A City Proud of Its Role in Facing Down Hatred Confronts a New Wave of Violence

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.

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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. {snip}

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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