For many Americans, Arbery’s killing harks back to the old Jim Crow days when white mobs hunted black men down and killed them with impunity. In Brunswick, the shooting has sparked an uneasy conversation about race and power.
As a longtime NAACP foot soldier in this small Southern port city, Robert Griffin has witnessed his share of civil rights struggles.
On Friday morning, the 82-year-old retired teacher and former NAACP community organizer was among hundreds outside the Glynn County Courthouse in downtown Brunswick to call for justice for Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was chased by two white men and shot dead as he jogged along a suburban street.The Georgia Bureau of Investigation
by Gregory McMichael, a white former police officer and retired investigator with the local district attorney’s office, and his son Travis. They were armed with a shotgun and a .357 magnum. Demetris Frazier, 25, a cousin and childhood friend of Arbery’s who played football with him at Brunswick High School, said he was well aware of police brutality and the spate of black men who have been killed in recent years, but to see it happen in his hometown, to somebody so close to him, was devastating.While many black residents and activists said they were excited about the arrests, they were also cautious after so many shooters of black men, like Trayvon Martin, had been acquitted.
a black teenager, Rilyn Ellis, leaving him on the side of the road with a fractured neck and broken leg.“His father paid a fine, and he was let go,” Richardson said. “Brunswick is known as a country boy circle. Generations after generations go into the same [elected] positions.” For Perry, part of the problem was that the McMichaels had ties with law enforcement — connections that extended them privileges and allowed them to evade the law.
Some white business leaders would also give them cash registers to train young black residents how to use them so they could work as cashiers.One night, Griffin said, the leader of the NAACP branch, the Rev. Julius Caesar Hope, got a call from the police chief in the middle of the night saying officers had just trapped three young black men in a dark alley after they robbed a Jiffy Mart.
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