Georgia man’s death evokes legacy of racial terror in US
Black man’s slaying a stark reminder of past injustices
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Many people saw more than the last moments of Ahmaud Arbery’s life when a video emerged last week of white men armed with guns confronting the black man, a struggle with punches thrown, three shots fired and Arbery collapsing dead.
The Feb. 23 shooting in coastal Georgia is drawing comparisons to a much darker period of U.S. 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.
The footage of Arbery’s death was not the only thing that rattled the nation’s conscience. It took more than two months for his pursuers — who told police they suspected Arbery was a burglar — to be arrested and taken into custody. That is fueling calls for reforms of
Georgia’s criminal justice system and the resignation of local authorities who initially investigated the case.
“The modern-day lynching of Mr. Arbery is yet another reminder of the vile and wicked racism that persists in parts of our country,” said the Rev. 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 privileges that permeates throughout our country and our institutions.“
The case appeared frozen as it was handled by police in the small city of Brunswick.
After the video emerged on social media, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took one day after launching its probe Wednesday to arrest Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34. They are jailed on murder and aggravated assault charges and did not have lawyers as of Friday who could comment on their behalf.
Several hundred people crowded Friday outside the Glynn County Courthouse to mark what would have been Arbery’s 26th birthday, with many saying it’s too soon to celebrate because the case must still go before a grand jury that will 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 civil rights movement and brought about the eventual passage of federal civil rights protections.
During Friday’s protest, demonstrator Anthony Johnson said he sees echoes of Till and others. Arbery “died because he was black like the rest of them did. For no reason,” Johnson said.
Arbery’s death has drawn sharp reactions and expressions of sadness across the U.S. A Change.org petition calling for justice hit over 826,000 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 racial justice group made up of professional athletes, sent a letter Friday 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.”
While likening Arbery’s death to a lynching may seem an apt comparison, doing so isn’t sufficient for understanding why the man’s death is a tragedy, said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. The organization has cataloged more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings in the U.S. that took place between Reconstruction and World War II.
“Law enforcement did nothing about lynchings for a century,” Stevenson said. “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.”
The shooting of Arbery has also been compared to the 2012 case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black Florida teenager killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer.
Phillip Agnew, an organizer with the Movement for Black Lives, said vigilantism involving black victims has been “driven by hate, resentment and generations-old racial anxiety.“
“We need to make people afraid to do something like this to other people,” Agnew added. “And until we do that, this is going to continue to happen.”