Last Friday, the nation commemorated the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and told a crowd of roughly 250,000 people that “now is the time to rise up from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”
But here we are, 60 years later, where on the day set aside to commemorate that historic event, a 21-year-old white man went into a Dollar General in a historically Black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and killed three Black people: 19-year-old Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., 29-year-old Jerrald Gallion, and 52-year-old Angela Michelle Carr.
According to police, the shooter first went to a Dollar Tree before going to Edward Waters University, a historically Black college, where he was asked to leave by campus security. He then went to the nearby Dollar General where he shot three people before killing himself.
Racial violence, like last week’s shooting, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Jacksonville’s history of violence against its Black residents dates back more than a century, which writer Michael Harriot masterfully points out in this Twitter thread.
From a factory fire in 1901 that decimated a thriving Black neighborhood to the redlining, which made it almost impossible for Black families to rebuild, to the reconstruction of the New Town neighborhood near Edward Waters University and Ax Handle Saturday, understanding this history is vital to putting last week’s shooting into context.
The other part to understanding this tragedy is that New Town is a food desert, meaning many in the community who don’t have the time or means to travel out of their neighborhood for groceries are forced to do so at dollar stores like the one where the shooting took place.
A side note about dollar stores: Despite advertising low prices, they’re actually charging consumers more than non-discount grocery stores. They do this by offering smaller product packages with a higher per unit price, meaning you might pay a little bit less for a box of cookies, but you’re also getting substantially fewer cookies.
This means that not only did the shooter target a Black neighborhood, he targeted Black people who were simply trying to buy groceries. The same thing Black shoppers at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store were doing last year when a white supremacist shot and killed 10 people. The same thing Latine shoppers were doing at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 when a white supremacist shot and killed 23 people.
These attacks are not done simply for the sake of killing Black and Brown folks, they are used to strike fear into Black and Brown communities. “The assailant told us that he was a white domestic terrorist and that his motivations were racial in nature,” Dr. Nicole Price, Forbes Book Author, said in a recent interview on URL Media partner WURD Radio’s Reality Check.
These attacks send the message that Black and Brown folks are not welcome and are not safe — even in their own communities.
This is a message Jillian Hanesworth, the first poet laureate of Buffalo and Open Buffalo’s director of leadership development, told URL Media partner Prism following last year’s shooting when pushing back against the “Buffalo Strong,” narrative.
“We don’t need to know that we’re strong,” she said. “We need to know that we’re safe.”
Until those in positions of power are willing and able to have the hard conversations about our nation’s racist policies and systems — and actually do something to fix it — racial violence will continue to plague this nation and Black and Brown communities will remain at risk.
And we need to continue calling out these tragedies for what they are — a failure at the highest level to protect and value Black and Brown lives.
To quote Dr. King: “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” —Alicia Ramirez
