AMY GOODMAN: In Georgia, a jury has convicted three white men for murdering Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year Black man who was chased down by the men and shot to death while jogging last year. The jury convicted the men on a number of counts including felony murder. Only one of the men, Travis McMichael, who fired the fatal shots, was convicted of malice murder. Travis McMichael, his father Gregory, who is a former police officer and their friend William “Roddie” Bryan could face life in prison. Ahmaud Arbery’s mother Wanda Cooper-Jones spoke outside the courthouse after the verdict came down on Wednesday.
WANDA COOPER–JONES: Early in, to tell you the truth, I never saw this day back in 2020. I never thought this day would come. But God is good. And I just want to tell everybody, thank you. Thank you for those who marched. Those who prayed. Most of all, the ones who prayed. Thank you guys. Thank you. Now Quez—which you know him as Ahmaud, I know him as Quez—he will now rest in peace.
AMY GOODMAN: The Reverend Al Sharpton also spoke outside the courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia.
REV. AL SHARPTON: Let the word go forth all over the world that a jury of 11 whites and one Black in the Deep South stood up in the courtroom and said that Black lives do matter. Brunswick, Georgia, will go down in history as the place that criminal justice took a different turn. Let us pray. Dear God, even when many of us doubted, even when many of us said it’s not gonna happen, you came in the state of Georgia, a state known for segregation, a state known for Jim Crow and you turned it around. You took a young unarmed boy that they thought was worthless and you put his name in history today. Years from now, decades from now, they will be talking about a boy named Ahmaud Arbery that taught this country what justice looks like.
AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Alicia Garza, the Principal of Black Futures Lab, co-founder of Supermajority, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, also the Senior Adviser for the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is the author of The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. Alicia, it is great to have you back. Can you talk about your response to the verdict in the Arbery case?
ALICIA GARZA: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Amy, for having me back on the show. My response was like many other Black folks’ response in this country, which was one, a feeling of relief. As you know, we had just come off of the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, of vigilanteism. So a few days later to hear that the three people who participated in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery being held accountable was a very important verdict and it was a feeling of relief that actually they hadn’t gotten away with murder.
At the same time, like many other Black folks across the country, I have to say that while it feels important that a jury convicted these men for their crimes, that justice would actually be that Ahmaud Arbery would be here with us today. The thing that really sits with me, Amy, is that our court system, our legal system generally protects vigilantism. This case, this verdict, was an important one. Unfortunately, it is not the rule; it is the exception to the rule that when vigilantes act in our communities in such a way as the McMichaels and their neighbor did, that often they are walking away scot-free just like Kyle Rittenhouse did earlier in that week. So relief, yes. Justice would be that Ahmaud Arbery would still be with us. Then of course, just reflecting on the fact that our criminal legal system protects these kinds of actions in general and that their conviction was not the rule, unfortunately, but it was the exception.
AMY GOODMAN: If you could talk about the comments of Reverend Sharpton who said “Let the word go forth all of the world that a jury of 11 whites and one Black in the Deep South stood up in the courtroom and said that Black lives do matter”?
ALICIA GARZA: Reverend Sharpton is incredibly prolific as per usual. And Rev is correct. This is an important verdict for this time and this place in this country. We have to understand that it is odd that a jury of 11 whites and one Black person would convict three vigilantes who murdered a man in his own community who was merely jogging in his neighborhood. You heard the 911 calls as much as I did. When the operator asked what the problem was, McMichael said that the problem was that there was a Black man jogging in the neighborhood. So yes, it is deeply important that this jury convicted this trio, a part of which was a father-son duo. It is important for Rev to say, and I agree with this, that times are changing. At the same time, we need more action.
As I said before, this is not the rule; it is the exception. While we are grateful for the exception, while the exception is important, we have to keep pushing to figure out, how do we make this the rule? How do we make it so that people who take the law into their own hands and decide for themselves who deserves to live and who deserves to die understand that that is not acceptable in this country? Until that is the case, we’re going to continue to see these kinds of tragedies happening across the nation. So yes, it is historic that a jury in this community at this time could make this kind of decision. At the same time, we want to see this happening across the nation. We want to make it the rule and not the exception.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Ahmaud Arbery’s father Marcus Arbery addressing the reporters after the verdict came down on Wednesday.
Bq. MARCUS ARBERY: This is history today. You know that. Black kids’ life does matter! For real, all life matter. Not just Blacks. We don’t want to see nobody go through this. I don’t want to see no daddy watch their kid get lynched and shot down like that. So it’s all our problem. It’s all our problem! So hey, let’s keep fighting! Let’s keep doing it and making this place a better place for all human beings. All human beings! Everybody! Love everybody! All human beings need to be treated equally. We finna conquer this lynching. Today is a good day.
