It was past midnight on 27 May 2012 when Randall Woodfin, an early-career public prosecutor, received a call about his older brother. “Ralph’s been shot,” he was told, abruptly. “You need to come.”
He jumped in a car, and raced across the city of Birmingham, Alabama, running every red light along the way. He made it to the police perimeter. It was a block and a half from his grandmother’s old home, at a public-housing project in the city’s south, where the two brothers – eight years apart – had spent much of their childhood.
Randall had idolised Ralph growing up. His older sibling had taught him about classic cars, hi-fi sound systems and early 90s hip-hop. But their lives had taken radically different paths. Randall had moved away from Birmingham for college, studying political science at Morehouse in Atlanta. He held longstanding political aspirations, and returned to their childhood city with a view to climbing the local power ladder. Ralph, on the other hand, had never left. He’d dropped out of high school and started dealing drugs. “A neighbourhood superstar,” as Randall refers to him. While their trajectories had taken different directions, they had remained close.
The night before the shooting, they had sat together and watched Ralph’s daughter graduate from high school. The morning after, Randall told his brother he loved him over the phone. It was the last conversation they had.
Standing at the police line, as flashing blue lights illuminated the dark, Randall could see his brother’s body underneath a sheet. As he rushed forward, a group of police officers held him back. “I was trying to get to him,” he recalls. “And I ended up breaking down, crying in one of their arms. I knew then that he was dead.”
Ralph had been shot multiple times after a brief dispute over a botched drug deal. It was one of 72 murders in the city that year, part of a rise that propelled Birmingham towards a crisis that has left it with one of the highest homicide rates in the US.
Woodfin called his father as he regained composure, and the family congregated at the crime scene. His mother collapsed in shock. “I had never seen her in a state like that before. She was overwhelmed,” he remembers. “And I was oscillating … somewhere between disbelief, grief and anger.”
It was the anger that lingered longest. The grief was largely locked inside, Woodfin says. He looked away as Ralph’s coffin was lowered into the ground. He returned to work soon after and tried to bury the pain, expressing his anger in fiery exchanges in court. When the murder came to trial two years later, Woodfin sat in the benches watching his brother’s killer exhibit little remorse.
“I looked at him,” he recalls, taking a long pause as he relives the memory over Zoom from his office in Birmingham. “And it took restraint not to jump over the table and punch him in his face.” When the guilty verdict came, he felt “small relief” but it also underscored the futility of it all. “In the scheme of things it doesn’t repair the big-ass hole in your heart,” he says.
It was around this time that Woodfin entered electoral politics, successfully running for the Birmingham city school board shortly after the trial concluded. He had not viewed his brother’s murder in the context of gun control or public policy. “I couldn’t connect any work or politics to it,” he says. “It was just the unfortunate feeling of, ‘Damn. This is how it feels when somebody takes your loved one away.’ There is so much grief in this city from loved ones being snatched by gun violence.”
Two years later, Woodfin’s ambitions moved to the city’s top job and he announced his candidacy for mayor, aiming to unseat a long-term incumbent named William Bell. It was a bruising campaign season and Woodfin leaned into his progressive values, his youth (he was 36 years old) and his personal experience.
In 2017, the year of the election, homicides in Birmingham continued to surge: 117 people were killed in a city of 200,000 residents. Woodfin found himself speaking about the loss of his brother as he campaigned, pledging to revitalise the city and reduce the bloodshed. He targeted younger and first-time voters.
In August of that year, as the election loomed and he drove towards Atlanta for a fundraising event, Woodfin received another frantic phone call. His nephew, Ralph’s son, Ralph Jr, had been shot. He veered off the highway and headed back towards the crime scene. On the way, he received a second call: Ralph Jr was dead.
His nephew had only just turned 18. His life had followed a similar trajectory to his father’s. He had dropped out of school early, got involved in street crime, and developed an obsession with firearms – regularly posting photographs of himself holding guns on social media.
Woodfin arrived at the police perimeter and walked towards the attending detective, who presented him with a photograph taken on a mobile phone. “Is this your nephew?” the detective asked. Woodfin recalls the identification image with haunting clarity. “I see a bullet hole in his head. His eyes are closed. It was at that moment I thought: ‘Shit, here we go again.’”
It was less than two weeks from the election, and Woodfin felt the need to bury his grief once more. “I literally got right back into the campaign thing,” he says. “I faked it. That’s just the truth. I didn’t show my anger, my hurt, my disbelief to anybody. I kept working. I kept campaigning.”
It was partly the public pressure, but around family, too, he shut down and felt his late brother’s absence acutely. “I second-guessed myself,” he says. “Was there something I was supposed to do in lieu of my brother not being here, something that I could have done better, where my nephew didn’t end up getting killed?”
