WaPo: “The killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man who had the gall to jog through a mostly White neighborhood, was nothing but a classic lynching of the kind that could have happened a century ago.
We can say that in plain English now, with no hemming and hawing, following Wednesday’s jury verdict finding Arbery’s killers guilty of murder, aggravated assault and false imprisonment — the same crimes that White lynch mobs once regularly committed against Black Americans with impunity.
Lawyers for the three defendants — Travis McMichael; his father, Greg McMichael; and their friend William “Roddie” Bryan — played the race card repeatedly throughout the trial, perhaps seeing it as the only card they had. In Brunswick, Ga., a town where almost 60 percent of the population is Black, they managed to seat a jury with only one Black member. They resorted to just about every racist trope used to denigrate and demonize Black men over the years, suggesting that the armed killers had reason to fear the slight Arbery’s allegedly inhuman strength and malice. One defense lawyer, Laura Hogue, even went so far as to tell the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails.”
Those defense attorneys utterly failed. It took just 11 hours of deliberation for the almost all-White jury to find the three White defendants guilty of lynching a Black man. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for justice in these United States after all.”