“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.”
-Ulysses S. Grant
We are told another police killing was “justified” by the victim’s actions, according to Andrew Womble, the district attorney of Pasquotank County in North Carolina, where an unarmed Black man, Andrew J. Brown, was shot and killed by a sheriff’s deputy. Womble called Brown’s death, “while tragic, justified.” Brown was shot and fatally wounded a day after a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murder in the killing of George Floyd. The Brown family’s attorneys, including Ben Crump and Baraki Sellers, promptly issued a statement saying the D.A. was trying to “white wash” the police killing and that: “To say this shooting was justified, despite the known facts, is both an insult and a slap in the face to Andrew’s family, the Elizabeth City community, and to rational people everywhere.”
Rev. William J. Barber, widely respected, prophetic Goldsboro, North Carolina pastor and co-founder of The National Poor People’s Campaign, said that while Womble’s decision was not a surprise, it “doesn’t make it acceptable to our communities.” Moreover, he said that Womble was behaving like a defense attorney for the officers involved in the shooting. In response to a comment from Womble about why the officers didn’t allow Brown to escape and then arrest him later, Rev. Barber said that Womble regards a warrant as, “a license to kill … Far too many killings of Black men and women have been ruled justifiable only to be proven later that they were not.”
Former St. Louis Comptroller Virvus Jones draws a sharp parallel with heinous past police practices in a recent tweet: “The D.A. in the Andrew Brown case said because the police had a legal warrant, they were justified in killing him to apprehend him. This is no different than the slave patrollers who also had legal warrants and power to use deadly force to apprehend slaves.” Jones is completely correct in drawing this apt comparison.
Although Womble has declared this case closed and ignored the governor of North Carolina’s call for a special prosecutor in Brown’s death, the FBI — undoubtedly influenced by the protests against this apparently malicious police killing — has announced it will conduct a federal civil rights investigation. This shows again how important it is to have someone in charge of the Attorney General’s office who is involved in addressing this issue in a forthright, proactive way. Again, we see that the results of the last presidential election matter and so does continued resistance to the racial injustice of state-sanctioned violence inflicted on Black people during the centuries-old history of this country.
It is encouraging that Black people and many others of good will (philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that it is a good will rather than the consequences of an action that determines the ethical worth of an action) have stood up and joined the ongoing fight to finally force a reckoning in this country about the long-endured systemic injustices and their impact that remains today. There must be continuing demand if there is to be meaningful change. We have seen how there can be change if ordinary people come together to pressure the existing state of injustice and inequity in this country.
