BirminghamWatch

A White Son Raised by a Black Man: Seeing Race From a Unique Perspective

Kevin Sims, who is white, remembers being on a beach when another white fellow asked him for a cigarette. As the pair talked, the subject of football came up. And the other fellow showed his true colors. “He was like, 'Why I wanna watch football?’” Sims recalled. “I don't wanna watch a bunch of (N-words) run up and down a field chasing each other.'” Sims, who was raised by a Black man since the time he was 3, couldn’t stand for that. Read more.

by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.

Sticks and Stones: Racist Comments Affect Policy, Law and Discrimination

One time she was in a beauty salon when it happened, Pam King remembers. Another time, she was in the drug store. One time it happened while she was driving down the street in Vestavia Hills. In each instance, another white person — someone she didn’t know — decided it was OK to say something to her that was racist about Black people. “You can hear it every day. You can hear it … anywhere,” King said. “You hear from white people, constantly, ‘Well, did you hear what the Black people are doing?’ Just all kinds of little comments, every day. It's part of the conversation.” Read more.

by Nick Patterson

Sometimes, Media Have to Remind Government Who It Works For (That Would Be You)

Imagine giving some money to an investment broker and when you later ask what the broker did with it, you’re told it’s none of your business. I see no difference between that and what agencies of state and local governments in Alabama do whenever they reject or ignore a citizen’s request for government records. This happens too often in Alabama and elsewhere: — In June, the city of Decatur denied an open-records request by multiple news outlets for disciplinary records of a police officer involved in a physical assault of a storeowner. — In May, the environmental advocacy group Gasp and the Environmental Defense Alliance filed a lawsuit against three state of Alabama agencies that have denied access to emails involving state opposition to a federal environmental cleanup of a North Birmingham neighborhood. — Last year, the state Attorney General’s Office (one of the agencies sued by Gasp) rejected a request by an Alabama Media Group reporter to see a contract signed with an industrial safety expert as part of a new plan to allow death-penalty executions by nitrogen gas. — In 2017, WBRC-TV asked to see the $2.6 million contract between the city of Birmingham and a company called ShotSpotter that detects gunshots and pinpoints their location. The station also asked for data compiled by ShotSpotter. Three years later, the city still has not provided the data or even the contract. — You’d think that in a pandemic, when smart behavior depends on having full and accurate information, that there’d be no secrets. But you’d be wrong, as shown by the Alabama Department of Public Health’s refusal of an AMG request to identify individual state-licensed nursing homes that have reported coronavirus cases. In each of these cases, there is a legitimate public interest. And in each of these cases, the reason cited for rejection was an incorrect interpretation of Alabama’s open-records law. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Descendants Want to Remove Gadsden’s Emma Sansom Monument

A descendant of Emma Sansom said members of Sansom's family support removing a Confederate monument in Gadsden that memorializes their ancestor. The statue of Sansom near City Hall has become a target for conflict between Black Lives Matter protesters and counter-protesters. The fray began with national protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed May 25 by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Sansom is a heroine of Confederate lore for her role in helping rebel Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest capture Union Col. Abel Streight and his brigade in 1863. Streight appeared to have escaped Forrest’s pursuit across north Alabama by crossing and then burning a bridge spanning Black Creek at Gadsden. Read more.

by Scott Morris

Generation After Generation, the Need for Black Parents and Children to Have ‘The Talk’ Continues

Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. I must have been speeding. No, you weren’t speeding. I wasn’t speeding? You didn’t do anything wrong. Then why are you pulling me over? Why am I pulled over? Put your hands where they can be seen. Put your hands in the air. Put your hands up. — From “Stop and Frisk,” by the Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine Ralph Cook and Grover Dunn were born in the early 1940s, and though they did not know each other until much later, they had some things in common. Both were black, both were raised in Bessemer, both have had long public careers and have been among the first blacks to hold various public posts in what used to be “the Cutoff.” Being black, Cook and Dunn also had another shared experience – a talk from their parents about how to behave in the presence of the police. That experience is one they hold in common with black children and parents in Alabama and across the country, including black parents nearly half their age, such as Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Chris England. As adults, Cook and Dunn have had what is commonly referred to as “the talk” with their children and their grandchildren. “It’s a shame we have to do this,” said Dunn, the assistant tax collector in the Bessemer Division. “But we do it constantly.” Read more.

