A city proud of its role in facing down hatred confronts a new wave of violence

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

There was a time, not so very long ago, when this city earned the nickname “Bombingham,” renowned for senseless violence and its strength in confronting the racial hatred that fueled it.

But days after Birmingham endured its third mass shooting of 2024, officials and residents who know what it means to be tested are voicing a new strain of frustration and despair.

With 122 homicides so far this year, the vast majority of them carried out with guns, Birmingham could well break its decades-old record for killings. And in a city that takes great pride in its history of facing down demons, it is increasingly hard for many to see a way out.

“I’m sick of it. I’m really sick of it,” Crystal Smitherman, who represents the nightlife district where four people were killed and 17 injured in a shooting over the weekend, said during an emotional city council meeting Tuesday. “I don’t care what you have to do, put the hammer down.”

Outside the chamber, resident Robert Banks, recalling how his mother survived the bombing of the city's 16th Street Baptist Church during the civil rights upheaval of the 1960s, expressed similar anguish. The spate of shootings, he said, raises doubt about preserving the city that generation fought for.

“If we don’t get a grip on what’s to come and what’s happening now, we ain’t going to have no Birmingham,” said Banks, who knew at least three of those killed in Saturday’s shooting.

Birmingham is hardly a stranger to violence. In the 1950s and 1960s it gained worldwide attention when segregationists, bent on defeating Black residents’ push for equality, unleashed a series of explosions. The most infamous came in 1963, when four Black girls were killed in the church bombing by four members of the Ku Klux Klan.

But the shooting Saturday outside a nightclub, as well as other recent killings, are very different. Nearly all the shooters and their victims are Black, many of them young men determined to settle disputes with bullets. And the widespread availability of devices that convert handguns to automatic weapons that can fire dozens of shots with a single pull of the trigger has made street-corner shootings much more lethal.

“What we’re seeing is when individuals get upset with their fellow brother or sister, they choose firearms to settle that argument,” said Birmingham police Officer Truman Fitzgerald, who serves as the department's public information contact. “It’s difficult to change the culture. That takes a community, not just the police department.”

Shootings in the city happen with enough frequency that many families, including at least one of those who lost loved ones Saturday, have been affected repeatedly. In a previous quadruple killing in July, one of the young men killed was a cousin of two others who lost their lives in a January mass shooting.

To put the violence in Birmingham into perspective, it helps to compare it to other cities as well as its own past.

The 135 homicides that Birmingham saw last year average about one killing for every 1,500 residents. That is about 14 times greater than New York City, where last year’s roughly 390 murders averaged about one for every 21,000 residents.

Crime is down in most cities nationwide. But Birmingham and some other Southern cities are ticking in the other direction, said Thaddeus Johnson, a former police officer who is now a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice.

“You have laxer gun laws as opposed to other places. You also have these histories of social injustice, economic inequities. … It’s all those things kind of mixed together,” he said. “Crime has gone down overall, but for black folk, that’s not necessarily the same story.”

In Birmingham, the record for homicides was set in 1933, when 148 people were killed. Back then, the city was a fast-growing center of industry. By 1960, drawn by jobs in steel mills and factories that built railroad cars, Birmingham’s population topped 340,000.

Its fortunes changed dramatically when Birmingham was wracked by the battle over civil rights for African Americans. The city garnered global attention in 1963 when civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail laying out a case against racial segregation, followed months later by the church bombing.

Many white residents fled for the suburbs. Birmingham, a majority-Black city, has struggled to reinvent itself as a center of healthcare and education as industrial jobs have dwindled. By last year, the Census Bureau estimates, the population had fallen just below 200,000. Nearly a quarter of city residents live at or below the poverty line, significantly higher than national and state averages.

Even with far fewer people than in past decades, Birmingham could break a record for homicides that has stood for more than 90 years, if homicides continue at the current rate.

Years ago, residents spoke of Birmingham fondly as a place where they could live out their lives and enjoy retirement, said Sheila Everson, whose son was injured in the Saturday night shooting and whose nephew was among the dead.

Now the city feels “like Chicago or Iraq, you know, we’re in a war zone,” says Everson, who lost another nephew in a 2017 shooting.

“They took two of my nephews. I’ll be damned if I let them take three. So we -- my family -- we have to get up out of here,” she said this week.

“I think it’s no secret that it has gotten worse,” says Te’Andria Ellis, who founded a Birmingham group that works to divert young people from gun violence after her 22-year-old brother was killed in a 2012 shooting. That year, there were 77 homicides in the city, she recalls.

“I believe the citizens of Birmingham have, at a point in time, shown just how strong and resilient we are and can be,” she says. “And as I look at what is happening now, I still believe that we will demonstrate how strong and resilient we can be beyond the tragedies our communities have experienced, particularly this year.”