On a tense Sunday afternoon in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, a 16-year-old African-American male named Johnny Robinson lost his life. The city was a powder keg of racial unrest, reeling from the morning's bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four young Black girls. In the turmoil that followed, Robinson was with a group of friends near a gas station when a car of white teenagers drove by, shouting racial slurs and waving a Confederate flag.
The exchange escalated, and some of Robinson's group reportedly threw rocks at the vehicle.
The arrival of a police car sent the youths scattering. As Johnny Robinson ran down an alley, a shotgun blast from the back of the patrol car struck him in the back. The officer who fired the fatal shot was Jack Parker, a white member of the Birmingham police force. Parker would later provide conflicting accounts of the incident, claiming both that he fired a warning shot and that the gun discharged accidentally. Witnesses, however, did not recall hearing any warning before the shot that killed the teenager. Johnny Robinson was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.
In the aftermath of the shooting, justice for Johnny Robinson proved elusive. Two separate grand juries, one at the county level and another at the federal level, declined to indict Officer Jack Parker for the killing. He remained on the police force for another decade, retiring in 1973, and was never held legally accountable for Robinson's death. The case was reopened by the FBI in 2007 as part of a cold case initiative, but with Parker having died in 1977, the investigation was closed without the possibility of prosecution. The story of Johnny Robinson's death remains a poignant and unresolved chapter in the history of the civil rights movement in Birmingham.
