by Roy S. Johnson, member of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame, an Edward R. Murrow Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary
This is an opinion column.
It wasn’t a typical Sunday morning. It couldn’t have been. Not in Birmingham. Not in or around the city that’s been my home now for more than a decade.
Not like one Birmingham has seen in decades.
Almost 65 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” said: “One of the shameful tragedies is that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour in Christian America.”
That has changed little, alas, in more than six decades. Though on this past Sunday morning, Birmingham woke up hurting. Woke up hurting, sick, and angry. All of Birmingham. Every corner. Every culture.
Every faith. Unless. Unless you chose to ignore. To ignore that sick ache in your gut. That not again ache.
Unless you chose to ignore the piercing pain. Your neighbor’s pain. Your own. Your not again pain.
Typically, we gather at our particular places of worship on Sunday mornings, love on our fellow church members, maybe ask how they’re doing, nod our heads a few hymns from the choir — or at my church, the Praise team — and hear a Word from the preacher. Then go home.
Not this past Sunday. Too many of us knew. Maybe knew one of the more than 20 people senselessly shot or injured on the sidewalk outside a Birmingham nightclub just after 11 o’clock Saturday night in Five Points South, just hours before Sunday service. Maybe knew someone who knew one of them.
Maybe someone else who was there. Or could have been there.
“My niece, she was there,” a member of my church shared with me on Sunday morning. Thankfully, the young woman was not harmed. Not physically. “Now she’ll have to live with that night the rest of her life.”
Another member posted on social media about friends of her son who “witnessed the shooting, but were not injured … Thank you, Lord.”
At my church, we opened each service with hands lifted in prayer for our city. Prayers I am confident similar to those lifted in spaces throughout the region.
Like that awful Sunday 61 years ago, when a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls at 16th Street Baptist Church – and led to the deaths of two young boys, this was not a Sunday to cast the horror of the mass shooting — mass killing— as their concern.
It is ours, Birmingham. All of Birmingham, whether you live inside the defined lines of the city’s borders or beyond them in its metro regions.
All of us. Just like 61 years ago.
We’ll all live with it—with a night when four more lives were piled atop a mountain of homicides in the city, 123 in 2024, as of this writing. A mountain of death that feeds a river of blood flowing south Montgomery, where feckless Republican lawmakers would rather watch Birmingham bleed out than enact legislation that will help address its ills.
Bleed out by making it legal to carry a firearm without a permit.
Bleed out by yawning at a bill during this year’s session that would have given teeth to the federal law banning Glock-like switches that turn ordinary guns into flailing killing machines. Sponsored by Montgomery Democrat Phillip Ensler, the state law would make possession of a weapon with a switching device a Class C felony in the state and allow state and local officials to arrest, charge, and prosecute without having to wait on federal action, and allow the state to establish its own penalties.
Ensler has prefiled the bill for the 2025 session. Mobile wasn’t enough. Dadeville wasn’t enough. Let’s pray Birmingham, whose historic tragedies reshaped national sentiment on civil rights generations ago, softens the hardened hearts of state Republican lawmakers and leads to passage of a bill that grants innocent Alabamians the right to live.
Of course, state Republicans, like their ilk nationwide, are only following the tenor of the man who wants to lead them back to the White House. Donald Trump would rather demonize (and put in harm’s way) immigrants living legally in the country and spew false claims about inflation and the economy than speak up for innocent Americans, especially children, losing their lives to gun violence and mass shootings nationwide.
Let me be very clear about this: There is no single entity that causes gun violence in our nation, just as there is no single solution. But each entity must do its part. Inaction is guilt.
Shining this hot lamp of shame on Republicans in no way absolves local leadership from doing more. From radically addressing the shortage of police officers that has left its ranks thin, drained, and incapable of being the presence they must be to be at least a modicum of a deterrent. From shifting resources to new and proven community-based strategies for ferreting out criminality – and ditching those that just aren’t working. From convening more partnerships with other law enforcement entities to fill the gaps on the street and solve more crimes in less time, perhaps diminishing the time for retribution.
And this light certainly does not absolve the gutless, hate-filled, remorseless shooters of their guilt in this gully of gun violence. We don’t just have a gun problem we also have a people problem, and something must be done to yank those who no longer value life— theirs or anyone’s — from our streets and address the conditions that shaped them.
Until we do, too many more lives will be unnecessarily lost. Too many of us will fret over our loved ones’ whereabouts. Too many loved ones will unnecessarily grieve. Too much blood will be spilled.
And spread onto the hands of those who stand idly by. Those who ignore.
A Sunday like none we’ve seen in more than six decades — and pray to never see again — could have fractured our faith. Or fortified it. We’ll see.
We’ll all see.
