Georgia killing echoes brutal days of vigilante lynchings
Outrage spreads in US after video shows white son and dad gunning down young black jogger in the street
Many people saw more than the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery’s life when a video emerged during the week of armed white men confronting the black man, a struggle with punches thrown, three shots fired and Arbery collapsing dead.
The February 23 shooting in coastal Georgia is drawing comparisons to a much darker period of US history, when extrajudicial killings of black people, almost exclusively at the hands of white male vigilantes, inflicted racial terror on African Americans. It frequently happened with law-enforcement complicity or feigned ignorance.
It took more than two months for his pursuers — who told police they suspected he was a burglar — to be arrested and taken into custody. That is fuelling calls for the resignation of local authorities who initially investigated the case and reforms of Georgia’s criminal justice system.
“The modern-day lynching of Arbery is yet another reminder of the vile and wicked racism that persists in parts of our country,” said the Reverend James Woodall, state president of the Georgia NAACP. “The slothfulness and inaction of the judicial system, in this case, is a gross testament to the blatant white racial privilege that permeates throughout our country and our institutions.”
The case appeared frozen as it was handled by police in the small city of Brunswick.
The slothfulness and inaction of the judicial system, in this case, is a gross testament to the blatant white racial privilege that permeates throughout our country. Reverend James Woodall
After the video emerged on social media, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took one day after launching its probe on Thursday to arrest Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, on murder and aggravated assault charges.
Hundreds crowded outside the Glynn County Courthouse on Saturday to mark what would have been Arbery’s 26th birthday, with many saying it was too soon to celebrate because the case must still go before a grand jury that would decide whether to indict the McMichaels.
Arbery’s killing reminds some of Emmett Till, a black teen from Chicago, who was kidnapped in 1955 in Mississippi, lynched and dumped in a river after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman.
An all-white jury acquitted the white men accused of killing Till, who was 14. His death helped fuel the civilrights movement and brought about the eventual passage of federal civilrights protections.
During Saturday’s protest, demonstrator Anthony Johnson said he saw echoes of Till and others. Arbery “died because he was black, like the rest of them did. For no reason,” Johnson said.
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, has said she thinks he was jogging for exercise at the time.
Gregory and Travis McMichael told police they suspected Arbery was the same man recorded by a security camera committing a breakin. When they saw Arbery running on a Sunday afternoon, the McMichaels grabbed guns, got into a pick-up truck and pursued him.
Video footage shows a runner grappling with a man armed with a shotgun. Shots are fired and the
runner staggers and falls. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation statement said the McMichaels confronted Arbery with two firearms and that
Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery.
Arbery’s death has drawn sharp reactions and expressions of sadness across the US. A Change.org petition calling for justice hit more than 700,000 signatures on Saturday. President Donald Trump called the video “very disturbing” and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said it was like seeing Arbery “lynched before our very eyes”.
The Players Coalition, a racialjustice group made up of professional athletes, sent a letter on Saturday to the FBI and prosecutors requesting a federal investigation into Arbery’s death.
“The absence of justice is ever present,” said Malcolm Jenkins, a safety for the New Orleans Saints and the foundation’s co-founder. “Another black life has been taken by a bullet and the slaying justified by white fear.”
Others joined demands from Arbery’s family for the resignations of local law-enforcement authorities.
Before the case was turned over to special prosecutor Tom Durden, Glynn County District Attorney Jackie Johnson and Ware County District Attorney George Barnhill recused themselves because of their connections to the McMichaels. Gregory McMichael was an investigator for Johnson’s office before retiring last year and before that served as a local police officer.
Johnson and Barnhill “must be held accountable for their shameless dereliction of duty”, said Vanita Gupta, president and chief executive of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a former head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division during President Barack Obama’s administration. She also called on the Justice Department to investigate Arbery’s killing under the federal hate-crimes statute.
While likening Arbery’s death to a lynching might seem like an apt comparison, doing so wasn’t sufficient for understanding why it was a tragedy, said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. The organisation has catalogued more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the US that took place between Reconstruction and World War II.
“It should be a national priority to eliminate this kind of racial terror so that we do more, not less, when someone like Ahmaud Arbery is killed in this manner.
“Our nation continues to underestimate the painful burden that has been placed on black people and the traumatic injury we continue to aggravate when our justice system refuses to hold accountable perpetrators of unnecessary violence if they are white and invoke some public-safety defence.”