On Birmingham church bombing anniversary, a call for a unified movement for justice
Richard Trumka, left, president of the AFL-CIO, and Rev. William Barber during the virtual ceremony. Screenshot courtesy of The Poor People’s Campaign.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Rev. William Barber frequently invoked the words and philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a speech on Tuesday commemorating the 57th anniversary of the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Barber, who leads the nonprofit Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, said that the U.S. is again in crisis as it was in 1963. He denounced violence in all its forms, calling it the inevitable result of worsening divisions in society. To heal, he said, requires a recognition that this is a season for various groups and movements to coalesce around shared core values.
“We’re here because we’re deeply concerned about the hate and the division being sewn in our society — not that it’s new, but that it’s being pushed and stoked,” Barber said from the church, where the event was held virtually because of weather concerns due to Hurricane Sally bearing down on the region.
He noted that in addition to the four girls who were killed by the bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members, two Black men were also killed out in the streets, one by police and the other by white supremacists. He cited King’s admonition that they were not only killed by the Klan, but by the inaction of politicians who refused to speak out against racism and by every preacher who chose to sit on the sidelines.
The event also served to launch a partnership between Barber’s faith movement for justice and workers’ advocates. He shared the virtual podium with Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the country’s largest federation of unions.
The struggle for an equal and just society is too often told only through the lens of Black Americans, Barber said. He noted that white union members were allied with the marchers in Selma who walked into Sheriff Bull Connor’s batons and fire hoses in 1965. Poverty and the systems that perpetuate it affect people of every background and political persuasion, he said.
He connected the plight of frontline workers facing COVID-19 infection to historic struggles for workers’ rights.
“These deaths today likewise compel us in this season to substitute courage for caution, as tens of millions of people have awakened to the systemic inequalities in American society, and have stood together to say something must change,” Barber said. “We stand on the verge of a reconstruction in America.”
He condemned police killings of unarmed Black people as well as the recent targeted shootings of two police officers in Los Angeles, calling all such events part of a deeper threat to unity and the promises of America.
The victims of society’s fissures don’t fall into neat ideological categories, he said.
“It’s not Black people, it’s people,” Barber said. “And so people are starting to realize, with Trump and his enablers, something that my grandmother taught: That if you scratch a liar, you’ll find a thief. Racism is a lie. Voter suppression is a lie. Police brutality is rooted in lies. And what you find out is the people who engage in those things and support those things will also steal your union rights, steal your wages and steal your health care.”
As he has traveled around the country, he said, he has been hearing shared concerns from many Christians and people of other faiths that transcend political talking points. Finding commonalities in core values reveals what people of faith know to be more powerful than the forces of division, he said.
“We’re not feeling so much new, but we’re embracing what has always been the necessary embrace in times of national crisis, around justice and around fundamental civil rights and economic rights,” Barber said.
Micah Danney is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Brooklyn and was a 2019-2020 Poynter-Koch reporting fellow and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area and covered religion and conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories for the GroundTruth Project.