Cellphone video footage of a Black man being hunted and killed by three white men in south Georgia in 2020 was a catalyst that led to a racial awakening that evoked change and trigged white guilt in America.
Ahmaud Arbery fought for his life on Feb. 23, 2020, after being cornered by father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan. However, his years of athletic training did not prepare him for the power of Travis’ shotgun.
The specter of white men chasing a young Black man in pickup trucks permeated the minds of Americans and fueled impending civil unrest of historic magnitude. It led to significant changes in policy written into law when scenes of racial killings of Black people were more familiar in the South.
Georgia NAACP president Gerald Griggs said Arbery’s murder was a “modern-day lynching” that built up to the global outrage over George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police.
Video of Arbery’s killing surfaced online on May 3, 2020, a little more than three weeks before Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck. A Black woman, Breonna Taylor, was also killed in Louisville, Kentucky, in a botched narcotics raid in March 2020. The string of deaths sparked peaceful protests and riots starting in Minnesota to as far as the capital city of Australia.
“We were inside during the pandemic, and we all saw the video, and it was the impetus for people to go outside,” Griggs told Atlanta Black Star. “So, I think that it was the impetus similar to the Emmett Till case for the rebirth of the social justice movement, just as Emmett’s case was the impetus for the birth of the civil rights movement.”
Two white men admitted to torturing and killing 14-year-old Emmett in Mississippi in 1955. The boy’s mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, made it a point to showcase his battered body at his funeral to expose…
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