When a white supremacist opened fire at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, Sheletta Brundidge began searching for ways to help the community—and the country—heal.
She read a news story about Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured in the shooting while working at Tops. Everheart put out a call for children’s books that address and combat racism to distribute around Buffalo. Brundidge, a Minnesota-based radio host, Emmy-winning comedian, autism advocate and mom of four, is also a children’s book author. She gathered a collection of her three books (“Daniel Finds His Voice,” “Cameron Goes to School” and “Brandon Spots His Sign”), threw in a bunch of Crown Shepherd’s “Black Boy, Black Boy” and “Black Girl, Black Girl” and shipped more than 1,000 books to Buffalo.
“I want the children in Buffalo to know somebody outside their community cares about them,” Brundidge told me. “That we love them and we value them enough to send them a little piece of us. Every person in that community has been touched by that shooting and I don’t want them to think they are hurting or grieving alone. I want them to know there’s love inside that book from Minnesota.”
Ten days after the Tops shooting, a gunman with an AR-15 walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and slaughtered 19 students and two teachers.
I will admit to moments — a lot of them — of hopelessness and despair on the topic of gun violence in America. It’s hard for me to imagine what will move legislators to make meaningful change to gun safety laws, what will move assault rifle owners to renounce their allegiance, if not the blood that was shed at Columbine, at Sandy Hook, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, at every mass shooting in and among those.
I will admit to watching brave, broken survivors — including, most recently, a fourth-grader — testify before Congress and finding it all a bit obscene. Over and over we ask the grieving and traumatized to bare their wounds in a desperate attempt to nudge away from this toxic status quo. And over and over we haven’t budged.
But hopelessness is defeat. And defeat means all those lives were cut short, all those surviving hearts were shattered, all those families are left grieving, all of it, in vain.
So I turn to people like Brundidge for guidance.
“I can’t get stuck in hopelessness,” she told me. “Then I don’t move. Then I don’t take action.”
After the Uvalde shooting, Brundidge read a story about the staff at El Progreso Memorial Library, a few blocks from Robb Elementary, deciding whether to close the day after the shooting out of respect for the lives lost.
“Everybody in Uvalde knows everybody,” Brundidge told me. “You have a shooting in Houston or Chicago or Minneapolis, you might not know anyone who was shot. Everybody in Uvalde knows every one of those families.”
Ultimately, the library stayed open and librarian Martha Carreon conducted her weekly storytime to a group of children, the day after rushing out of work to pick up her own panicked child at a nearby school, only to find it locked down.
When Brundidge read that story, she knew what she had to do. “I told Shawn, ‘Fire up the RV. We’re going to Uvalde.’”
Shawn is her ex-husband/best friend. They piled their four children, an aunt, a couple of uncles and a whole bunch of her books into their RV and hit the road. Brundidge connected with Houston bookstore Buy the Book to hold a one-day book drive, where customers purchased books to donate to El Progreso’s summer reading program. She also connected with her Dallas-based podcasting friends, the J.E.T. Setting Divas, who got to work creating care packages for each staff member and volunteer at El Progreso—even the grounds crew.
They dropped their kids with Brundidge’s mom in Houston and drove to Uvalde, where they delivered the goods and visited a memorial to the children and teachers killed at Robb Elementary and shared meals and tears and laughter, even, with folks stumbling through a nightmare.
“These people need to feel us,” Brundidge said. “They need to see us. They need us to help them heal. You have to bring your light. The only way to drive out darkness is light.”
I admitted to Brundidge that I sometimes give up hoping we’ll see a time when mass shootings don’t punctuate our days and nights and fears. I asked her if she ever gives up hope.
“I’m a Christian,” Brundidge. “So I lean on my faith. I lean on God.”
She also leans on history.
“This country is so resilient,” she said. “This country overcame slavery. Slavery! And now we have an African-American woman vice president. You can’t tell me we can’t do anything. But we have to do more than thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayer are important. But they’re not enough. We have to do something. We have to act.”
With hope at the center.
