By VALERIE RUSS
From The Philadelphia Inquirer via Tribune News Service
There is almost a straight line between Birmingham, Ala., and El Paso, Texas.
You can take Interstate 20 from just outside Birmingham, cross Mississippi, then Louisiana, and the entire breadth of the state of Texas to El Paso, a distance of 1,272 miles. Or about 18 hours by car.
When news that a young, white man drove 10 hours from his suburban home outside Dallas with the specific intent to shoot and kill Latinos — including in a manifesto the same “invasion” used by President Donald Trump — the enormity of the slaughter shook the nation into finally saying out loud that this was the work of white supremacism. And it became for me, too, a clear line to Birmingham.
Within hours of the El Paso attacks, nine people were killed in Dayton, Ohio, but officials haven’t determined if race was a motive in the shootings.
On Sunday morning after the two weekend shootings — while I drove to an assignment at a Mt. Airy church, where a predominantly white congregation has Ending Racism Committee meetings — I listened to a radio interview. A 17-year-old said the massacre in El Paso made her realize she could be killed simply for having brown skin, for being who she was.
It was an echo of my own realization years ago. In 1963, when white men later found to be members of the Ku Klux Klan placed a bomb along the side of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, I was in elementary school, an all-black school. I, too, thought all those years ago, I can be killed for simply going to church.
Four little girls died in their Sunday clothes that day. I have carried their memories with me all my life.
There was a sense after the bombing that — having seen the photos of innocent girls sacrificed in the black struggle for civil rights — white America was finally realizing the depth of hatred and racism. Historians eventually cited the bombing and other violence directed at children that year as pivotal to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Could the fact that politicians, white, black and Latino, are now denouncing the massacre in El Paso as an act of terrorism portend changes in gun laws and other laws to protect people from white supremacy?
As U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, proposed in his speech Wednesday at Emanuel AME in Charleston, S.C., the site of yet another church massacre in 2015, perhaps federal authorities could identify, track and arrest white supremacists who threaten violence.
Miguel Andrade, who works for Juntos, a Philadelphia immigration advocacy organization, said Thursday that naming the shootings an act of terrorism is a start.
“It’s horrible that it takes a tragedy like this for people in power to take action,” Andrade said. “Do I know what will come of it? I’m not sure. The hatred has not only been spewed by the president but also by the extreme right wing. If no action is taken around this issue, the fear is, it will happen again.”
On Thursday, Latino groups gathered at the William Way Center to discuss their feelings.
But not just for the terrorism that killed 22 people in El Paso, but also to share their grief for the families who were separated when ICE agents arrested 680 undocumented workers during raids conducted Wednesday throughout Mississippi.
“This was another act of terror,” Andrade said.