Tremaine Lee’s A Thousand Ways to Die traces gun violence’s systemic toll on Black America, from his 1922 great-uncle Cornelius murdered in a Sundown Town to his stepbrother killed in Camden in 1996. Research began with Kevin Johnson’s $50K+ medical costs after a robbery, but Lee’s own heart attack at 38 expanded focus to generational trauma—slavery’s "guns for slaves" legacy, Jim Crow, and modern racial disparities like shorter sentences for Black-on-Black killings. C-SPAN’s Washington Journal platform underscores unfiltered democracy coverage while spotlighting how systemic violence devalues Black lives across history. [Automatically generated summary]
In so many ways, that was the starting point of what the book would become.
Until that point, I had been writing a book about the true cost of gun violence in this country in terms of actual dollars.
But once I had my heart attack, it forced me to widen the aperture on what it means to experience violence in this country and what we carry within us and how all of the violence we see and experience, especially like people in this country, can manifest in physical ways.
And so at 38, I had this heart attack, and my then five, turning, six-year-old daughter was asking me how and why.
And so I had to be honest about what it was that was bearing down my heart.
And it had been a career of carrying bits of trauma and violence that I covered as a reporter, but also a family history that had been marked with gun violence.
And so it made sense to start there because it changed a lot for me personally, but also in the writing of the book.
So this wasn't the original name, but after the heart attack, I was wrestling with the difference between a blood clot that caused my heart attack and a bullet.
And now they are very different things, but both have the power to take an end or shred a life.
And I arrived at my blood clot in the same ways that many other people experienced the bullet from this kind of structures of American society and the history and everything that we carry.
And so it was, you know, important, I think, to kind of clarify the many ways in which we die In this country.
So, there are a thousand ways a bullet is just one.
But the original idea was sparked after I met a young man back in 2003 when I was just an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News covering the police and crime beat, a young man named Kevin Johnson, who was left paralyzed after being shot during a robbery.
And I met Kevin and his family, and he just had so much hope and buoyance despite his condition.
But then I spoke to his mother about the true cost to this family, not just in Kevin's mobility, but all the myriad costs it would take just to get him out of the hospital, which meant a new wheel, a special wheelchair, a special van to transport the wheelchair, a ramp for their North Philadelphia row home, the widening of the doors just to get the wheelchair in the door, a changing of the receptacles, all of these actual costs.
And in that moment, I was thinking to myself, like, you know, I don't think people care about the Kevin Johnsons of the world, but maybe they care that we're all paying a literal cost for gun violence.
Because most people who, you know, survive a gunshot, most of them don't have private insurance.
It's public insurance.
So the public, we're literally paying the price.
And so maybe that might get people's attention and force us to have the conversation about the cost we're willing to pay for this gun violence.
And so that was like the initial seed of the idea.
And then once I had my heart attack and I had to weigh again the aperture of violence, it changed everything.
And I'll just share a quote from your book about that.
It says this: Although I have been physically healthy most of my life, my heart and spirit have taken on tremendous psychic burdens.
I've spent more than 20 years as a journalist reporting on stories that led me to people who had just missed death or others who were withering from the weight of someone else's.
I've chronicled the tragedy of lives taken too soon, most often with guns.
I have traced the paths of bullets ricocheting from person to person, wreaking physical and emotional havoc long after victims are laid to rest or their scars colloid over.
That is a quote from A Thousand Ways to Die, and our guest is Tremaine Lee, the author of that book.
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I want to ask you about guns in particular because you talk in your book about kind of the history of guns and how it has played a role in African-American life and history.
You know, it's important for me as I was tracking back, excuse me, the ways in which the gun in particular has shaped black life in this country.
In some ways, it's the literal physical gun, the violence of the trigger and the bullet.
But it's also important to talk about the systems and structures of systemic violence that are almost requisite before you ever get to a gun being fired.
By the time you get to the gun and its impact on Black life, there's been generations of other violence.
But in doing my research and trying to understand from the very beginning how guns have shaped our American experience, we actually have to go back to Africa, which I do in the book.
I think there's this conception from a lot of us, the way we're taught about slavery, is that there were just a surplus of humans from these wars that were happening.
And Europeans came and Americans came and just wanted to take advantage of this untapped labor force, right, to handle the needs, the growing needs of labor in the Western world.
