America, too, was on trial in Arbery murder case
Three men stood accused of killing an unarmed Black man, but it was the American judicial system that seemed on trial.
A jury recently convicted the three men — William Bryan, Travis Mcmichael and Mcmichael’s father, Gregory Mcmichael — of murdering Ahmaud Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020, in Brunswick, Ga.
“It’s been a long fight, a hard fight,” Wanda Cooper-jones, Arbery’s mother, said at a news conference.
The 12-member jury — all but one of them white — deliberated over two days, and the tension mounted with every passing day. The trial transcended the simple facts of the case — the forensics and witnesses and videos. It would provide a glimpse into the soul of America.
Some observers saw the trial as a litmus test for racism in our judicial system, a reasonable view considering the hate that permeates across the country. Are we the nation the Constitution calls on us to be? Or are we something else, something rotten and toxic?
We got the answer last week, and it was encouraging. The jury focused on the facts, finding the three men guilty of killing the 25-year-old man. All three will spend their lives in prison.
Arbery was jogging through a suburban neighborhood, and the three men, suspecting him of burglarizing a home under construction, chased him in their pickups. They claimed self-defense, but Travis Mcmichael acknowledged, under questioning, that the victim had no weapon. Arbery was shot three times with a shotgun.
“God is good,” Cooper-jones said of the verdict. “He will now rest in peace.”
We like to think we have left the past behind, that Jim Crow is dead and buried. But is it? If racism had been interred, it has been unearthed in recent years, with prejudice assuming more subtle iterations, including voter suppression and partisan redistricting.
Sometimes, as in the Arbery murder, there is nothing subtle or nuanced about racism. It is horrifying, as cold and naked as a razor blade. And it recalls an era when lynchings were common throughout the South.
Reflecting the poisonous mood in the country, the trial seemed rife with the potential for racism. The signs were there, starting with the jury composition — one African American in a state where almost 33 percent of the population is Black. The makeup invited comparisons to the Emmett Till trial in 1955, when an all-white jury acquitted two white men of killing Till in the Mississippi Delta region.
The accused would confess, in a Look magazine interview a year later, to murdering the Black teenager. No matter. There would be no retribution for one of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century; the victim was mutilated so brutally that his mother demanded an open casket so the world could see the horror visited upon both the teenager and his loved ones.
History did not replicate itself in the Arbery case, for the simple reason that the jury acted with honesty and integrity.
“While the guilty verdicts reflect our justice system doing its job, that alone is not enough,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “Instead, we must recommit ourselves to building a future of unity and strength, where no one fears violence because of the color of their skin.”
It will not be easy. The Arbery case proves that. Despite the just verdict, it was not until a video emerged, months after the killing, that the three men were arrested; the video showed them chasing an innocent man.
The verdict was all the more heartening because it came on the heels of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. He was found not guilty of killing two men during a racial injustice rally on Aug. 25, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Conservatives celebrated while liberals commiserated, viewing the verdict as an example of white privilege triumphing over justice.
That did not happen in the Arbery case. This could be an inflection point, if we only see the signs.