Ahmaud Arbery: A People's Victory from the People's Movement!

Nov 29, 2021

Statement released on Abery's verdict by Executive Director Frank Chapman:

"We agree that the murder of Ahmaud Arbery was a 'modern day lynching.' We stand united with the Arbery family and our community in their demands for justice. The lynching of a Black man by white supremacists was on trial and in a very real sense this was a people’s victory brought about by the people’s movement. The jury finding all the perpetrators guilty of murder was a people’s victory. It was not proof that the system works.

What we need to focus is that the struggle works and that when we fight, we can win. The verdict was a people’s victory despite the fact that originally a racist prosecutor refused to prosecute this case; despite defense counsel’s use of blatant racist appeals to the jury of eleven white people and one Black person; despite all this the jury found these white supremacists’ murderers guilty.

As freedom fighters in the struggle against racist and political repression we celebrate what happened in Georgia, a deep South former slave state. And yet this is but a small step in a country which has consistently refused to pass an anti-lynching law for the last hundred years, as U.S. Congress which even now is sitting in silence on the George Floyd bill and the John Lewis Voting Rights bill. We must continue to fight for justice and equality because the verdict of guilty in Georgia stands in the shadow of the Rittenhouse acquittal and leaves a white supremacist social order rooted in slavery and genocide in tack."

-Executive Director, Frank Chapman. National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression