Benjamin Crump: America’s civil rights lawyer
If attorney Benjamin Crump is asked to take a case, it’s likely that another Black person has been killed.
Every time, he has the same conversation with the grieving family: He says he tells them that he can’t promise a criminal conviction, as the nation’s legal system is unreliable in punishing the killers of Black people. He tells them it will be their responsibility to be the voice for their loved one — and they’ll likely face bile and vitriol from many in response.
But attention, he says, is the only way to get to the truth of how their parent or child or partner died. And truth is the only path to justice.
“You have to decide now: Are you going to grieve or are you going to fight? Because if you wait too long, the world will move on,” Crump tells each family.
The ones he represents are among the fighters.
One of the first families who took on the fight with Crump was that of 17-yearold Trayvon Martin, who was gunned down by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman at the Retreat at Twin Lakes community in Sanford 10 years ago this month. Within weeks of his
death, the nation knew Trayvon’s story.
The killing launched the modern civil rights movement that has swept the nation and the world. For Crump, the case provided the “blueprint” for working with grieving families to expose injustice.
In the decade since, Crump has had his conversation with dozens of families whose loved ones became household names in death. Many of them died at the hands of law enforcement officers, others in scuffles with violent vigilantes or as a result of negligence. His ability to convince families that justice is worth the fight has catapulted Crump from a prominent legal mind known mostly in northern Florida into the most recognizable civil rights attorney in the nation.
When a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, Crump got the call. When a group of white men chased then shot Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, he got another. When Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her Louisville home, he was called again.
Within days of nearly every high-profile killing, Crump is by the family’s side giving an impassioned speech, humanizing the victim and demanding criminal punishment, civil penalties and legislative changes that make it harder to justify the killings of Black and other marginalized people.
“I think when you look at the conviction of the killer of George Floyd, the conviction of the killer of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, the lynch mob of Ahmaud Arbery, that all harkens back
to Trayvon Martin and raising the consciousness level that Black lives matter,”
Crump said. “I believe that, without Trayvon, we would see none of the progress that
we’ve made.”
Two ‘crazy’ Black lawyers
Crump has a catalog of names that he can list from memory, most of them Black men and boys, all of them dead. He represented each of their families.
But when Trayvon died and Crump was called on to
help find out why Sanford police did not immediately arrest Zimmerman, he had only one high-profile civil rights case under his belt.
Parks & Crump, the firm he ran with then-law partner Daryl Parks, represented the family of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old boy who died in 2006 after he was kicked and beaten by seven guards, on his first day at a now-defunct boot-campstyle juvenile detention facility in Panama City. A nurse looked on and did nothing to stop it.
“Martin Lee Anderson was Trayvon Martin before Trayvon Martin,” Crump said.
The 14-year-old’s mother, Gina Jones “went to two white lawyers before she came to us,” he added.
Both lawyers refused the case, Crump said. The second told the family he had seen too many like it and was sure the family would lose. He predicted the Bay County deputies responsible for the detention center death would claim that he was a “disorderly Black youth” and they had no choice but to use deadly force. A judge would surely side with the officers.
“Then he said, ‘I’m going to tell you, there are these two young Black lawyers, they’re a little crazy because they won’t shy away from these controversial matters where the police kill Black people. You should call Ben Crump,’ ” Crump recalled.
At that suggestion, Jones hired Parks & Crump.
“We had done many, many civil rights cases, most of them are ones you’ve never heard about,” Parks said, looking back on more than a decade of work he and Crump did together before their firm became known for civil rights law. “The reality is that a whole bunch of things happen almost every day to people in our state. Some get attention, some don’t.” The Anderson case did. Protests led mostly by college students in Tallahassee and Panama City led to national media coverage and brought the Rev. Al Sharpton to Florida, the first of many times the civil rights icon would work with Crump.
The deputies and the nurse were charged but acquitted at trial after the defense claimed the boy did not die from the blows but rather a medical condition. But the family won a civil settlement and the boot camp and others like it across the state were shuttered, a bittersweet victory.
As he signed the Martin Lee Anderson Act into law in June 2006, then-Gov. Jeb Bush told Jones her son’s memory would help save other boys from suffering a similar fate.
“Your son won’t come back,” Bush said, according to the Tampa Bay Times, “but you’re going to be part of something bigger than yourselves.”
‘We needed the media’
By the time Trayvon died in 2012, the power of media attention was unmistakable to Crump. Making sure that families have as much opportunity to shape a story as police, prosecutors and killers’ defense attorneys is central to his approach.
When Crump took on Trayvon’s case, having heard about the killing from a college friend and been connected to the family through a relative of the teenager, he quickly put that strategy into practice.
“Ben was a genius in recognizing that we needed the media,” said Natalie Jackson, the Orlando attorney who served as local counsel alongside Crump for Trayvon’s family. “Ben was very adamant about Sybrina [Fulton, Trayvon’s mother] and Tracy [Martin, his father] giving interviews to the media even though they were so traumatized. Sybrina did not want to do those interviews but she agreed that she wanted to define her son’s legacy.”
