The open lot in front of Bob Hoglan’s fireworks store at Good Hope was a busy place Saturday, greeting a steady stream of locals dropping by to show their support for law enforcement at a “Back the Blue” gathering that felt more like a genial picnic than a demonstration or rally. 

Kids played on a nearby inflatable as parents chatted over free barbecue, with deputies and police officers visiting throughout the afternoon. Hoglan, a Blount County resident who operates several fireworks stores in Alabama, said the idea behind the event was to show law enforcement that the surge of anti-police sentiment seen on TV news in recent weeks isn’t reflected among the majority of people he knows throughout the Cullman area. 

“It may be like that in the bigger cities, but it’s not like that here,” he said. “People in most places, and especially places like this, don’t want any part of what they’re seeing [in the news].  We value law enforcement, and the last thing we want is for them to feel like they’re not appreciated here in their own community. People will come out to support law enforcement here, and today, they have.”

Farther south in Hanceville, a smaller gathering of people from the other side of the ideological spectrum played music, commemorated speeches from prominent African-Americans, and grilled food under a pavilion for a Juneteenth Community Cookout held at the city’s Veterans Park.

Organizer A.C. Poteete said he and like-minded supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement helped stage the event as a way to show black residents in Cullman County (and beyond) that inflamed racial narratives seen in media don’t have a place in his community. 

“There aren’t a lot of black residents in Cullman County, and to some extent I guess that’s understandable,” he said. “But we wanted to show the black people who do live here, as well as black people who see us from the outside, that they are welcome here; that they belong just as much as anyone. Even though we kind of started small with this [event] today, I’m hoping that message will spread and bring more people out next year.”

Poteete said the only local resistance organizers faced in planning Saturday’s event came from politically conservative critics on social media, with no pushback from city officials who monitored the proceedings. “I spoke with Mayor Kenneth Nail ahead of time, and while he does not agree with my political views, he does agree with our First Amendment right to free speech,” he said. “The City of Hanceville isn’t where we encountered any obstruction.”

At both Good Hope and Hanceville, neither of Saturday’s events showed any hint of violent intent, or even of growing particularly animated in conveying their participants’ message. Organizers at each gathering said their goal was to cast as wide a net as possible in welcoming concerned citizens to learn about and share their point of view, and that radical behavior — which some social media critics expected — wasn’t the way to win hearts and minds.

“It was never going to be like that,” said Poteete. “This was just a group of people who came out to show the black community that we know how to be supportive.”