

LEE: Thank you. Michel.