Matthew Moore: In the summer of 2020, a teenager from Los Angeles traveled 1,000 miles to join the racial justice movement of his generation happening in Seattle. But less than a week after he arrived at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, Antonio Mays Jr. was shot and killed there, and the case remains unsolved.
Reporters from the Seattle Times and KUOW came together to report an eight-part podcast series called "We Keep Us Safe.” as a part of NPR's "Embedded" podcast. Will James is a reporter and producer with KUOW and one of the hosts of the series. He says a lot of this podcast has been about re-examining what happened six years ago, including getting some actual details about Antonio Mays Jr.
James: I mean, when he was killed in 2020, his family did not really speak out publicly in a big way, so we just had the bare facts. His name was Antonio Mays Jr. he was 16 years old, he was a Black kid from Southern California and protesters at the time told us that their volunteer security forces shot Antonio because he was a threat. He was in the process of some kind of attack on this protest zone, either a mass shooting or a car attack.
What we learned was that Antonio actually left his home in Southern California to join the protest movement in Seattle. He grew up steeped in the history of the Civil Rights movement, of Black history. His dad had extensive conversations with him about what it means to be Black in America. And so Antonio, against his father's wishes, left home to join what he saw as the Civil Rights movement of his generation. And so from there, questions emerged: How did this kid, this idealistic 16-year-old who came to Seattle to protest, come to be seen as a threat to the encampment?
Moore: You and your colleagues spoke to nearly 100 people in your reporting on this, and I'm intrigued in people like Ashley, who was a person who was live streaming the event. When your team spoke to her for the podcast, she was answering interview questions from her job in a drive-thru fast food restaurant. It just sets a very good mental picture in your mind of who this person is. Tell me more about the kinds of people you heard from and some of their experiences.
James: It was so interesting because my co-reporters and I, Sydney Brownstone and David Gutman, all covered CHOP in 2020. We all covered the racial justice movement here in Seattle as reporters on the ground. And so we had encountered a lot of these people as protesters, as live streamers. And so when we started reporting this five years later, it was like catching up with these people that we'd either heard of or met on the ground, and finding out where they ended up, where they are today.
Some of these people were breakout leaders of this movement. They had been regular people before George Floyd was killed. And then, literally days later, they were sitting across from the mayor negotiating. And five years later, they're somewhere else. They're back to their lives. Some of these people volunteered as protest security. They came to the protest to try to keep it safe from what they saw as threats of political violence from right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys. And today they are back, normal people living their lives. So we also talked to some police officers, city officials, a range of people who were attached to CHOP, who were connected to this chapter in Seattle's history. Yeah, it was interesting to catch up with these people and see where they ended up.
Moore: Well, that leads really well into this idea of live streaming and not really realizing you were going to be as popular and as big as you were. And when the moment happened, I lived in St. Louis when Ferguson happened, and there was a lot of that that happened too. And this was really kind of the moment where we saw this giant peak of live streaming and vigilante journalism, really. And when we think about the way that this story revolves around constant live streaming and sharing the news as it happens, moment by moment, and yet there is this unsolved murder that happened in the midst of all of it that we still don't know details about six years later, what can we learn from this gap between live streaming everything and analyzing things later on?
James: Yes, that's such an interesting question. CHOP, like you say, and other recent big moments in our nation's history were awash in live streamers documenting everything. And I think what we learned is that these live streamers, in some cases, saw themselves as somewhere between a journalist, a protester, somebody who was aligned with the movement, but also making content from the movement. And so while they captured some of the events of that night on video, live streamers like Ashley that you referenced also, in the moment, saw a need to protect the people on the ground, to not show their faces, to curate the image of this protest for a national audience in a way that was sympathetic or that protected people. And that is something that a traditional or mainstream journalist might not have done.
I want to carve out some exceptions. Omari Salisbury, a local journalist here, live streamed the entire protest that summer and captured some of the most important footage of several key moments. So it was a range of people. But you're pointing to something real. There was this impulse to document but also protect.
Moore: Well, to that point, when you think about producing a podcast like this, how do you, as reporters, think about making yourselves characters in the story as opposed to just simply reporting it? I think when we think of NPR reporting, it's usually, let me show you the story and not let me show you how I was involved in the story.
James: Yeah, I think when we looked at how to tell this story, more than 100 interviews, dozens of hours of video footage that we went through, all these documents and records, the simplest way to tell the story was to just explain how we reported it. We went back and forth about the best way to do this. Was this story Antonio's journey? Is it the journey of the protest itself? But just, as listeners will find out, there's just so much density to this story, and it was so complicated to try to unspool it all that I think we just made a decision: Let's just take listeners inside our process and show them how we found a bunch of this stuff, and we kind of went from there.
Moore: Do you view this at all as a lesson in media literacy?
James: Oh, yeah. I think honestly, a lot of the subtext in this podcast is about media, including the way that mainstream journalists like us covered this protest movement in 2020.
I think what is the value of reflecting on a big event like this five years later? It's to give people who participated an opportunity to reflect on it five years later, to speak out when maybe they weren't willing to speak out, but also to give us as journalists a chance to kind of correct our mistakes, to fill in gaps that we failed to report at the time. And I think that's what listeners will see us doing throughout this podcast is: paying attention to dynamics, to clues, to things that we did not pick up on in the moment, but we have the hindsight to do five years later.
Moore: Will James is a reporter and producer with KUOW and one of the co-hosts of "We Keep Us Safe." You can listen right now when you search for NPR's "Embedded" in your podcast app.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
