Standing Our Ground

The Triumph of Faith Over Gun Violence: A Mother's Story

37 Ink, September 2018

Lucia McBath had never imagined herself as an activist. Though she’d encountered her share of bigotry as a single mother to her son Jordan Davis, she also had pride in her heritage, a deep and abiding faith nurtured in the African American church community and, with a black man and his beautiful family in the White House, she believed in a more harmonious racial future.

In a narrative that has become all too familiar, her dreams of a better future for Jordan were shattered by a bullet. On November 23, 2012, four young black men pulled into a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida on their way home from the mall. A white man and his fiancé pulled in next to them, and asked the teenagers to turn their radio down. When they refused, the man returned to his car, retrieved a semi-automatic handgun, and fired ten rounds into the side of the boys’ truck. The white man drove away, checked into a motel, and ordered a pizza; Jordan Davis, just 17, bled to death in the backseat of his friend’s Dodge Durango.

But Lucy’s strength was not shattered, and her faith was not shaken. She resolved to fight not only for justice for Jordan, but to fight the Stand Your Ground laws that have allowed too many killers to go free. In STANDING MY GROUND: A Mother’s Walk of Faith, Perseverance and Hope, Lucy tells her story, in the hopes that more mothers will not have to endure the loss of their black and brown children at the hands of gun owners who perceive danger in dark skin.