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Newbern, Alabama is a small town. At it's heyday in the 1880s the population was 562. Today just about 150 people live there, with the population falling by 20% per decade for the past two decades.
It's a tiny town but there are residents who care about its future. One is Patrick Braxton, who started to question how the town was being run when working as a volunteer firefighter and during the early days of COVID.
The official leadership seemed unresponsive and even hostile.
1/
Newbern is majority black, but like many small towns in the Black Belt the town leadership is all white. Newbern has historically not had elections for Mayor--
Some residents from First Baptist Church of Newbern are fed up. Braxton among them. The small funds the Mayor controls are not spent with transparency. COVID supplies were squandered. When Patrick Braxton put up signs encouraging people to get vaccinated the signs were thrown in the burn heap.
So Braxton decided to run for mayor. 2/
There is a process to have mayoral elections, Patrick Braxton found the paperwork despite obstruction from the city council. The existing mayor Haywood “Woody” Stokes III ignored him and didn't bother to run so Braxton won by default managing to get recognized by the county. Then, shortly after, the white town council met secretly and reappointed (??) Haywood “Woody” Stokes III as Mayor. It's an old typical situation. Here's the best article I found:
“In October, Lewis and her children found their house burned to the ground. The cause was undetermined, but she thinks it may have been connected.”
The article didn’t make much of this since it’s just a suspicion— but they were receiving hate mail with swastikas and drawings of them being hanged before this happened! Likewise it’s not like the local police will help.
Her suspicion is reasonable. And that sucks that she has to go on day to day not knowing just how much danger she’s in.
@futurebird that story is so bizarre. It's like these people live in 1750
@carolannie @futurebird or even just 1950.
Though of course we must realize, this is now for a whole lot of people. Not some black-and-white documentary footage past. Not just in Alabama, but all over the country, in the north as well.
@futurebird and this:
Two years ago, Braxton says he was the only volunteer firefighter in his department to respond to a tree fire near a Black person’s home in the town of 275 people. As Braxton, 57, actively worked to put out the fire, he says, one of his white colleagues tried to take the keys to his fire truck to keep him from using it.
In another incident, Braxton, who was off duty at the time, overheard an emergency dispatch call for a Black woman experiencing a heart attack. He drove to the fire station to retrieve the automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, but the locks were changed, so he couldn’t get into the facility. He raced back to his house, grabbed his personal machine, and drove over to the house, but he didn’t make it in time to save her. Braxton wasn’t able to gain access to the building or equipment until the Hale County Emergency Management Agency director intervened, the lawsuit said.
“I have been on several house fires by myself,” Braxton says. “They hear the radio and wouldn’t come. I know they hear it because I called dispatch, and dispatch set the tone call three or four times for Newbern because we got a certain tone.”
@futurebird Ugh.
I have a strong suspicion that this was racial terrorism https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/us/alabama-firefighter-dead-shot.html
@fivetonsflax FWIW, in cop parlance “targeted attack” usually means domestic/interpersonal, and that victim and attacker knew each other, rather than a “hate-motivated attack” or “bias crime” where the attacker did not personally know the victim, and was motivated primarily by what they (the attacker) presumed to be the identity of the victim.
(Sorry to be pedantic; this is top of mind because I know a bunch of people targeted in two different bias crimes this past weekend. 
)