He drove his wife to one of the best hospitals in America for a planned caesarean. A routine one. Her second. Charles Johnson watched her blood collect in a catheter bag for ten hours while he asked for help. Kira Johnson died at 2:22am. Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, 12th April 2016. Kira Johnson was 39. She spoke five languages, raced cars, ran marathons. The caesarean was scheduled. Everything about it was routine. Her son Langston was delivered at midday. By the afternoon her husband could see blood in her catheter. He told a nurse. He was told they would check. He asked again. And again. A CT scan was ordered and then not performed. He has described being told, at one point, that his wife was simply not a priority right now. He stood in a corridor for ten hours asking people to look at his wife. They took her back to theatre just after midnight. There were three litres of blood in her abdomen. She died shortly after. Her son Langston was twelve hours old. Charles Johnson has spent the decade since as one of the most effective advocates in American maternal health. He founded 4Kira4Moms. He has testified before Congress. The federal Black maternal health legislation introduced in recent years carries work he pushed for. He talks about one thing more than any other, and it is not the medicine. It is the ten hours. He was standing right there, in the building, awake, articulate, asking. And it made no difference at all.

He missed the school bus. So Brennan Walker, fourteen, walked the route from memory and got lost, and knocked on a door to ask for directions. A woman screamed. Her husband came down the stairs with a sh0tgun. Rochester Hills, Michigan. The morning of 12 April 2018. His phone was dead. He had never had to walk it before. He knocked. Through the glass he tried to explain he had missed the bus and needed to know which way the school was. The woman inside started shouting that he was trying to break in. Her husband, Jeffrey Zeigler, a retired firefighter, came downstairs with a sh0tgun. Brennan ran. Zeigler came out onto the porch and fired at the back of a running fourteen-year-old. The shot missed. It is on the house's own doorbell camera, which is why we are not relying on anybody's memory. Brennan kept running until he found someone to call his mother. Zeigler was charged and convicted of assault with intent to do great bodily harm and a firearm offence, and sentenced to four to ten years. Brennan's mother, Lisa Wright, said afterwards that she had taught him what to do if he got lost. Go to a house. Knock on a door. Ask an adult. Every parent teaches that. It is the single most basic instruction there is. He did it exactly right, and a man fired a shotgun at him for it. He was fourteen, and he was late for school. This is why in our book we confront the painful history too many people never hear. We must never forget these injustices Get yours: savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…