Commit to Bending that Arc
In May, I spent a little over two weeks serving on a jury in San Francisco. Less than a month after the trial ended, I left for southern Ohio and West Virginia, followed by a nine-day Black Freedom Movement trip in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, ending in Memphis, Tennessee. The juxtaposition of these two experiences enhanced my gratitude and respect for the power of due process, equitably applied.
This was my third time on a jury, and once again I was impressed by the ability of twelve strangers to become a cohesive enough group to come to a unanimous verdict. Jurors have to trust each other, which can be a tall order since we cannot talk about the case until we actually meet to deliberate over the evidence. We did have the shared experience of observing the care and attention with which court staff, including the judge, clerk, court reporter, bailiff, attorneys, and the cadets staffing the metal detector at the entrance to the building conducted the affairs of the court. The rituals and courtesies of the law help set the tone that jurors need in order to do our job well.
Within a few minutes of being ushered into the deliberation room after testimony and arguments had concluded, it was apparent that we all arrived with good will: Two people began setting up the jury computer, on which we could review video evidence like that from police body-worn cameras. Others figured out how to use the scrap paper we had received to set up name cards so we could address each other by name (rather than as “Juror Number 2,” for example). I reminded us that we needed to choose a foreperson – and ended up being asked to fill that role.
As we began our deliberations, however, it became clear that we had quite a range of opinions about whether the prosecution had made a strong enough case for us to bring a guilty verdict and whether the defense had made a strong enough case for the presumption of innocence to prevail. That’s why it took us more than two days of deliberation to reach a “not guilty” verdict. We went over the pictures and videos which had been offered as evidence, and we asked the court reporter to read us several portions of witness testimony again. We reread the judge’s instructions to the jury, and we sent her several queries about the meaning of a felony charge none of us had heard of before the trial. We talked through what we had heard and seen and how it related to the law as the judge explained it. Most importantly, we listened to each other. And finally one juror pointed out a few things on a video which led another juror to shift his perspective, and from there it was suddenly easy to inform the judge that we had a unanimous verdict. We needed time to build enough trust and mutual respect to be able to agree, even though each one of us was committed to uncovering the truth together. Trust and respect are essential to due process just as they are to any serious discussion of difficult matters.
The history trip in southern states highlighted how much suffering can occur when trust and respect are lacking. We visited sites in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Alabama, where peaceful campaigns for equal access to voting, public transit, stores, and restaurants had been met with violence from police. Our local guides included people who had faced jail and assault as child “foot soldiers” in the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. Our guide at the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana was a white native of New Orleans who told us that she only began to really learn the history of enslavement when she first toured the plantation about ten years ago, an experience which changed her life. Her story, like my experience of coming to agreement in the jury room, demonstrates the insights and relationships that can result when people take time to listen to each other and find common ground.
In Mississippi we visited the home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, which reminded me strongly of the first house my parents owned, in Long Island, New York. Both houses were in small developments built for World War II veterans using their GI Bill benefits, although there were fewer such developments for Black veterans like Medgar Evers than for Jewish veterans like my father. (Neither Jews nor Black people were welcome in most post-World War II housing developments.) We met the newly-elected Black mayors of Canton and Clarksdale, Mississippi, and we walked across the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, Alabama – named for a Confederate army officer and Ku Klux Klan leader, yet famous now for heroes such as Representative John Lewis and The Rev. Martin Luther King. We visited memorials to voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and to lynching victims including Emmet Till.
We also enjoyed musical performances at a simple juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi and at B.B. King’s Blues Club in Memphis. We visited sculptures by Michelle Browder, an artist and activist who has beautifully commemorated enslaved women on whom a white physician performed gynecological experiments. Browder’s work both honors the women and moves us to remember the suffering of past generations, reminding us that our actions have profound consequences for human lives.
Sculptures by Michelle Browder
Some of our guides attended racially segregated schools when they were young, including our wonderful guide in Greenwood, Mississippi, where schools for Black children taught only three months of the year in the 1960s, with the children required to work in the cotton fields the rest of the time. Schools are still effectively segregated in many places in the south, with most Black children attending public schools and most white children attending private schools.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said (paraphrasing abolitionist minister Theodore Parker) “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” I used to hear that saying as a promise that the moral universe would inevitably bring us to a place of justice. I hear it differently now, when the rule of law and our aspirations for justice are under threat from the highest levels of the United States government.
One of the things I learned in Birmingham, in Montgomery, and throughout the South is to appreciate the strategic genius of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Dr. King, Medgar and Myrlie Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and many other leaders who planned Civil Rights campaigns, who taught nonviolent resistance, who encouraged people when justice seemed slow in arriving, and who developed new tactics as the movement continued. They refused to give in to despair, even in the face of violence. They consistently built community and solidarity, and together they kept moving toward justice.
If we are to prevail in the face of today’s attacks on due process and on justice, we also must encourage each other, build community and solidarity, keep moving together, and persist in the face of oppression. I now understand that the arc of the moral universe does not move all by itself: It bends toward justice because human beings committed to justice, peace, equity, and due process for all people add their weight to that movement.
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