The Old South
It feels like sixty years ago – 1961 not 2021. In a courtroom in the “Old Confederacy”, Brunswick, Georgia; a jury made up of 11 white people and 1 black person is hearing a murder trial. It’s about three white men who accosted Ahmaud Arbery, a black man they chased down with a pickup truck for being in “their neighborhood”. When Arbery resisted, the white men tried to use a gun to subdue him. In the subsequent struggle, Arbery was shot and killed.
A defense lawyer complained that there wasn’t “enough diversity” on the jury. What he wanted was more “white males born in the South over forty without a college degree”. As he said, “…Bubbas or Joe Sixpacks…seem to be significantly underrepresented” (First Coast). That’s diversity, I guess, not a jury more reflective of a community where 26% of the people are black (US Census Bureau). Even the judge in the trial admits that the defense has intentionally picked a “white” jury (though he says there’s nothing he can do about it – CNN)
But that’s not all. The same lawyer is concerned that the presence of “black ministers” might influence that eleven and one jury. “If their pastor’s Al Sharpton right now, that’s fine. But then that’s it. We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here…sitting with the victim’s family…” He then compared the black pastors to folks dressed like Colonel Sanders with white masks (Reuters). It’s hard to know if he was implying that black people like fried chicken, or that Colonel Sanders dressed like the Ku Klux Klan.
The Old North
But at least the attorneys in the Ahmaud Arbery Trial are allowed to refer to Mr. Arbery as the victim. In the trial of eighteen year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the defendant is accused of shooting three white demonstrators at a protest over the police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake. But the prosecutors aren’t allowed to refer to the two dead and one wounded demonstrators as victims. They can be “…rioters, looters or arsonists”, the Judge says, if the defense can show evidence of that. Of the twenty jurors selected in Kenosha, (ultimately twelve of the twenty will decide the case) only one person is of color. Kenosha is 80% white (Census).
Movie Trials
There are two famous “movie” trials where our nation’s race relations were exposed. The first, the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird, is set in the 1930’s. It’s about an innocent black man, Tom Robinson (played by Brock Peters) accused of raping a white woman. The black man’s white attorney, Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck), makes an impassioned plea to the jury. He tries to convince them that the courts are the place where “all men are created equal”. But the all-white jury finds the defendant guilty anyway. The film, made in 1962, highlighted the continuing racial discrimination in the United States. What was true in the 1930’s was still true in the sixties, with all-white juries determining the fate of black men and women.
In the more recent film, A Time to Kill, set in the 1980’s and filmed in the 1990’s, Matthew McConaughey plays Jake Brigance. He’s a young Southern white lawyer defending Carl Lee Hailey, a black man (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who actually commits the crime of killing the torturers and rapists of his young daughter. Despite pressure on the jury and defense team from the Ku Klux Klan, Brigance is able to convince the all-white jury to overlook the guilt of his client. He has them visualize the crime against the child, then pretend she was white instead of black.
The message of A Time to Kill was that times had changed, and that, with prodding, an all-white jury could relate to a black man’s anger. But the two current trials have a different emphasis. Both the Brunswick and Kenosha trials hinge on the accused’s right to “self-defense”.
Defending Property
In Brunswick the three white defendants claimed they were making a “citizen’s arrest” of a potential burglar. When Arbery resisted, they threatened him with a gun, which he attempted to grab. The “citizens” claim that they were first defending their property, then defending themselves from Arbery.
In Kenosha, Rittenhouse, then seventeen, took a semi-automatic rifle to the protest, supposedly to protect property. When one of the victims (oops – protestors) tried to take the rifle away from him, he shot and killed him. The other two victims then attempted to apprehend him, one with a gun (he was killed) and the other using a skateboard as a club (he was wounded). Rittenhouse’s defense is that he was protecting property, then defending himself against the victims, and was in fear for his life.
White Privilege
One aspect of both these cases is that of “white privilege”. Three white men see a black man jogging down the street, and they have no problem chasing and accosting him. One white boy sees a protest going on twenty miles away in another state, and decides he’s going to grab a rifle and insert himself to protect someone else’s property. It’s not hard to think that if the races were all reversed, Jake Brigance wouldn’t have the juries close their eyes. The outcome of both these cases would be pre-ordained: guilty.
Atticus Finch is the “model” of an attorney fighting not just for his client, but for what America should be like – all created equal. The two current trials will give us an answer to how far has our society come since the 1930’s, or 60’s or 90’s?
The answer, I’m afraid, is not very far at all.
