BUILDING A WORLD BEYOND BRUTALITY BY ATTORNEY BENJAMIN L. CRUMP

Building a World Beyond Brutality by Attorney Benjamin L. Crump President of the National Civil Rights Trial Lawyers Association, President and Founder of Ben Crump Law

America, like so much of the world, continues to grapple with the vestiges of slavery and colonialism that are reflected in systemically racist practices in every facet of modern society. Slavery in America created wholesale devaluation of Black life in education, healthcare, employment, housing, voting rights, and the law—hence, the title of my book, Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. I have focused much of my career on the most visible manifestation of racism in America: police brutality or the state-sponsored extrajudicial killing of innocent Black men, Black women, and Black children without recourse. Although this is the most obvious form of racism in America, the methodologies through which Black people are oppressed and denied their fundamental human rights are as varied as the devious minds that create them. Racism evolves through time with the advent of new technologies, new legal systems, new healthcare systems, new educational institutions. Put simply, human rights practitioners must be freedom innovators and work diligently to create new ways to outpace modern-day oppressors or “Jim Crow Jr.” These United States of America have an established history of lethal police violence applied disproportionately against persons of African descent. In innumerable instances, local, state, and federal governments have failed to hold accountable police officers who commit human rights violations. In 2014, unarmed 18-year-old African American Michael Brown was accused of stealing from a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri, and was shot six times while he had his hands up. No police officer was criminally charged. In 2014, police accused unarmed Eric Garner of unlawfully selling cigarettes in New York City and killed him with a chokehold. None of the officers involved were convicted of any wrongdoing. In 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26year-old African American woman, was shot and killed in her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, by police officers executing a “no-knock” warrant; she was unarmed and not accused of committing any crime. No officer was charged with her death.

The extrajudicial killing of African Americans by police officers in the United States is so endemic that white Americans have been emboldened to act as vigilantes. In 2012, 17-yearold African American Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed and not committing any crime, was shot and killed by self-proclaimed “neighborhood watchman” George Zimmerman. In 2020, unarmed 25-year-old African American Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by white men while jogging in a Georgia neighborhood. He was committing no crime, and this modern-day lynch mob hunted him down and ruthlessly killed him in broad daylight. Although the extrajudicial killing of Black people by law enforcement was made illegal de jure, the precedent established in our legal system legalizes the extrajudicial killing of Black people de facto and has emboldened white persons to take the lives of Black persons. Much of my legal career has been dedicated to holding police officers and citizens accountable for murdering Black persons. It is possible—there are glimmers of hope—that the tide may slowly be turning. April 20, 2021, was a truly historic day for justice in America. For the first time in my career and one of the few times in American history, a white police officer was convicted for killing a Black man: George Floyd. Seven months later, on November 24, 2021, another historic victory came when a jury convicted the white men who hunted down Ahmaud Arbery and murdered him in broad daylight. Our efforts to restore justice to law and value to Black life in America have begun to bear fruit. I cannot minimize the significance of the victory represented in those two verdicts, bringing us closer to true equality in the United States. I also cannot emphasize enough that, by itself, stopping Black men and women from getting shot in the back by police and white vigilantes is not equality. We must forever keep our eyes on the proverbial prize and strive to create equal access to opportunity in every facet of life. Black lives are stolen in many ways, Black dreams are deferred, Black talent is too often unrecognized, and Black ingenuity is not given an opportunity to flourish. The foundation of our nation, the Declaration of Independence, pledges Americans the right to pursue happiness, and I intend to commit the remainder of my career to holding that declaration to its highest ideals. Although much of my work has been centered on police brutality cases, I have also taken on many cases involving equal access to education, health care, employment, housing, voting rights, and public accommodations. I have worked on high-profile cases that have fundamentally changed national and international law, and I have worked on cases nobody has ever heard of that have changed a single person’s life. I frequently remind the young attorneys I mentor that we must maintain a constant duality of being both the “salt of the Earth” and the “light of the world.” We must never be too self-important to take a moment of our time to help improve another’s life. I represented a postal worker who was subjected to racial discrimination in his employment before the United States Supreme Court. I represented the Madison 9, nine women unlawfully charged with felonies for attempting to exercise their right to vote in Madison, Florida. I represented people living in Flint, Michigan, whose drinking and bathing water was contaminated by lead from the municipal water supply. I worked on a case in Port St. Joe, Florida, where Black families were sold homes on top of a landfill that was poorly filled, causing the foundations of their homes to crack, their houses to begin to sink, snakes and wildlife to enter their houses through the holes, and exposure to toxins to occur. I worked on a case in which an elementary school teacher read a book to children using the “N-word,” making the Black children in her classroom feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. I have also stopped my day in order to take a single Black mother with a newborn baby to apply for a job at a local Olive

Garden. Most recently, I collaborated with St. Thomas University College of Law in Miami Gardens, Florida, to found the Benjamin L. Crump Center for Social Justice. I am working daily to ensure that African Americans have equal access to opportunity, to ensure that as we fight to preserve the fundamental right to Black life, I am also fighting for Black life to flourish and protecting the right of Black people to pursue happiness. I remain steadfastly focused on the future of justice in every facet of what it means to be a whole and equal person, and I use every resource at my disposal to push the bounds of justice. Fighting to eliminate acts of racism is not enough—we must fight for true equality. Stopping the active suppression of the Black vote is not equality; equality is equal representation of Black people serving in the judiciary. Stopping employment discrimination is not equality; equality is equal representation of Black people as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Stopping Black men from getting shot in the back is not equality; equality is shooting an equal number of Black men to the moon and allowing them to be competitive in every industry, including space technology. Securing medical treatment for a Black grandmother is not equality; equality is having highquality health care available to all, no matter their zip code. We cannot be so distracted by combatting structural and systemic racism that we fail to keep our eyes on the prize: a world beyond brutality. We cannot accept the inequities of the world we can see around us with our eyes. Instead, we must close our eyes and use the vision within our imagination to see and create a world of more perfect equality, and we must believe in that world more than we believe in the one currently around us. As leaders, our job is to envision a world beyond brutality—we must imagine the future of justice so that generations yet to be born will realize full equality, so seeds of hope will be sown and rooted into a future for our children. We must go beyond breaking every chain, to building the foundations that will raise generations. We must evolve in our ingenuity as freedom fighters at a rate that outpaces our oppressors. In short, we must work, every day, for true equality and true justice.