Our crimes, our tragedies, our silence; make me stop writing about them
Updated 9:55 AM;
Today 7:54 AM
A woman was killed and five others injured - ages 21, 17, 16, 15, and 5, when gunfire erupted inside Birmingham s Patton Park on East Sunday night. City and community leaders say it must stop.
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This is an opinion column.
I’ve written this column too many times. I’m incensed because I’ll probably have to write it again.
I’ll keep writing it, too, until Black men and women and children peaceful lawful citizens may safely fellowship in our parks on a beautiful spring Easter Sunday afternoon, can grill for goodness sakes, without having to scurry from gunfire, without having to use their bodies to shield children.
‘They deserve justice’: Families seek answers as Jefferson County ends 2020 with 74 unsolved murders
Updated Dec 31, 2020;
His mother, Nedra Smith, thinks about her first-born, just 15-years-old, every day and every night.
She thinks about how she was just beginning to know what it felt like to have a full-fledged teenager with his driver’s license just around the corner.
She thinks about him when his five younger siblings want to know why they can’t see him.
She thinks about how much help he was as the man of the family, and how that burden now rests on her 13-year-old.
“I don’t sleep because my mind is constantly racing, trying to put together the who and the why,’ Smith said. “I just don’t get what was so bad, so horrible for you to still have life and my child doesn’t. It’s like one of those movies where you are left hanging. I don’t have an ending.”