by Tom Gordon

Protests Over Confederate Monuments Spread to Small Towns Across Alabama

Chants of “black lives matter” and “take it down” echo across the courthouse square. Protesters wave signs and shout their disapproval of an anonymous Confederate soldier, immortalized in monument and towering over them. This is not Birmingham or Mobile or some other urban center of Alabama with a core population of black residents. This is Florence, tucked away in the remote northwest corner of the state, with a population that is 75% white. The protests from more populated Southern cities are filtering down to the hinterlands, with people in smaller and sometimes more conservative cities such as Florence, Gadsden, Anniston, Opelika, Jasper, Athens, Selma and Tuskegee showing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Read more.

by Scott Morris

Vestiges of Segregation Remain. America Is Fighting Over Them Today.

To understand today’s protests, you have to look at yesterday’s racial inequities, historians say. And you have to realize that, as famously noted by William Faulkner, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” America’s long history of racial inequality explains much about the intense, sometimes violent protests around the country that lately have cast a spotlight on issues of police brutality and lingering vestiges of the segregated past. It goes beyond Confederate monuments and beyond a single killing of an unarmed black man. “Even though the George Floyd murder was horrendous and absolutely impossible to watch, it shouldn’t blind us to the fact that racial violence has been with us and our country since its inception,” said John Giggie, an associate professor of history and director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. “For me, any conversation about George Floyd doesn’t begin yesterday, it doesn’t begin with the civil rights movement. It goes all the way back to when we know at least 17 enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestown in August of 1619. And there we began really an American tradition of unfreedom that has persisted in some vein all the way to the present moment as seen by the recent killings of unarmed black citizens,” Giggie said. He’s not the only one to connect present day problems with past discrimination. The issues thread through society. Schools with high minority populations often are poorer than majority-white schools; buying houses can be more difficult for blacks because of lending practices; health care is not as readily available in some majority black areas; black men are incarcerated in prisons at higher rates than are white men. This is the first of a series of stories from BirminghamWatch that will explore those legacies of race. Read more.

Conversation Begins Over What White Privilege Means in Society Today

Earlier this month, in response to the ongoing protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel delivered a monologue on his new acceptance of the term “white privilege.” He said he’d rejected the concept because he didn’t understand it. But now, he said, he does. “People who are white, we don’t have to deal with negative assumptions being made about us based on the color of our skin. It rarely happens, if ever. Whereas black people experience that every day,” Kimmel said. This is perhaps a sign of how recently he — and American culture at large — have begun to grapple with the concept of “white privilege.” Read more.

by Nick Patterson

Conversation Begins Over What White Privilege Means in Society Today

Earlier this month, in response to the ongoing protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel delivered a monologue on his new acceptance of the term “white privilege.” He said he’d rejected the concept because he didn’t understand it. But now, he said, he does. “People who are white, we don’t have to deal with negative assumptions being made about us based on the color of our skin. It rarely happens, if ever. Whereas black people experience that every day,” Kimmel said. This is perhaps a sign of how recently he — and American culture at large — have begun to grapple with the concept of “white privilege.” Read more.

by Sam Prickett

Execute Journalists? Don’t Think It Hasn’t Happened

President Trump’s reported statement that journalists who publish leaked information should be “executed” is a more explicit and heinous extension of his repeated “enemy of the people” trope. It’s so far beyond the pale that the only necessary reaction is ridicule, then dismissal as nothing more than Trump venting berserkly in private*. Except for the fact that it has happened. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that in the past 18 months, 14 journalists around the world have been murdered because they were journalists. UNESCO reports some that CPJ does not, including one as recently as this month. Some of the assassinations have suspected ties to government officials, others to political or criminal groups. Read more.

by Tom Arenberg

Hundreds Gather in Birmingham to Celebrate Juneteenth

Hundreds of people gathered at Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park on Friday to commemorate Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery. Onoyemi Williams is with the group Alabama Rally Against Injustice. She said after weeks of protests and demonstrations, today is a celebration of Black lives. “Because when you’re at war, you must take the time for self care and celebration,” she said. “We’re celebrating where we’re at so we can prepare for where we have to go.” Read more.

by Janae Pierre, WBHM