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This past Saturday, some twenty thousand people marched through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. They were there at the invitation of the conservative radio and television host Glenn Beck, as part of a movement known variously as Restoring Unity, Never Again Is Now, and All Lives Matter. (A blimp adorned with the third motto floated overhead.) Beck himself had been invited, too, by Bishop Jim Lowe, the pastor of Birmingham’s Guiding Light Church, a predominantly black, non-denominational congregation whose members number in the thousands. More specifically, the way that Beck tells it, the two came together in a sort of divine meet-cute, at an event last year. “This preacher is sitting there,” Beck explained to a studio audience on TheBlaze, his television network, in June. “I keep looking at him. And God is like, ‘You’ve got to talk to him.’ ”
Last weekend bore the fruit of that introduction. The jumble of event names did not seem to deter the crowd, who reported hours earlier than the advertised 9 A.M. start time to the designated corralling area, on Sixteenth Street and Seventh Avenue North. That placed the start of the event in the heart of Birmingham’s civil-rights district, just a block north of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where, in the fall of 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four girls and wounded nearly two dozen other parishioners.
The location was deliberate, and, according to several rally attendees, entirely appropriate. “Personally, I believe that a lot of the fights that were necessary in those days happened here. There’s a lot of similar battles to be won,” Kyle Wipf, a thirty-seven-year-old painter for John Deere, told me. He had driven the fourteen hours from Des Moines, Iowa, with his wife, Rachel. “The same Biblical principles apply in both situations.” Joe Preston, a financial adviser from Smithfield, North Carolina, agreed. “What people did back then, just letting it happen here—I’m talking about white people—to me is akin to just sitting here and letting ISIS do things to Christians. Planned Parenthood, people just letting that happen. It’s the same thing.”
Preston had travelled to Birmingham with his friend Ryan Harris, who cited the “racial divide” as his motivation for attending the march. “People who are supposed to be the non-racist people, if you pay attention, they’re the ones promoting all this stuff,” Harris said, citing “black leadership” generally, and Al Sharpton in particular, as examples. Debbie Bennett, a retired hospice worker from Kansas City, Missouri, walked the route with a cane in one hand and a poster of Frederick Douglass in the other.