The weekend Trayvon was killed, his death barely got any attention. Police released next to nothing about the case and it was overshadowed by a busy weekend of sporting events including the NBA All-Star game in Orlando and the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in Daytona Beach.
As more than a week passed without an arrest, Sanford activists drew parallels between Trayvon’s killing and that of another Black teenager in the city: Travares McGill had been killed in 2005 by two apartment security guards who also were not initially arrested.
Eventually, they were indicted by a grand jury and the case made it to trial but a judge later dismissed it, ruling McGill’s killers acted in self-defense.
Activists, including Jackson’s mom Francis Oliver, felt that case had been swept under the rug and did not want to see the same thing happen to Trayvon, Jackson said.
Public relations professional Ryan Julison came on board to help bring media attention to Trayvon’s case. Initially, the goal was simple: Use media attention and activist action to pressure the Sanford Police Department to arrest George Zimmerman. No one had any idea what Trayvon’s case would become.
For Julison, the first inkling came when Yahoo News posted an article from the wire service Reuters about Trayvon. Readers flooded the comments section with reactions.
“That was back in the day when they still had a comments section,” Julison said. “That story had about 15,000 comments.”
For Parks and Jackson, the realization hit about two weeks later when thousands of people showed up in hoodies carrying Skittles to join a massive protest in Fort Mellon Park in Sanford to demand that Zimmerman be arrested. Trayvon had bought the candy from a 7-Eleven near his father’s condo at Retreat at Twin Lakes and was walking back there when Zimmerman confronted him.
“That was when it dawned on me that this case was a huge case,” Jackson said. After that, she, Crump and the other attorneys started having meetings almost every day.
“I remember crying every night,” she said. “We got death threats. It was a scary time ... because I had never known society to be like that. I had not lived through that. I had never experienced death threats and racial slurs and thinking, ‘Can I drive on the street and be safe?’ ”
Fears over getting stopped by police plagued the lawyers. They were forced to fight back against complaints filed with the Florida Bar Association by people who were attempting to get their law licenses suspended.
These kinds of attacks are still a reality for Crump as he has taken on more cases that have garnered national attention.
“Thurgood Marshall is my personal hero,” Crump said. “And what I glean from studying his life and his legacy was, you always understood the mission was greater than you. So, I never lose sight of the fact with every case, no matter how emotional it is as a parent of Black children, that I must stay focused on the mission.”
‘This was our service’
Parks and Crump remained legal partners until 2017 when they amicably split and created two separate firms, Parks Law and Ben Crump Law. Parks said the split was over the future direction of the firm and the best way to be helpful while remaining financially viable.
Crump wanted to focus the bulk of his work on civil rights cases, which often means working pro bono and getting paid nothing unless he wins a civil settlement, while Parks wanted to maintain other parts of their business, including personal injury cases and workplace disputes in addition to civil rights and wrongful death suits.
“Ben and I lost a lot of money trying to be helpful,” Parks said. “The other stuff we did is how we made our money. This was our service; it’s a responsibility.”
Parks, who views the Trayvon case as his as much as it was Crump’s, said he came out of that case feeling that, despite Zimmerman’s acquittal, “people in my state were a little safer from the work we did and the attention that it got.”
“If someone does harm, they have to know that the system may come for them, that there is a strong chance that some people are going to try to get to the truth,” he said.
Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, found healing in making it easier for other Black families who lost loved ones in similar tragedies to get attention and a chance at justice.
“Our story shed light on other stories,” he said. “That’s a huge accomplishment. They were going to try to sweep this under the rug and we said, ‘No, you can’t sweep this under the rug. … In Trayvon’s case, the transparency that we forced Sanford to come out with, it had a domino effect in Minneapolis, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, all over the place.
“You can see the residual effects of us not being quiet with Trayvon. It gave people a chance to say, ‘OK, I don’t have to be afraid to speak up about a tragedy. No longer will I be silent about the injustices that the system has bestowed upon our people. … I don’t have to be afraid because there are a million people behind me saying ‘I got your back.’ That in itself carries a lot of weight.”
Though the Trayvon case transformed Crump’s life and career, he views it as a pivotal moment in a journey that began long before that.
“When I was a 9-year-old kid, I made the decision that when I grew up, I was going to ... help fight for people in my community and people who look like me to be able to have an equal opportunity at liberty and justice and that’s what I continue to do to this day,” he said.
Before cutting an interview short so he could meet with the loved ones of Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man killed by Minneapolis police during a no-knock raid, Crump said he enters each conversation with a grieving family with the same goal — one that doesn’t depend on police or a jury, but on society recognizing the tragedy of each unwarranted Black death.
“You are trying to make America say his or her life matters and we won’t let you ever belittle them or marginalize them as if they were not worthy of equal respect and consideration as any other American child.”