Roy S. Johnson: Birmingham’s Blood Is on the Hands of Alabama Republicans and a Silent Trump

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 I’ve lived in for over a decade.

Nothing like Birmingham has seen in decades.

Nearly 65 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking 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.”

Sadly, things have not changed much in more than six decades. Yet last Sunday morning, Birmingham woke up to pain. It woke up to pain, to disease, to anger. All of Birmingham. Every street corner. Every culture.

Every time. Unless. Unless you choose to ignore. To ignore that sick ache in your belly. Not yet wrong.

Unless you choose to ignore the piercing pain. Your neighbor’s pain. Yours. Your Not yet pain.

Typically, we gather in our places of worship on Sunday morning, love on the other members of the church, maybe ask them how they are doing, nod along to a few hymns from the choir (or, in my church, the worship team), and listen to a word from the preacher. Then we go home.

Not last Sunday. Too many of us knew. Maybe we knew one of the more than 20 people shot or senselessly shot on the sidewalk outside a Birmingham nightclub shortly after 11 p.m. Saturday night in Five Points South, hours before Sunday Mass. Maybe we knew someone who knew one of them.

Maybe someone else who was there. Or who could have been there.

“My niece was there,” a member of my church told me Sunday morning. Fortunately, the young woman was not hurt. Not physically. “She will now have to live with that night for the rest of her life.”

Another member posted on social media about his son’s friends who “witnessed the shooting but were not injured… Thank you, Lord.”

In my church we opened every service with hands raised in prayer for our city. I am sure the prayers are similar to those said in places in the region.

Like that terrible Sunday 61 years ago, when a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church — and resulted in the deaths of two young boys — this was not a Sunday to present the horror of mass shootings — mass murder — as a tragedy. their concern.

This is ours, Birmingham. This is all of Birmingham, whether you live within the city limits or beyond, in its metropolitan areas.

All of us. Just like 61 years ago.

We will all live with this, with a night when four more lives were piled atop a mountain of homicides in the city, 123 in 2024, as I write this. A mountain of death that feeds a river of blood that flows south to Montgomery, where irresponsible Republican lawmakers would rather watch Birmingham bleed than enact legislation that will help remedy its ills.

Spill your blood by making it legal to carry a firearm without a license.

Yawn at a bill in this year’s session that would have given teeth to the federal law banning Glock-style switches that turn ordinary guns into killing machines. Sponsored by Montgomery Democrat Phillip Ensler, the state law would make possession of a gun with a switch device a Class C felony in the state and allow state and local authorities to arrest, charge and prosecute without having to wait for federal action, and allow the state to set its own penalties.

Ensler introduced the bill for the 2025 session. Mobile wasn’t enough. Dadeville wasn’t enough. Let us pray that Birmingham, whose historic tragedies reshaped the national sentiment on civil rights generations ago, will soften the hardened hearts of the state’s Republican legislators and lead to the passage of a bill that grants the innocent people of Alabama the right to live.

Of course, state Republicans, like their ilk across the country, are simply following the lead of the man who wants to bring them back to the White House. Donald Trump would rather demonize (and endanger) immigrants living legally in the country and spout false claims about inflation and the economy than stand up for innocent Americans, especially children, who are losing their lives to gun violence and mass shootings across the country.

Let me be very clear about this: Shining this lamp of shame on Republicans in no way absolves the hateful and remorseless shooters of their culpability in this pit of gun violence. gun problem we also have a people problem, and something must be done to remove from our streets those who no longer value life, neither their own nor that of others. And address the conditions that shaped them.

Until we do this, too many lives will be lost needlessly. Too many of us will worry about our loved ones. Too many loved ones will grieve needlessly. Too much blood will be shed.

And it spreads on the hands of those who stand by with their arms crossed, of those who ignore.

A Sunday like we haven’t seen in more than six decades — and pray we never see again — could have shattered our faith. Or strengthened it. We’ll see.

We will all see.

I was raised by good people who encouraged me to be a good man and to surround myself with good people. If I did that, they said, good things would happen. I am a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame, a winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. My column appears on AL.comand digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and Mobile Press-Register. Let me know what you think at [email protected]and follow me on twitter.com/roysjor on Instagram @roysj.