He represents families of victims of police brutality and has become known as “America’s Black attorney general.”
Ben Crump told Brut what keeps him going, as a new documentary, “CIVIL,” explores his life’s mission … #tribeca2022
Ben Crump told Brut what keeps him going, as a new documentary, “CIVIL,” explores his life’s mission … #tribeca2022
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00:00What keeps me fighting for civil rights and social justice is for the future of our children.
00:06Our children are worth the fight.
00:19An adult follows and kills a child and nothing happens to him.
00:24Remember George Floyd who was tortured, who was tortured to death.
00:41I am an unapologetic defender of black life, black liberty and black humanity.
00:50I believe that we cannot let society try to marginalize people of color, especially black people,
00:58try to tell us that our lives are irrelevant.
01:03No, our lives matter and every opportunity I get to challenge the system,
01:08whether in the court of law or in the court of public opinion, I'm going to do so.
01:14What we fight to do is to get out there and frame the narrative
01:18because the police have all these resources, black and brown people don't have any resources,
01:23so we're trying to even the playing field.
01:26The entire world has seen that with their eyes.
01:40When you think about the history of criminal justice system,
01:44the police normally get away with murder literally when they kill us.
01:49If anything America understands, America understands money.
01:54We are a capitalistic society.
01:56And so if we keep making these towns pay millions and millions of dollars
02:02when they shoot marginalized people of color, especially black people,
02:08and busting our doors and choke us to death,
02:11then we believe based on this capitalistic definition of society
02:19that they're going to say we can't afford this anymore.
02:25I think about Trayvon often.
02:39It is still heartbreaking that America chose to see the stereotypical narrative
02:48that they put on our black children when they looked at Trayvon.
02:52He couldn't just be a 17-year-old kid walking home with a bag of Skittles
02:57and a can of iced tea, talking on the phone with his high school classmate.
03:01No, no.
03:02He had to be somebody nefarious.
03:04He had to be a menace to society.
03:06So I look at that 17-year-old portrayal of this black kid who didn't kill anybody,
03:12and then I look at how America portrays 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse
03:17who shot three people and killed two of them, and it couldn't be more different.
03:23And so I'm fighting for our children to get equal consideration as well.
03:29It was in the fourth grade that they bussed us little black children from South Lumberton,
03:47which was the black part of Lumberton, North Carolina, a small southern rural conservative town,
03:56and they bussed us literally across the tracks to North Lumberton, to the white part of town.
04:03And I just remember coming home on the school bus one day,
04:07coming back across the tracks to South Lumberton,
04:11seeing all of the dilapidated buildings in the black community,
04:16seeing the broken down cars sitting on bricks,
04:21looking at my old elementary high school that had the lead paint cracking on the walls.
04:28And I said, why do they have it so good and we have it so rough?
04:33And I made the decision as a little nine-year-old nappy-headed black boy
04:39that when I grow up, I'm going to be a civil rights attorney like Thurgood Marshall.
04:46And I said, I'm going to be like him to try to make it better for people in my black community.
04:53You know, I got a death threat last week.
04:56There's a lot of people out there who don't want to see black people do well or get a claim.
05:03We need to stay in our place.
05:17My cousin was just murdered by a Minneapolis police officer.
05:23His name is George Perry Floyd.
05:27I quickly noticed that these interactions that he was happening with these families was just so incredible, so emotional.
05:36I mean, in a short time, he has to go in there and say, tell me about your loved one.
05:41We need to do a press conference.
05:43These are your talking points.
05:44I know it's going to be hard.
05:46What is he going to wear to the funeral?
05:48You know, and I just developed such a deep respect for Ben in those moments.
05:54Well, everything that happens, all the racism and bigotry, I am absolutely confident.
06:07I don't have a shadow of doubt in my mind.
06:11We will win this war.
06:14The enemies of equality will not win.
06:19Precedent is on the side of us as black people.
06:23We overcame the middle passage.
06:25We overcame slavery.
06:27We overcame segregation.
06:29We overcame Jim Crow based on precedent.
06:33Anything the racist enemies of equality throw at us people of color, us black and brown people, we going to be all right.