AMY GOODMAN: Ahmaud’s father. Now we are going to turn to the lead prosecutor in the case, Linda Dunikoski, reacting to the verdict.
LINDA DUNIKOSKI The verdict today was a verdict based on the facts, based on the evidence. That was our goal, was to bring that to that jury so that they could do the right thing. Because the jury system works in this country, and when you present the truth to people and they can see it, they will do the right thing. That’s what this jury did today in getting justice for Ahmaud Arbery. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Linda Dunikoski who argued this case was the third prosecutor. The first, Jackie Johnson, has been indicted, went to jail last week and then was released. Ahmaud’s family is calling for her to be imprisoned because she was accused of covering up on behalf of Greg McMichael, the father, who was a former police officer, investigator who she knew well. Then it was handed to a second one and now to Linda Dunikoski. If you could talk about the significance of this, Alicia Garza, and that the indictments against the three men did not come down for over 70 days, for over two months, and it took the video, astoundingly, of William Bryan, the third white man, before this case got the attention that the family was demanding from day one?
ALICIA GARZA: Listen, it is incredibly important that this played out the way that it did. Let’s talk about that for just a few minutes. First and foremost, you’re absolutely right that we are on the third prosecutor in this case and that it was the third prosecutor who was able to get it done after the first one actually attempted to not have this case brought before a court. In fact, you are absolutely right, she conspired with this trio to keep this murder out of sight. That is unacceptable.
But what it should tell the rest of us who are watching this and asking ourselves, “How can this happen?”—it should say to the rest of us that actually the role of prosecutors is incredibly important. I can’t emphasize this enough, especially as we are going into midterm elections next year—so many of these positions like prosecutors, they are people who are elected by us. When you see these fights across the country for people to elect so-called progressive prosecutors, people who will actually bring cases like this on behalf of all people in their community and not just some, it is important to understand that we actually can have a role in that. I want to give a big shout-out to organizations like Color of Change that fight to make sure that the people who are in those positions are not just covering things up and sweeping things under the rug, that they are in fact working to make sure that Black Lives Matter in an incredibly racist legal system.
The second thing I think is really important to understand here is that this landscape politically has changed. This is not the first vigilante killing that has happened. In fact, this case reminds me in many ways of the case of Trayvon Martin who was just walking in his own neighborhood with a hoodie on in the rain and George Zimmerman decided that he didn’t belong there and that he was a threat. Since then, since 2013, we have seen an incredible explosion globally of organizing and movement-building that has called for accountability, that has called for a reshaping and renaming of what justice actually looks like and that has called for a reshaping and renaming of the rules that have been rigged against us for generations that allow for these kinds of cases often to go scot-free. So we have to give credit to the grassroots movement that has exploded across this nation for making the context such that somebody would have to think twice before allowing these three men to go free for such an obvious murder. I think all of those things are deeply important for us to understand contextually as we think about the role of the prosecution in this case.
AMY GOODMAN: If you could comment on this moment we are in? The Ahmaud Arbery murder case, the verdict has just come in, all three men found guilty of multiple felony murders. They face life in prison. You have the Charlottesville verdict. This was a civil case, the white supremacists there ultimately fined something like $26 million. I think it was Trevor Noah of The Daily Show who tweeted “Very fined people.” Then you have the case of Kyle Rittenhouse. In that case, he got off on self-defense. In a moment, we’re going to talk about a case of a woman in Kenosha who is arguing self-defense for murdering her sex trafficker, her sex abuser who had gone after multiple teenage Black girls. We’re going to be looking at the case of Chrystul Kizer. But the Kyle Rittenhouse, Charlottesville and the Ahmaud Arbery murder case, what does this mean for Black Lives Matter organizing in the future?
ALICIA GARZA: I think what it means is a few things. Obviously, there is still a lot of energy and a lot of discussion around how it is that we change the rules that have been rigged against us for generations and how we replace those with rules that are more humane, that are more just and that are rooted in a different moral and value system.
In the meantime, I think it is important for us to do a couple of things. Number one, I think we have to do some investigation of how did these laws come to be. These so-called self-defense laws have origins. The idea that you can protect yourself and your property against a would-be attacker is not devoid of racial tension. It is not devoid of racism or racist ideas. It is important for us to understand that. In 26 states across this nation, we have laws like this that protect vigilantes, that allow people to take the law into their own hands. I will be curious to see what happens in this case of Chrystul Kizer, a young Black woman who is claiming self-defense. So often these laws, these rules are rigged to protect vigilantes who often claim self-defense against who they think would be an attacker, which is often a Black person. So I want us to understand the origins of these laws. I think we need to actually go a little bit deeper to better understand how these laws are being applied in cities and states across the country.
