April Has Been A Horrible Month For Black Children
Natchez, Mississippi. April 20.
A 4-month-old baby, soft and new, still learning the shape of air, lies on the ground beneath a car. His mother’s foot rests on his stomach as if his body were something to hold in place. He is small against the pavement. His limbs are splayed, and his face is tight with confusion and distress as he cries into a world that has already turned hard beneath him.
His 27-year-old mother, April Alexander, put him there. She is threatening to run him over, saying it in the text messages she is sending to his father. “I dropped him. I don’t even like this baby.”
The screenshots posted online, since removed, show her words stacking on top of each other, building toward something unbearable. She tells him, “I’m not stable enough to care for him,” then says she is asking for Pampers and wipes that cost “under 20 dollars,” as if that small, ordinary need could explain what is unfolding. She tells him to come get his son, to “raise him,” “I will sign my own rights over,” because she “don’t wanna deal with this anymore.”
And then, it breaks open. She says, “If you don’t come get him, you will regret it, you will be one less child,” says, “I’m finna kill him” . . . “I’ll put him in the tub and drown him,” . . . “throw him in the river.” The threats come in waves, relentless and escalating, until there is no mistaking what she is saying.
In an accompanying video she sent to the father, she can be heard yelling at the infant, “You finna die my n—-. Yo daddy don’t want you.” Then she covers his mouth and nose with her hand.
And the cry changes.
It starts as a full, open cry, the kind babies make when something is wrong but still survivable. A cry that reaches, calls, and expects someone to come. But when her hand closes over his face, the sound breaks and turns jagged. Air gets caught in his throat. The rhythm collapses into short, panicked bursts like his body is trying to pull in breath that won’t come. It is the sound of confusion turning into fear, of a body realizing, without words, that something is not just wrong, but dangerous.
What does it take for a mother to arrive here? In the messages, she tells on herself in fragments. She says she is “not stable enough to care for him.” She says she cannot provide. She circles back to the same need—Pampers, wipes, less than 20 dollars. She says she doesn’t want to deal with this anymore. She will call CPS and put the child into the foster care system. She moves between asking for help and rejecting the child altogether.
There is desperation in that. This is the language of someone overwhelmed, possibly unraveling. Here is someone who knows, at least in flashes, that she cannot hold what has been placed in her arms.
But there is also something else. Because whatever is happening inside her, whether it is postpartum depression, untreated mental illness, economic strain, abandonment, rage at the child’s father, or some volatile mix of all of it, none of those explanations can soften what the child experiences. None of them changes what his body is learning in that moment and will never forget.
We reach for diagnoses because they give us distance. They give us a way to say this is abnormal, this is exceptional, this is something we can name and therefore contain. And yes, postpartum depression can distort reality. It can hollow out attachment, flood the body with despair, and turn caregiving into something unbearable. It deserves to be taken seriously, to be treated, and supported.
But naming it cannot become a way of looking past the child. Because while we try to understand her, he is under a car. While we parse her language, his breath is being interrupted. So the question is not just what would make a mother do this. It is also: what does it mean for a child to survive it? And how many times, in how many homes, does that question go unanswered until it escalates into something we can no longer ignore?
April Alexander has been arrested and charged with attempted murder. The baby is alive. That is how the story is allowed to move forward. Not with the sound of that broken cry, not with the image of a body pinned beneath a car, but with charges filed, custody transferred, and a case number assigned. The system has stepped in at the edge, after the threats, the text messages, the photo and video, and after a father has to call 911 because the distance he allowed to expand between him and his child ultimately helped shape a dangerous, potentially fatal environment that required law enforcement to step in to keep his baby safe.
What a vicious irony for Black children in the United States.
Another Black family is pulled into the machinery of crisis and consequence. Another Black child’s first lessons about the world are not about love and safety, but neglect and rejection. Another Black child learning, far too early, that the world is something you survive, not something that holds you
But this story is not just about Natchez. It’s not just about one mother, one baby, or one set of horrible messages. This is what April has looked like for Black children during National Child Abuse Prevention Month.
This month is supposed to be about prevention, protecting the most vulnerable, and catching harm before it reaches a child’s body. But instead, this month has been brutal for Black children in America. It has unfolded as a relentless series of moments where Black children are left to absorb the full weight of adult crisis.
A week before this precious baby was put underneath a car, two Black teenagers were forced into a reality no children should ever have to inhabit. Their parents, Justin and Dr. Cerina Fairfax, are gone in a murder-suicide that shattered whatever sense of safety once lived inside that home. Those children are still here, carrying the aftershock and sound of that tragedy.