When in fact, what we see is what's known as the guns for slave cycle, in which as gun technology was rising in Europe, the powers in Europe were applying regional African powers with guns to create the war to create the slave, to create the conditions for the slave.
And so before the first shackle feet of black people landed in what will become the United States, their bodies, their lives were bartered and sold between European powers and their African co-conspirators.
And so this notion that black people were pushed out of Africa with the muzzle of a flintlock rifle at their backs and then introduced to the Western world where there would be more men, white men with guns to maintain a system of chattel slavery for generations and generations.
And it would take guns and violence to free enslaved people, hundreds of thousands of which of those soldiers were black men with guns, only to have to fight to push back against the black codes and Jim Crow and all the violence and tumult of the lynching era and through the civil rights era to the modern day America we see today with streets flooded with guns and blood and violence.
And so the ways in which guns have certainly physically shaped black life and limited black life, while also guns in some situations used to defend and protect black life has created a dynamic that we carry with us today.
So growing up, I was always aware of my grandfather's murder back in 1976, just a couple years before I was born.
My grandparents had an apartment in Camden, New Jersey, and they went to rent it to a prospective tenant who left a deposit of $160.
And he left for many weeks.
And then he came back and won his money back.
And my grandfather told him that the deposit was non-refundable and that he would see him in court.
Instead of meeting my grandfather in court, he came back and shot and killed my grandfather.
And so growing up, I was always aware of the tremendous burden and loss of my grandfather's murder.
But it wasn't the first time someone in my family had been killed.
In researching and reporting this book, I discovered the first killing in our family was back in 1922.
My great-grandparents and my grandmother were tenant farmers in rural Jim Crow, Georgia.
And around the end of the year, my grandmother's brother, 12 years old, Cornelius, was sent off to run errands, and he was shot and killed in the neighboring Sundown Town.
For those who don't know, Sundown Towns are communities where it was explicit, not necessarily in law, but in practice, that Black people couldn't be there during certain times of the day or evening.
And so this is where he was killed.
My family then joins the Great Migration after that, joining millions of other Black Americans fleeing the violence of the South to the North in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia and Baltimore and New Jersey.
And many years after they arrived, another of my grandmother's brothers, a teenager named McClinton, was shot and killed by a state trooper under very mysterious circumstances.
And then my grandfather's killing in 76.
And then in 96, I had a stepbrother who was murdered in Camden.
And so my family has experienced the many ways in which Black people in this country experience violence.
The white supremacist, overtly racist kind of violence, the violence of the state, police, and law enforcement, the violence of community.
And so, in so many ways, my family's story tracks right alongside Black America's story in how we experience the violence and carry the violence.
If you'd like to join the conversation with our guest, Tremaine Lee, author of the book A Thousand Ways to Die, you can go ahead and do so now: Republicans 2027488001, Democrats 202748, 8000, and Independents 202748802.
I'll read to you another portion of your book and get your comment on it.
It says this: My mother would never let us play with toy guns.
On birthdays and other celebrations, she would grow anxious at the sight of balloons because they threatened to explode unexpectedly like gunfire.
Decades later, she is still racked by the memory of the images of her daddy's body on a gurney on full display during the trial of the man who killed him.
My mother told me that losing a loved one to murder is like losing a limb.
Quote, it's almost like cutting off a major part of your body.
It's just like you have to learn to compensate, and you can't really, because it's gone and it's never coming back.
They did their best to cope, but we're reminded every moment that they had been disfigured.
There's a deep unfairness in the pangs of this kind of death, of having a loved one snatched away so violently.
But there's also the unfairness of a carceral system that doesn't have the capacity or desire to value black life, let alone justice to black victims of violence, especially when the perpetrator is also black.
Can you talk about that last part, Tremaine, on black and black violence and what you consider dismissiveness on the part of the criminal justice system?
The idea of black lives mattering is almost cliche at this point, and it's such a charged up and loaded idea and phrase.
But when you think about in this country, the level of gun violence that we experience, and even though black people experience gun violence disproportionately, about half, almost a half of those who die by guns are also white.
And so America has a gun violence problem.
But then when we get into the engagement with the carceral system, the police and the investigators, the judges, and how we're sentenced, it's as disparate as and unequal as in life.
That if you kill a white man, you do substantially more time than you kill a black man.
So even in how we sentence folks, it still comes down to race and the value of the victim of that violence.