Guilty, Guilty, Guilty…
And so it went, as the judge read 9 of 9 guilty verdicts for Travis McMichael, the first, and clearly most guilty, of three men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. But I suspect many Blacks (and, to be fair, many whites) were so relieved after hearing that first guilty verdict, they probably didn’t even bother to listen to the judge read the others.
Here is how NPR reported this judgment day for Arbery’s killers on Wednesday:
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The three white men who chased down and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was jogging through their Georgia neighborhood last year, were all found guilty of murder charges.
The high-profile shooting — and the 10 weeks it took for law enforcement to make the first arrests — galvanized racial injustice protests in the summer of 2020.
‘It’s been a long fight, it’s been a hard fight, but God is good,’ Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said Wednesday outside the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Ga. ‘I never thought this day would come,’ she added, saying her son will now ‘rest in peace.’
After the judge read the first guilty verdict, a whoop rang out in the courtroom. ‘Long time coming,’ the person, later identified as Arbery’s father, Marcus, exclaimed as the judge expelled him from the courtroom.
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This was one small step for America, one giant leap for Ahmaud’s family. But I thought it was inspired that the judge read the verdict form for Travis McMichael first, with its 9 readings of Guilty!
Because, had he started with any of the others, and the first verdict the world heard was Not Guilty, instead of jumping for joy as he did, I suspect Ahmaud’s father would have been stomping with inconsolable condemnation.
Of course the verdicts would have been the same in the end. But the mood of the day would have been dispirited, irretrievably.
Apropos of being dispirited, that’s how I felt throughout this trial knowing that the jury comprised 11 whites and only 1 Black. This, after this same judge allowed the white lawyers for these three white killers to use Jim Crow tactics to systematically eliminate so many potential Black jurors.
I mean, who would’ve thought we’d have a To Kill a Mockingbird jury in a case so affected by race here in 2021…? And don’t get me started on the racist tropes those lawyers used during the trial in a brazen attempt to make this case more about Black vs. White than right vs. wrong.
So yes, justice prevailed in this case. But when I consider the way Republicans are gerrymandering voting districts across the country, I fear it’s only a matter of time before the Jim Crow tactics that seemed so old-fashioned in this case become newfangled in many ways again.
But (racist) whites are in for a rude awakening if they think they will be able to subjugate Blacks sufficiently to reclaim those halcyon days. I have given fair warning in commentaries like “Civil War II Looms as Texas Suppresses Voting Rights and Bans Abortions,” September 2, 2021, and in podcast episodes like “Online Comments and the Fate of Democracy,” June 12, 2021.
Related commentaries:
Civil War II… Fate of Democracy…