Then, Shreveport, Louisiana.
Eight children. Eight children, y’all. Ages 18 months to 14 years old were hunted down and killed by a man who was supposed to protect them. Eight children’s lives were folded into one man’s breaking point, one man’s decision to end not just his own life, but theirs. Two of those children were not even his, but they were close enough. Close enough to be claimed by his violence and close enough to disappear with it.
And in between these moments, before and around them, we are still having the wrong conversations. Our culture is obsessed with explaining adults. But what is happening to children while we do that? We are locked in gender wars. “Not all men.” “What about women who kill men?” There’s been endless loops of blame and deflection. People are on social media playing armchair clinician, diagnosing strangers they’ve never met, reaching for labels that make the violence feel distant, containable, and not ours.
All the while, Black children are not part of the conversation. They are underneath it and absorbing it all. Because what gets lost in all that noise is what children are actually living through. They’re living in homes where tension escalates, where adults are overwhelmed, where conflict turns physical, where bodies become the place where power gets asserted.
This month, we also heard debates over Charles Barkley telling us right before the start of National Child Abuse Prevention Month that children need to be “whupped.” He framed it as discipline and as a parenting tool that produces respect. Never mind the data, which shows that Black children suffer higher rates of child abuse and fatalities than all other groups of children in this country.
The latest Annual Child Maltreatment Report shows that the child abuse fatality rate for Black children is 6.04 deaths per 100,000. For white children, it is 1.94. That is not a marginal difference. It means Black children are dying from abuse and neglect at more than three times the rate of white children. The gap widens even further when you look across other groups. The rate for Asian children is 0.51, which means Black children are dying at nearly 12 times that rate. In a single year, 540 Black children were killed by abuse and neglect. That is more than 10 children every week. Every week. And yet, our loudest voices are still out here promoting violence against children.
Barkley’s comments are not just opinions about parenting. They are lessons that teach children that when you lose control, you can use your hands. They teach that pain is a legitimate response to frustration and that power flows downward, from the bigger body to the smaller one. They teach that the child’s body is an acceptable place to release anger, to assert authority, to regain control. And those lessons do not stay in childhood. They do not disappear once the child grows up.
They harden and show up later in how people handle stress, rejection, abandonment, and rage. They shape what feels normal when emotions escalate. They lower the distance between feeling something and acting on it. So when we watch a mother move from asking for help to threatening to kill her child, when we watch a father move from anger to killing his wife or eight children, we cannot pretend these are isolated explosions disconnected from everything else we have normalized.
When someone with a national platform like Charles Barkley defends “whupping” as normal, necessary discipline, he reinforces the idea that children’s bodies are acceptable sites for adult control, frustration, and release. The data then shows us the outcome of that normalization, with Black children dying from abuse and neglect at disproportionately high rates, week after week.
And the cases in Natchez, Shreveport, and the Fairfax home are not aberrations floating outside that reality. They are its most extreme expressions. Different circumstances and different triggers, yes, but the same underlying logic: when adults lose control, when stress, rage, or despair peaks, the child’s body becomes the place where it lands. What we excuse, normalize, or laugh off as discipline, ultimately escalates into the kinds of violence we claim to be shocked by.
So now, we are left holding all of this at once.
A baby under a car in Mississippi.
Two teenagers living with the aftermath of a murder-suicide.
Eight children killed in Louisiana.
A public defense of hitting children, as if it exists on a separate moral plane from everything we claim to be horrified by.
And the throughline is impossible to ignore. Black children are the ones at the center of all this horror. Black children are the ones absorbing it. Black children are the ones whose bodies, minds, and nervous systems are carrying the cost.
This month has been horrible, and we cannot pretend these are isolated incidents. We cannot keep separating what we normalize from what we condemn. We cannot keep drawing a line between “discipline” and “violence” as if they do not live on the same continuum, as if one does not prepare the ground for the other.
The baby in Natchez does not experience that distinction. The eight children in Shreveport did not experience that distinction. Those two teenagers in Annandale, Virginia, will not experience that distinction. Their bodies only know what happened. And what happened is that the people closest to them became the source of their deepest harm.
SEE ALSO:
Roland Martin Centered Justin Fairfax, Not Cerina Fairfax, The True Victim
Ashlee Jenae Is Another Victim Being Blamed For Her Own Death
April Has Been A Horrible Month For Black Children was originally published on newsone.com
