Welcome the convictions of the vigilantes who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, yet the struggle for racial justice continues

The welcome conviction of the three white assailants, Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan, Jr., on most of the counts for the murder of the Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Ga should not obscure the deeply rooted flaws of a legal system plagued by the legacy of structural racism that remains pervasive throughout U.S. society.

As National Nurses United President Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN said in an NNU statement: “This verdict will hopefully send a message of reckoning that it is long past time to hold accountable the perpetrators of an obviously racially motivated vigilante murder. While we await the decision on the sentencing for the killers, this is an important moment for Ahmaud Arbery’s family, community, and the nation.”

“It has long been evident that racism is deadly,” she continued. “This trial shows us how this is evident in the unequal access to safety, security, and justice for Black people and other people of color.”

In a country in which racism has been baked into all aspects of the political, economic, social, and legal system since the first Africans were brought in chains to the shores of North America, the murder and trial symbolizes the history the book burning, education censorship crowd is so feverish to ban.

Some examples of that living history just from this trial.

· Efforts to avoid prosecution.

The murder occurred in February 2020. Yet charges were not brought for three months as a series of local district attorneys failed to prosecute the shooters until a leaked video of the murder which sparked widespread national condemnation of their failure to act, finally shamed a fourth prosecutor to levy charges.

· Purging of prospective Black jurors. Though Glynn County, GA, where Arbery lived and was killed is 27 percent Black, 11 of the 12 jurors were white.

The defense was allowed to bar eight potential Black jurors despite a 1986 Supreme Court Batson v Kentucky ruling that barred discrimination on the basis of race in jury selection, a decision which prosecutors have long found ways to evade, as a comprehensive study earlier this year by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) described.

Attorney Annie Sloan argued in a law review article last year that Batson was now “widely considered to be a toothless and inadequate decision that fails to reduce the unfair exclusion of jurors of color.”

Even the Glynn County trial judge admitted “there appears to be intentional discrimination in the panel,” yet denied prosecution efforts to re-seat the challenged jurors, an implicit acknowledgement that the system has failed.

· Legal protections passed by conservative legislators that protect and enable vigilante violence. From Georgia’s 1863 “citizen’s arrest” law, the pretext cited by the defense team even though that law has finally been abandoned, to “self-defense” justifications under which Kenosha, Wi shooter Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted also cited in the Arbery trial, to Florida’s “stand your ground” law exploited by George Zimmerman for his acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

· The unescapable underpinnings of racism.

Racism was always at the heart of the case of the three men who, as the prosecutors described, as the Washington Post put it, “pursued Arbery without justification, jumping to conclusions about a ‘Black man running down the street’ and used their pickup trucks to trap him in their suburban Georgia neighborhood.”

The racist motivations of the three vigilantes were evident in social media postings, “racial messages” found on one defendant’s cell phone, a reported racist epithet about Arbery after the shooting, and the Confederate flag vanity plate on one of the two trucks that blocked Arbery from getting away from his assailants when they confronted him.

Hopes of stirring racist assumptions among the mostly white jury they had carefully orchestrated to seat was always central to the defense case, even if it ended up failing.

They employed the all too familiar theme of racial demonization and characterizations of Arbery, summarized most blatantly in one of the lawyers outrageous closing argument that, “turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”

Further, defense attorneys tried to gin up an atmosphere of a mistrial because of the presence of racial justice Black supporters outside the courthouse and the presence of prominent Black pastors, including Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, sitting in the courtroom with Arbery’s family under the ludicrous claim it would foster sympathy for the murdered man. “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here,” one of the attorneys notoriously argued.

These tactics, of course, echoed the odious history of racism and racist violence in Georgia, other former slave states, and the U.S. generally. As the EJI has documented, more than 4,000 post-Civil War, post Reconstruction lynchings of Black people occurred in the 12 former Confederate states between 1880 and 1940.

After all the racist murders in which their vigilante killers escaped any reckoning — from Emmet Till to Medgar Evers to Trayvon Martin and so many more, the convictions are important. “May this verdict bring a small measure of peace to #AhmaudArbery’s family and loved ones,” tweeted Stacey Abrams.

Yet we can’t lose sight of the likelihood that “Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers were only prosecuted because we all saw them do it, “ tweeted writer Jamil Smith. “@AdamSerwer reminds us: “To say the system worked in this case is like saying your car made it home — after your entire family had to get out and push it miles down a dirt road.”

“I know America will go down this road again — another White man will think that his Whiteness bolstered by his gun means that he has the right to kill a Black man. Maybe he’ll be convicted, maybe he won’t. Either way, the story of being Black in America will remain triggering and traumatizing and Rated X for extreme violence,” said writer Toure.

Many Black leaders and community activists and supporters remind us we should have never been here in the first place.

“This verdict, while just, does not bring me joy. A man is dead and life in prison for these three will not bring him back. Arbery was 25 years old, a high school football player who loved running and was on his way to becoming an electrician,” Toure added.

Or as Georgia Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock tweeted: “This verdict upholds a sense of accountability, but not true justice. True justice looks like a Black man not having to worry about being harmed — or killed — while on a jog, while sleeping in his bed, while living what should be a very long life. Ahmaud should be with us today.”

One important legacy of the case, and the Rittenhouse acquittal, would be if it promotes efforts for transformative changes to our legal system, including even minimal reforms ensuring state and federal courts adopt policies and procedures to ensure communities of color are fully represented in the jury selection process as well as the repeal of laws that protect and encourage vigilantism, as NNU noted.

“We live in a nation on the edge of disaster,” said Triunfo-Cortez. “We all have an obligation to speak out and act in our workplaces, in our communities, and at the polls to resist right-wing racist violence in all its forms. We must take action to promote a democratic society built on care, respect, and solidarity.”