Journalist Trymaine Lee reveals how covering Black death nearly killed him — and the book it inspired

In his new book “A Thousand Ways to Die,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Trymaine Lee, documents the cost of gun violence on Black America and the multiple ways he inherited a spirit of survival from his ancestors.

Journalist Trymaine Lee never saw it coming.  After years of covering the traumas and heartbreak of Black people in America with his hard-hitting reporting, the last thing Lee was expecting was to be fighting for his own life.

But two years into writing a book about the impact of gun violence on Black Americans, initially called “Million Dollar Bullet”—an allusion to the cost of shootings—Lee was hit with something as deadly as a bullet–a blood clot.

The healthy former athlete turned MSNBC contributor was having a heart attack at the mere age of 38.

“Blood clots and bullets, right, very different things, but both can twist and shatter life—and some are from the same impulses of how we experience America,” Lee tells theGrio.

A piece of plaque had broken off and clogged his artery, sending him to the hospital and upending his life as a father, husband, and working professional.

True to his bloodline, Lee survived and recovered and is now out with a new book called “A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.” It’s the completed version of the first book he was writing at the time of the heart attack, but with a new lease and a broader lens.

“My [six-year old] daughter was asking me about how and why… and to be honest with her and to be raw with her, I had to engage with what really was bearing down on my heart, which was a career filled with telling the stories of Black death and survival in this country, but also a history of my own family going back to the Jim Crow South of gun violence and each kind of gun violence.”

Lee had a long list of family members impacted by gun violence to draw experience from: a great uncle who was shot and killed in a sundown town, another great uncle who was killed by a state trooper, his grandfather killed by a disgruntled prospective renter, and his own stepbrother, tragically shot in the back of the head.

In “A Thousand Ways To Die,” Lee tells their stories with journalistic detail and compassionate storytelling, making them feel like family members the reader themselves can connect with.

Lee also connects individual stories with the larger policy decisions—or failures—that lead to certain outcomes.

For example, there is an underground gun market that transports thousands of illegally made guns from the rural south to inner cities where gun laws are tight.  Lee writes about “straw gun purchases” where eligible citizens buy guns that they sell to criminals and others who should never have a weapon.

With care, Lee draws the connection between failed systems like poverty and broken schools and failing healthcare, that can push a desperate person into the dangerous work of the gun underworld—fueling the exchange of weapons that shatters the hearts of communities.

“It’s not just the violence of the gun, it’s the violence, lack of access to quality healthcare and education and water and air,” Lee tells theGrio. “It’s the violence of the stress that has black folks sleeping fewer hours with higher incidents of cardiac issues. There are a thousand ways for us to die in this country, and gun violence is only one.”

Lee says that “A Thousand Ways To Die” isn’t meant to be prescriptive in telling people exactly what to do to eliminate gun violence, but instead focuses on illuminating the true dynamics of how it’s a public health concern.

At a time when the Trump administration’s plans to address crime in cities call for even more guns and police presence, the DC US Attorney General recently announced that there won’t be prosecution for carrying registered rifles and shotguns in the District of Columbia, public discourse could benefit from engaging with the root causes and evidence-based understanding of violence.

“Places with more restricted gun laws typically have less gun-related death,” Lee tells TheGrio. “Those states and jurisdictions that have looser gun laws and more guns have higher rates of death, and not just of homicide, but suicides.”

Through it all, Lee wants the world to understand there is a cost paid by everyone when bullets spray freely and human life, especially Black life, is undervalued.

“The real cost we pay, not just in loss of life; we’re talking about a chilling of hopes and dreams right in communities—these boundaries placed on our imaginations.”

Watch the full conversation about “A Thousand Ways To Die” with author Trymaine Lee, in the video player above, and subscribe to TheGrio Weekly on our YouTube channel.

Natasha S. Alford is the Senior Vice President of TheGrio. A recognized journalist, filmmaker, and TV analyst, Alford is also the author of the award-winning book, “American Negra.” (HarperCollins, 2024) Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @natashasalford.