for Bonita Beatrice Carter (1959–1979)
“Culture informs stories and truth-telling lifts people.”
Sometimes, the teacher the world needs is the memory of a Magic City in the South. Sometimes the teacher is a city that has survived fire hoses, bombings, brutality, erasure, and betrayal, yet still speaks. Birmingham, Alabama, named the Magic City for its industrial rise, has long been a rigorous classroom. Lecture halls for streets. Churches like laboratories of courage. Neighborhoods marked by cruelties and victories. In this divisive political climate, between familiar storms and a storied past, let us not forget the concise syllabus at home.
In my work as the first poet laureate of the city of Birmingham, I speak the names that history would try to erase. These are young men and women whose worthy lives are often overlooked. They were murdered by police violence during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow in the American South: Bonita Carter, Virgil Ware, Johnny Robinson. Say their names.
Saying their names is not symbolic. It is curricular. It is political. It is poetic. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined #SayHerName in 2014 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and to honor Black women who were victims of police violence and brutality.
A staple of my poetic vision is documentary-poetics, or docu-poetry, and what I have posited as reparative poetry-poems that evoke revival and the spirit of the regenerative imagination. These forms use artifacts and archival content to bear witness to historical narratives, societal issues, and various injustices. Both demand inner and exterior listening—narrative reparations. In this moment, I have found these forms instrumental in the urgent fights of racial healing and injustice.
Birmingham, America’s Classroom
(excerpt)
Bonita Beatrice Carter
the teacher
the world needs to
remember
an unarmed American citizen
brutally shot in a car by police
on 10 ave North, in 1979,
Sometimes the teacher
the world needs remains
hopeful even when hope evaporates
like warm raindrops,
sometimes the teacher
the world needs
becomes breathless
in the face of dry bones,
sometimes the teacher
the world needs
is a Magic City in the American South
a classroom that keeps on teaching.
For Bonita Beatrice Carter
#SayHerName. Bonita Beatrice Carter, a Black woman, was murdered by police. She was shot several times in a car decades before Renée Good, a mother and poet in Minneapolis, was killed in January by state violence as she drove her SUV near an anti-immigrant protest. Sadly, this grief is not new. We meet this mourning on ground already soaked with blood.
Bonita Beatrice Carter was twenty years old the night Birmingham took her name into its mouth and never quite let it go.
Born January 26, 1959, one of nine children, she grew up in Kingston, one of Birmingham’s ninety-nine neighborhoods. Kingston rests on the quiet edges of Birmingham where neighbors knew one another’s mamas, and hymns floated from open windows.
Bonita graduated from Hayes High School in Birmingham. She sang in the choir at Parker Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham. Bonita lived with her parents not far from Jerry’s Convenience Store on 10th Avenue North in Birmingham, where she was killed. The ordinary felt safe. On Friday, June 22, 1979, an argument broke out at the store. A man Bonita knew argued with the clerk. She offered to move the man’s car and slid behind the wheel to help. When a white police officer named George Sands arrived, she was still in the driver’s seat. Moments later, she was brutally shot multiple times at close range. We have stood in this sorrow before.
In America,
where innocent Black women
good gestures are punished
sing, sister Songbird
justice is coming
soon-one bright morning
Justice, come.
The police department called the killing justified. Mayor David Vann supported the officer, who already had several complaints of excessive force against Black residents. Documentary poetry intervenes here:
But the neighborhood of Kingston did not stand down.
a line drawn in dust and fury
protesters gathered
white counter-protesters
some Ku Klux Klan
The Fraternal Order of Police
backing evils back
guns fired into the air
bricks flew
taunts and slurs
sparks looking for timber
armed white caravans bringing bombs
armed Black residents in holy resistance
a court order to limit protest
as if grief could be contained.
Remembering is Revival
Bonita’s death did not end in a car at a corner store in Birmingham. It forced a lesson outside the classroom. Her death cast a vision for future revolutions from the streets of the South into the homes of America yet again. It shifted the city’s political ground. The ruling and the mayor’s support for the officer eroded trust in Birmingham’s Black community and helped clear a path for City Councilor Richard Arrington Jr., who had long named police brutality as a wound, to become the city’s first Black mayor.
Bonita’s name echoes in the documentary Iron Grit, in a memorial plaque now standing where she fell, and in the Reckon Radio podcast Unjustifiable, which revisited her story decades later. Say her name. Bonita Beatrice Carter. Still, this isn’t enough. We must continue to prepare vulnerable poems. We must teach justice with truth-telling curricula. We must act from the blueprint of the American South. Perhaps poetry should cause wings to mount earthside like Black folk in Kingston.
She was a daughter
a sister
a voice rising on Sundays,
one summer night in 1979
she became a question
America still has not finished answering.
This is why Birmingham remains America’s classroom
America’s longest and most incomplete lessons bear many names. Birmingham shows us one way we get free: Confront all these names honestly, publicly, and communally. This is what poetry offers when we participate and share.
Docu-poetry is part of the reckoning and the remaking. During the Civil Rights era, the 1963 Birmingham campaign against segregation, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth, set a powerful precedent for nonviolent protest. It also helped cultivate a culture where art became a form of activism, amplified by the voices of prolific wordsmiths.
Political activist and philosopher Angela Davis, who was born and raised in Birmingham in a neighborhood marked by the bombings of African American homes during a time when activists referred to the city as “Bombingham,” has long written and spoken about resistance as a daily practice. As Davis reminds us, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” The renowned poet Sonia Sanchez, also born in Birmingham, echoes this tradition of witness and voice. She reminds us that oppressed people, including women, will speak against injustice and that their voices will be heard and documented. In the poem “Under the Soprano Sky,” from her collection of the same name, Sanchez lovingly resounds: “under a soprano sky, a woman sings, / lovely as chandeliers.” Reading these words, I cannot help but imagine that Davis and Sanchez might have been speaking toward voices like Bonita Carter’s that are healing and shaping the imaginations of new worlds already here and to come.
Docu-poetry is both testimony and witness to uninterrupted, unraveling truths. America crescendos the bittersweet, and docu-poetry helps to encode a heritage that shows us how to dream and heal. What a horrific lesson rose from Kingston’s red clay with the death of Bonita Carter, a daughter of the American South who beckons us to persist a little while longer.
Her name moves through the country and asks us to wake up in an era of moral injury. Her loss continues to press against us, knowing our compulsion to escape and urging us to build the world we keep imagining:
a sky open
a city rising toward mercy
a remembering that stretches beyond Birmingham
a living commemoration in her name
and in the names of all the others
who deserved to keep breathing beneath that open sky.
The inherited restorative elements of docu-poetry support me as a writer who began later in life. Docu-poetry approaches the form as means of excavation and construction; an ancestral anchoring that uncurls with every sentence and reveals the blood in the margins.
Serving as the inaugural poet laureate of Birmingham, one of America’s most historically important and radical cities, has prepared me to steal away into sacred memory and attempt to liberate the invisible and overlooked. We stand our ground in the presence of broken silence. We notice that what remains is good and lovely.