The outcome of the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial in Glynn, County, Georgia, has brought both jubilation and cautious optimism for the future of race relations in the South. It was with a sigh of relief that I listened to the guilty verdict for the three defendants. Perhaps, the reputation of Georgia was burnished a bit and that of Glynn County rescued from becoming a place of infamy in the justice system. Right up to the end, I was not confident that justice would prevail in spite of the overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecution. I was proud of my adopted state.
Ahmaud Arbery, as many of you know, was the twenty-five year old Black man who was chased down and shot three times with a 12-gauge shotgun by three white men in their pickup trucks. After the shooting, it took two and half months to charge them with a crime during which they walked away as free men. The local prosecutor in Glynn County is now under indictment for protecting the perpetrators and directing the police not to arrest them. Without the video, astonishingly taken by one of the assailants, the case would probably never have seen the light of day and the crime would be forgotten as just another case of a Black person without redress.
This time the outcome was different, a Black man got a fair trial and justice was done. Despite the outcome, the case reminds me of the infamous trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1921 when two Italian immigrants were convicted of robbing and killing a paymaster in Massachusetts. Historians still debate as to the quilt of the pair while the case remains prominent as an example of the double standard of American justice between white Americans and others who are disenfranchised or happen be ethnic or racial minorities. The trial and the subsequent execution of Sacco and Vanzetti provoked novelist John Dos Passos to declare that “all right, we are two nations” in The Big Money (1936). Fortunately, this time a nearly all white jury in a small southern town helped close that gap and bring our two nations together.
Let us hope that the Ahmaud Arbery trial is a sign of progress and a maturing of the American mind about race relations, both here in the South and north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But let’s also remain vigil so this progress is not short lived.