HistoryLaw EnforcementRace and EthnicitySocial Commentary: Georgia State of Mind (Ahmaud Arbery Murder)

C2Change Magazine Social Commentary: Georgia State of Mind

A Brunswick native’s commentary on the Ahmaud Arbery Murder

As the video of the Ahmaud Arbery shooting circulated around the country, all the stories heard throughout my childhood (awful as they were) came rushing back. Stories of Georgia’s Jim Crow past; its murders and lynchings (including within my own family); the terrorism imposed by those sworn to serve and protect; the lawful voter suppression of the “White Primaries;” and the many other social and civil injustices people of color were made to endure while pursuing those unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The city of Brunswick, Georgia changed for the better with each generation of my family, unfortunately, some of its residents did not.

When my grandparents, and eldest aunt, migrated to Brunswick in the 1940’s, Thurgood Marshall would be a key factor in the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a Texas state law (used throughout the south) to impede the black vote in “white-only” primary elections.

Some 300 miles northwest of Brunswick, George and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom are brutally murdered around the Moore’s Ford Bridge; allegedly over voting rights and George Dorsey’s relationship with a white woman. (No one was ever charged or held accountable for the murders.) The gruesome murders attracted national attention and sparked multi-city protests. President Harry S. Truman, in its aftermath, created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and introduced federal anti-lynching legislation; the anti-lynching legislation would fail due to Southern legislators in the Senate.

Segregation, voter suppression, lynchings, lack of state and federal protection, and the daily oppression of Jim Crow laws were the rule of order for people of color in the 40s. The oppression not only impacted the quality (and perceived value) of black life, it would serve as the backdrop for the upcoming Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s.

Black folk weren’t even able to sit down in restaurants. We had to order from the counter and stand there to eat.

Brunswick, like other southern cities, mirrored the oppressive Jim Crow way of life for people of color. The city was segregated in every possible way; neighborhoods, public spaces, retail establishments and jobs, all the way down to the separate but unequal tax-payer-funded public schools. And as my eldest aunt (who still lives in Brunswick) reminded me, “Black folk weren’t even able to sit down in restaurants. We had to order from the counter and stand there to eat. We couldn’t sit at those white people’s tables.”

And while my grandparents and eldest aunt lived through the horrors and injustices of the 40’s, my mother and her younger sister would see the sweeping changes ushered in from the Civil Rights movement. My mother would graduate from the all black high school and her younger (by 7-years) sister would graduate from an integrated Brunswick High School. Gregory McMichael, according to my mother’s sister, would be in the same integrated graduating class.

So when the cell phone video of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing surfaced—prompting national and worldwide condemnation of the three men involved in his murder—I was shocked, but not surprised. Gregory McMichael grew up in a Jim Crow South where the lynching of blacks was accepted and went without punishment; and we’ve seen and lived through this type of hate and conditioning time-and-time again.

The forgotten Georgia cold cases of James Brazier and Hulet M. Varner, Jr., are two of many reminders. Brazier harassed and murdered by law enforcement and the cover-up that ensued to protect his assailants. 16-year-old Varner gunned down in front of his home by a white civilian driving through his neighborhood.

In Brazier’s 1963 trial—even with the involvement of the FBI and NAACP—the camaraderie between law enforcement, physicians (providing protection through medical misdiagnosis), and the judicial system in Terrell County, Georgia proved too strong to bring justice for Brazier’s murder.

In Varner’s 1967 trial, the assistant solicitor general, George McPherson, challenged a Fulton County, Georgia jury to find a white man guilty of murdering a black child—a crime that often went unpunished in the Jim Crow South. As reported in the Cold Cases Project, McPherson told the jury, “You have an opportunity to destroy an ugly, malicious stigma—that a white man will not be convicted in the South of murdering a Negro. I ask you to find this man guilty of murder regardless of how you feel toward the Negro population.” Today, 53-years after McPherson’s jury challenge, despite all the societal advancements and changes (and cases like Breonna Taylor (Louisville, KY) and George Floyd (Minneapolis, MN)), we’re still addressing individuals hanging on to that Jim Crow state of mind.