The election went to a runoff and Woodfin won comfortably. He is now the youngest mayor in this historic, Deep South city in more than a century. His campaign had drawn significant funding from progressives outside Birmingham, and endorsements from household names such as Bernie Sanders. He entered office with a growing national profile and vowed to push reform to lower the city’s murder epidemic.
In 2019, Birmingham was among the first cities in the US to declare gun violence a public health crisis, a strategy that encourages a holistic approach to tackling the issue by integrating community and public campaigning alongside traditional law enforcement efforts. At a press conference announcing the move, Woodfin appeared with a group of mothers who had lost children during shootings.
Privately, Woodfin was enduring a crisis of his own. As he approached his 39th birthday, the age of his brother when he was killed, the new mayor remained preoccupied by the loss. “I started freaking out,” he recalls. “I got genuinely scared of where I was in my life, where I was supposed to be. Will I live past 39?”
Ralph appeared to him vividly in dreams. “I’d see how crazy his hair looked. I would hear his voice. I would see him smile.” In one dream, after he and his brother hugged, Woodfin was jolted awake by his wife as he wept uncontrollably. “It was so real seeing him.”
It was around then, seven years after Ralph’s murder, that that Woodfin sought therapy for the first time. He began to realise that he had not properly grieved – he had been suppressing and ignoring the profound sorrow in a bid to appear strong. He visited his brother’s grave for the first time. “I never properly said goodbye,” he says. “I told him I loved him. I gave him the proper respect as my big brother. It was hard as hell.”
The gun violence epidemic has continued to intensify in Birmingham. Last year the city saw 151 homicides, its deadliest on record. The figure bucks a downward national murder rate, and is inseparable from the persistently high poverty rate and struggling school system in the city.
Woodfin has lost track of the number of grieving mothers he has tried to console since assuming office. The conversations are often excruciating. “I only have to think of my own mom,” he says. “I’m the other son that lived, and I don’t even know what to say to my own mother sometimes.” Often he just asks for stories. “Tell me more about your child,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how old they are when they’re snatched from them. That grief is unbearable.”
He recently became a father himself. The experience has given his gun-safety advocacy an even sharper focus, he says. His administration, which has limited municipal power, has pushed the Republican state government for commonsense gun reform, including curbing the sale of assault rifles and outlawing rapid-fire modifications to handguns. But little has come of it so far.
In 2024, he launched a program named Project Safe Streets, which included the placement of concrete roadblocks in certain neighbourhoods in an attempt to deter drive-by shootings. He has faced criticism from political opponents over staff shortages in the police department.
In a recent video address to the city, Woodfin recalled the story of his brother appearing to him in dreams, as he sat at a table surrounded by dozens of guns seized by police after shooting incidents. “Laws, policing, can’t stop all of this,” he said. “No superman is coming to save Birmingham.” In the same address, he implored those who witness gun crime to come forward and help authorities: “We shouldn’t have to beg the community when an innocent child is killed.”
Woodfin is frank about the cultural and historic forces he sees exacerbating the crisis in his city. “America promotes and celebrates violence,” he says. “It’s in our video games. It’s in our music. It’s on our TV. It’s in our conversations. It’s on social media.” But he argues that Birmingham, once the focal point of the civil rights movement and the centre of bombings and lynchings during Jim Crow, has endured a unique history that should not be viewed separately from its contemporary struggles.
“I think lynchings became a part of Birmingham’s culture, and it was tolerated,” he says. “People wore two uniforms: police in the daytime and [Ku Klux Klan] robes over their heads at night. I think bombings became a part of the culture in Birmingham, and, as bad as it was, the police didn’t investigate.
“When you get granular and deeper into Birmingham’s culture, violence is so embedded. We’ve got to break it up.”
We are speaking just weeks into the second Trump administration, which has already signalled its intent to legally target Democratic jurisdictions it decides are out of compliance with its political agenda. Last month, Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced a lawsuit against the state of New York over its immigration policies. Throughout his political career Trump, firmly backed by the National Rifle Association, has lambasted Democratic cities enduring gun violence.
Woodfin – who faces re-election this year – argues that now, of all times, leaders in the Democratic party, at all levels of government, should be pushing back vocally. “We are living in a time where some want people to be cowards and afraid, but that is the most opportune time to stand up,” he says. “What’s the point of having the job if you don’t speak up for the people you represent?”
Woodfin’s life experiences have given him that courage to stand up, it could be said, but part of that process has also been learning to articulate his vulnerability, he says. He acknowledges the conversation we are having today would not have been possible only a few years before.
“Those who are comfortable with their vulnerability can be a better version of themselves.”
