Book Event - A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America
Fri, Apr 24
|Sankofa Video Books & Café
Join us for a powerful conversation with author and journalist Trymaine Lee on A Thousand Ways to Die and the true cost of violence on Black life in America. In conversation with Prof. Greg Thomas
Time & Location
Apr 24, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Sankofa Video Books & Café, 2714 Georgia Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001, USA
Guests
About The Event
About the book
A deeply personal exploration of the generational impact of guns on the Black experience in America.
A few years ago, though fit and only 38, I nearly died of a heart attack. When my then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked me why, I realized that to answer her honestly, I had to confront what almost killed me—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.
In this powerful narrative, I weave three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; my work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and…