San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Arbery verdict propels hope over despair
Sometimes justice isn’t greeted with joy but relief.
Joy is possible when something taken has been given back, when something, or someone, removed has been restored.
Ahmaud Arbery’s life can’t be returned to his family, but there is relief the three men responsible for stealing his life will spend the rest of theirs in prison. It’s a nationwide relief given what would have happened had the verdicts gone the other way.
For the second time in seven months, a jury saved this nation from being broken in a way that all its parts would never again be pieced back together. Despair would have overcome the hope that it is still possible for us to rise above our legacy of racism and to correct injustices. Despair still may prevail if we’re not careful about preserving this democracy, protecting it and each other from those threatening to harm the body politic and the bodies of individuals for political reasons.
For now, the verdicts in the George Floyd and Arbery cases reassure us that justice is possible and when there’s only one obvious verdict, juries can render the correct one.
Had former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin been acquitted in April of murdering Floyd in May 2020, the world would have been told the crime we saw on video for more than nine minutes, the crime that
launched the largest social movement in American history, either didn’t happen or didn’t happen the way we saw.
Had Travis McMichael, his father, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan not been convicted of murder, false imprisonment, aggravated assault and other charges, we would have been told we didn’t see, or saw wrong, the video from Feb. 23, 2020, in which 25-year-old Arbery was chased, hunted and killed because white men were
suspicious of a Black man jogging in their Brunswick, Ga., neighborhood and wanted to make a citizen’s arrest.
Even with both these videos clearly showing the culpability of the murderers of Floyd and Arbery, many Americans, especially those who are Black and brown, weren’t confident in the outcome of the trials. It was a pessimism rooted in a painful history of disappointing experiences with the justice system.
That a nearly all-white jury in
the Deep South took only 10 hours to find the men guilty of murdering Arbery was an especially heartening departure from that history. But the question that gnaws is, what if there were no video?
Local officials allowed the McMichaels and Bryan to go free for weeks and would have continued to do so were it not for the dogged reporting of Larry Hobbs of the Brunswick News, video of Arbery’s slaying and protests.
Arbery was killed nearly eight years to the day another unarmed young Black man was killed by a vigilante profiling him as a criminal: Trayvon Martin.
On the night of Feb. 26, 2012, 17-year-old Martin was walking to his father’s house in Sanford, Fla., with Skittles and iced tea when he was confronted by George Zimmerman, who’d been following him in his car because he thought Martin looked suspicious. A fight ensued, and Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted.
There was no video to contradict him.
It was Martin’s death that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, and to watch Arbery stalked like he was a runaway slave or an animal is to see how little his life meant to his killers. After the shooting and the arrival of police, body cam footage shows Arbery, soaked in blood, laying across the yellow stripes of the road. He’s still moving, and the audio catches his painful, heartbreaking gasp.
No one, not the men who chased him or any of the officers, care that a horribly wounded human being is dying in the street. No one attends to him or offers him comfort.
Had the jury not heard Ahmaud’s gasp and seen all that led to it, would it have mattered? Video of an injustice shouldn’t be the standard by which justice is achieved.
Until the hearts of men stop them from hunting, attacking and murdering other men out of fear and hate, we’ll celebrate victories in the courtroom and that of hope over despair.
Despair will destroy us. Hope sustained by justice is our salvation.