But then there’s also of course a role for the federal government to play. As you know, the federal government can set the tone for what it is that states and municipalities do. Unfortunately, I think the Biden-Harris administration could have been a lot stronger in their condemnation of this kind of behavior and activity. But what we saw was actually more of a milquetoast response, which is incredibly concerning in this political context of white nationalism and a rise of vigilanteism, a rise in racial terrorism and a rise in racial violence. I think it is important that the federal government, led by the Biden-Harris administration, take a stronger stance and set precedent for what states and municipalities need to do.
We have long called on the Biden-Harris administration to strengthen the mechanisms that they have to ensure that there is justice that is applied equally across the board. Part of what that looks like, we think, is investigating the use of these so-called—sometimes they’re called King of the Castle laws or castle doctrine laws or self-defense laws that allow vigilantes to operate with impunity. The Biden-Harris administration could strengthen the Department of Justice to make sure that there is more oversight over legal systems across the country to give guidance about what we do in these kinds of cases.
We can’t afford to have more Kyle Rittenhouses. What we know from this era of Trumpism is that Kyle Rittenhouse or people like him are proliferating every single day, sometimes by the recklessness of companies like Facebook on social media but also because of the recklessness of the leadership in this country which fails to denounce this kind of behavior time and time again, whether it be the Trump Administration or now whether it be the Biden-Harris administration. We need to see stronger action on that.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the fact that at this point when there is so much outcry around these cases that still the Senate cannot manage to pass either of the two acts including the John Lewis Act and the For the People Act, or rather the Police Accountability Acts? Yes, you have got the voting rights acts on one side and you have got the Police Accountability Act because they could not resolve the issue of police immunity.
ALICIA GARZA: We should understand that these things are deeply intertwined. If you’re not able to make decisions about who represents you in the prosecutor’s office, if you’re not able to make decisions about who represents you in the judge’s seat, then you certainly aren’t going to be able to ensure that laws are being applied equitably and fairly. The fact the Senate can’t get this done should tell us something about the political landscape in this country.
Right now there are moderate Democrats who have joined forces with obstructionist Republicans to keep this country from progressing in a forward direction at the mandate of Black voters who put a lot of these people into office in the first place. So what I think needs to happen is that what we have to see is that people have to feel like there will be consequences for the actions that they are taking or not taking. In this case as we saw with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who they feel accountable to are the corporations that fund their political coffers but they do not yet feel accountable to a movement that says, “If you do not move our agenda, you will be removed from office.” So that is what we have got to keep in mind, particularly as we are pivoting into the midterm season.
AMY GOODMAN: That is how the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act links up with the voting rights acts because as we see in state after state, in scores of states, you have African Americans, Latinos, people of color being disempowered by gerrymandering and the suppression of voter laws that are passing.
ALICIA GARZA: That’s right. That is absolutely right. Again, as we pivot into this next political season, it is important for people to keep our eyes on the prize. Midterms are often a time when people drop off in participation. There are a lot of down-ballot races that people tend to not participate in. But those are the ones that are the most important to participate in. Again, like I said, when you look across the nation, these kinds of positions like prosecutors, like judges, like governors who get to decide people’s fates, these are elected positions and these are positions that you have the ability to weigh in on and have decision-making power over. So it is important for us to be thinking about how do we put the chess pieces in place so that we can create more favorable outcomes for the things that we want to see. So that we can make sure that this case where three white men were actually held accountable for the senseless murder of a Black man who was just jogging in his neighborhood, so we can make sure that those kinds of convictions are the rule and not the exception. So that we can make sure that what justice looks like in our communities is our people not been disappeared, whether it be in the bottomless pit of our jail and prison system or whether it be through the hands of vigilantes who have decided that some lives matter more than others. We actually have the ability to influence that, and so I want us to keep that in mind as we pivot toward this next election season.
AMY GOODMAN: Alicia Garza, we want to thank you for being with us, Principal of Black Futures Lab, co-founder of Supermajority, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, also the Senior Adviser for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and author of The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart.
Next up, we look at the case of Chrystul Kizer, the Black teen who faces murder charges in Kenosha, Wisconsin after she killed her alleged sex trafficker, a white man who had a history of sexually abusing underaged Black girls. She says she killed him in self-defense. Her case is under new scrutiny after the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal in Kenosha after he shot dead two racial justice protesters, claiming self-defense. Back in 30 seconds.
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