Roy S. Johnson: Again, Black folks, killing each other was not MLK’s dream nor blueprint for us
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on January 22, 2025
“Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in “What is Your Life’s Blueprint?” speech
Hard to believe it’s been three years. Disheartening that it’s been three years.
Downright shameful it’s been that long.
Another three years of inexcusable and unexplainable insanity.
Another three years of unfathomable grief. Of unmitigated and justifiable anger.
Three years and we’re still shooting and killing each other, Black people.
Shooting and killing each other in our homes, in our cars, and on our streets.
Shooting and killing each other as if our lives don’t matter.
Three years ago, on this national holiday celebrating the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, I wrote a column with the headline: “Black folks, we must honor Dr. King this way: Stop killing each other. Especially our children.”
Just days earlier, 16-year-old Yasmine Wright was killed in Birmingham by a bullet intended for someone else as she rode home from work with her great aunt.
One day prior, 18-year-old De’Undray Nakil Haggard was killed by gunfire by someone he met outside an apartment. The week before, 18-year-old Jireh Portis was killed, and her ex-boyfriend, 22-year-old Dayvon Bray, has since pleaded guilty to murder. (He also pleaded guilty to manslaughter in another shooting.)
All the while our hearts ached for Aniah Blanchard and Kamille “Cupcake” McKinney. They still do.
Here’s an excerpt from that column:
Today, as we do each January, we should do — all of us — we’ll honor the life, legacy and sacrifice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We’ll re-read his salient quotes, most of which are as relevant today, sadly, as they were last century.
We’ll hold hands, too, and sing, We Shall Overcome. Some day.
We’ll do all those things, as we should. All of us.
Black folks, we must do more. On this day and beyond, we must honor Dr. King in the way that matters most right now. We must stop killing each other.
Just. Stop.
We didn’t. Not even close.
In the three bloody, deadly years since that column was published there’ve been 532 homicides in Birmingham. Among them the well-chronicled and widely mourned 151 homicide deaths last year, the most in a year in the city since 1933. Not all of them, of course, were perpetrated by African Americans. But in a city that is 70 percent Black — as I wrote in 2022 — “the hard truth is so many of them” were.
Too many of them. Just as there have been far too many Black perpetrators and victims in Jefferson County, Montgomery and other Alabama cities since then.
In 2022, 2,526 children died by gunfire in the U.S., the third straight year guns were the leading cause of death among American youth, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Last year in Birmingham, 10 children were among the killed: Aston Starkey, 13; Markell Sanders, 15; Prentice Lovell Little, 15; Cornelia Rose Lathan, 15; Jaylin Lee Jenkins, 16; Alexis Elizabeth Wise, 16; Jaquavius James Weston, 18; and Jonathan O’Dell Thomas Jr., 18; and 5-year-old Landyn Brooks.
So, today, as we once again celebrate King’s life and sacrifice, my message, sadly, is the same — though laced with more urgency, more bewilderment, and a lot more fire:
Why the hell are we still doing this?!
Why are we still shooting and killing each other? Over dice games, petty beefs and jealousy.
Why are we killing our own dreams? Killing dreams our mothers, fathers and grandparents birthed and nurtured for us. Dreams they poured into us. Dreams counted on us to grow.
Killing every victim’s dreams. Killing their families’ dreams.
Killing the dreams of the children they left behind.
Killing King’s dream.
How we got here was infinitely longer in the making than just three years, and its whys are conflated with more factors than should cloud this day. Like poverty and redlining, like disappearing manufacturing jobs and underfunded schools, like a criminal justice system that ripped generations of Black men from their homes for offenses that wouldn’t merit a citation today, a system that now keeps some there as forced labor when they’ve been deemed safe enough to work outside prison walls but not live outside those walls.
Earlier this month, an august group of Birmingham leaders published a comprehensive 66-page game plan for addressing gun violence in the city. In the coming weeks my AL.com colleagues and I will digest and dissect its findings, dig deeper into its recommendations, and hold city leaders accountable for its quick funding and implementation.
Accountable for its bold aim to make Birmingham “the safest city in America.”
I’ve read through the recommendations and will have much more to say about them. It’s not likely any of them, though, can remold the mindset of someone who doesn’t value themselves enough to dream. Or refrain from pulling a trigger that steals someone else’s dream.
On Oct. 26, 1967, Dr. King spoke to students at Barrett Junior High School in Philadelphia. (He was in the city for a rally hosted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference featuring Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Joan Baez and others.) By then — four years after his most famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial — King had moved from dreaming to devising strategies for Black workers to gain higher wages and dignity in their jobs.
That dignity, he charged in numerous speeches during that period, began from within.
The talk at the school, which no longer exists, lasted about 20 minutes. It was titled, “What is Your Life’s Blueprint?” In it, King said: “Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel like you have worth.”
Worth enough to live. Worth enough to dream. Worth enough to stop shooting and killing us.
Six months later, King was killed by an assassin’s bullet as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
READ full text of King’s remarks here.
Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at rjohnson@al.com, and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.