When journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates set out to write about police killings he went to visit Mable Jones. Back in 2000, Jones son, a friend of Coates from their time at Howard University, was shot and killed by police in Virginia. He was twenty five years old.

Written in the form of a letter to his own teenage son, Coates' book "Between the World and Me" puts police shootings in a wider context.

Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke as part of the Lannan Foundation's Pursuit of Cultural Freedom Series.