Navalny’s wife captured the world’s attention as she turned her grief into action. Black women in Philly have done that for years.

It’s been three weeks since Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, stunned the world when she took to a Munich stage moments after reports of her husband’s death in prison. She has vowed to keep his work and legacy alive.

Ever since, I’ve been thinking about all of the Ms. Navalnayas on the streets of Philadelphia, who, without the attention of the international press, every day take on the mantle that was foisted upon them by gun violence.

They are women like those who were honored recently after a panel discussion hosted by the Philadelphia chapter of Moms Demand Action, Black women leading the way in gun violence prevention in our city.

“These women have had to make a way out of no way well before we came around,” Moms Demand Action Executive Director Angela Ferrell-Zabala told me. “When no one else seemed to care how to take care of their communities, when they were losing their own children and their friends and family.”

I’ve long known and written about many of them, including Terrez McCleary, whose 21-year-old daughter, Tamara Johnson, was shot and killed on Easter in 2009, and later created Moms Bonded By Grief. And then there’s Chantay Love, a founder of the Every Murder Is Real (E.M.I.R.) Healing Center, a nonprofit named after her 20-year-old brother who was shot and killed in 1997, and Tahira Fortune, who created Voices By Choices after she lost her 18-year-old son, Samir, in 2017.

You know what Fortune wanted to talk about when I called to congratulate her on being honored? She kept steering the conversation back to other mothers who had more recently joined the unenviable club of eternal grief.

“There’s so many,” she said of women who have little choice but to turn their darkest moments into activism and action.

We can sometimes see what that looks like, when the world turns its gaze to brave women like Navalnaya as she chooses courage in the face of calamity.

Closer to home, these moments are less public but no less dramatic. With tears streaming down their faces, and in some instances, their loved ones’ blood yet to be cleaned off the sidewalk, the women leading the gun violence movement in Philadelphia reach back to the rest of us who, at any minute, could be standing in their shoes.

These are women like Debbie Fortune (no relation to Tahira Fortune), who was also honored at the event. Fortune, a Germantown block captain, lost two sons to gun violence: Lonnie Workman, 32, in 2012, and Victor Workman, 37, in 2022. I was ashamed to admit that I didn’t recognize her name, and when I searched for stories about her, I found only a spattering of accounts that didn’t go much past the basic details of her sons’ deaths.

What was missing in those accounts was that when her oldest son Lonnie was killed nine doors from her home, people assumed she’d leave Philadelphia, but she didn’t. And when her youngest son Victor was killed 10 years later in 2022, she still remained.

“I’m not running,” she told me, because there are other children in her neighborhood who deserve futures free of fear and violence.

Almost as soon as I typed those words, news came that there had been a mass shooting in the Burholme section of Northeast Philadelphia at a busy bus stop at Cottman and Rising Sun Avenues. Eight Northeast High School students between the ages of 15 to 17 were shot. Over 30 shots were fired.

Speaking in the pouring rain at the scene of the shooting, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said the city will not be held hostage by gun violence. I appreciated her sentiment, but the reality is that our city has long been seized by relentless violence as leader after leader has failed its most vulnerable residents.

“Enough is enough,” Parker said.

I hope, for once, that turns out to be true.

Just a day earlier, she told a group of gun violence prevention advocates and residents who had lost loved ones to shootings that her administration would create a standard operating procedure for how the city responds to families affected by homicide.

It’s the least we can do as their numbers just keep growing in our city. These women are the backbone of the gun violence prevention movement, usually by no choice of their own.

They owe us nothing but they give their all. In turn, we owe them everything.