Regret is an odd emotion because it comes only upon reflection. Regret lacks immediacy, and so its power seldom influences events when it could do some good.
— William O’Rourke
I last encountered the Reverend Ronnie Williams on April 10 of this year. I can state the date with certainty because it found both Rev. Williams and me in attendance at the regular meeting of the Jefferson County Commission. I admit frankly that I was there in anticipation of some acrimony between four-fifths of the commission and State Reps. John Rogers and Mary Moore; Rogers had alerted me the evening before of his and Moore’s intention to be present and address the commission on matters related to Cooper Green Mercy Hospital.
Williams was there for reasons both simpler and more complicated. On the one hand, he was there doing his job, just the same as I was doing mine. As a longtime and well-respected advocate of better healthcare and other services for the poor and disadvantaged of Birmingham and Jefferson County, he was there to witness the latest skirmish in a battle over indigent care that has been ongoing since January 2013, when the cash-strapped county eliminated emergency and outpatient services at Cooper Green. He was there to represent the notion that public health — that is, the health of the community as a whole — should be the ultimate measuring stick of public service and political leadership.
“We’re having the wrong discussion,” Williams told me when we stopped to shake hands and chat in the hallway after the meeting adjourned. The confrontation between the commissioners and the state legislators had devolved into an unusually emotional exchange of charges and denials over the status of the county’s Indigent Health Care Fund. For his part, Williams suggested in his characteristically soft-spoken manner that both sides might be missing the point.
“This is about how we as a county collectively value life,” Williams declared. The county’s establishment of Cooper Green in 1965, he said, demonstrated “the wisdom to understand that we have to take care of the poor. Yet here we are in 2014, abandoning that responsibility.
“It’s a public policy issue,” he continued. “There is a real disconnect between the people affected and the people elected, and unless it is addressed, the disconnect on this issue has life-and-death implications. We need to acknowledge where we are now, acknowledge that the real question we should be engaged together in answering is, how do we grow from this abject failure?”
This is where we venture onto a landscape that is considerably more complicated. It is complicated in the communal sense, because Ronnie Williams’s words cut straight to the heart of the most serious economic and social — and, yes, spiritual — issues before us as a community. Poverty is the most deadly disease among us, the most glaring and malignant point of convergence of all of the failures — of leadership, of communication and collaboration and participation, of basic humanity — that have made Birmingham’s progress such a needlessly checkered affair. Ronnie Williams knew of all of this firsthand.
Even more poignantly on that ordinary morning six months ago, Ronnie Williams already carried the knowledge of the aggressive cancer that overtook him last week, at the age of 56. Before we parted ways on April 10, he made some vague reference to “a health problem” he was experiencing, at which I made a fairly rote expression of sympathy and wished him well. It was sometime after that when I heard news of Williams’s diagnosis and made a mental note to get in touch and extend moral support — and, if he was up to it, ask his thoughts on Weld’s then-upcoming series on poverty in Birmingham.
I never did. I wish I had.
(Note: My friend and colleague Vickii Howell posted a wonderful tribute to the life and work of Ronnie Williams at Birmingham View.)
Sometime in late 2012, a guy named John Garrett contacted me out of the blue. Would I be willing to meet him for a cup of coffee one morning? I did so happily, despite wondering whether this guy was just trying to sell me something.
Instead of a sales pitch, I got a conversation with a highly enthusiastic interlocutor. John Garrett wanted to talk about Birmingham, and about what he — as a young professional, a business owner, a husband and father, a believer in the value of collaboration — could do to make Birmingham the best it can be. We talked for an hour, delving deeply into local history and politics and social relationships. It was another six months before I ever even found out what the guy did for a living.
John and I talked on occasion after that, a few times in person, every now and then on Facebook. They were always good, interesting, productive discussions, and I always came away thinking that I needed to make a point of soliciting John’s “outsider” perspective on Birmingham and its potential more often.
I didn’t do that. I wish I had. I wish it because less than two weeks before Ronnie Williams died, John Garrett, CEO of the web and software firm Chronicle Studios, passed away in his sleep at the age of 35. The volume and depth of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of beautifully expressed and heartfelt tributes to John that poured in on social media spoke to the strength of his character and the qualities of leadership he quietly exerted in so many lives. To which I can only add, I wish I’d known him better.
During the spring of 1998, I was working on a long profile of Howell Heflin, the long-serving U.S. Senator from Alabama who had left office about a year-and-a-half before. In preparation for spending a day with Heflin in his hometown of Tuscumbia, I interviewed several people who had been associated with him over the years. One of those was the Birmingham attorney, James L. North.
Starting with his clerkship under U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, North became one of the most highly regarded lawyers in the South. He was a stalwart of the Alabama Democratic Party during its most progressive years, and a knowledgeable and incisive political thinker. And he loved Howell Heflin, as he made clear in our interview.
That was my first exposure to North, but not my last. Early in 2013, having been a regular reader and word-of-mouth supporter of Weld since our inception, he became an investor in our company and an even more trusted and ready source of opinion and advice. When he died after a long illness on September 7, aged 77, my first thought was of the several times he and I talked over an afternoon drink about sitting down to spend a day talking about the history of Alabama politics. I always told him I’d call his assistant to arrange it.
I never did. I wish I had.
