Atlanta mayor calls Ahmaud Arbery murdering ‘a lynching

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms compared the 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death in February to lynchings in the Jim Crow-era South and said the rhetoric of President Trump gave racists “permission to do it in an open way.” Bottoms’ remarks, made during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” came just days after a white father and son were charged with shooting in February.

“It’s 2020 and this was a lynching of an African-American man,” Bottoms said. “My heart goes out to the family.”

“With the rhetoric we hear coming out of the White House,” she added,” “many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way we wouldn’t see in 2020.”

President Trump, speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Friday, described Arbery’s death as “a heartbreaking thing,” and said he had seen the video footage of the killing, which he described as “disturbing” to anyone who watched it.

“I looked at a picture of that young man. He was in a tuxedo … I will say that that looks like a really good young guy,” Trump told “Fox & Friends.”

Speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Friday, President Trump described Arbery’s death as being “a heartbreaking thing.”

The remarks of Bottoms echo those made by other representatives of civil rights around the country who contrasted the assassination of Arbery to that of Emmett Till and other black men in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

Till, a Chicago black boy, was abducted in Mississippi in 1955, lynched and thrown into a river after he was wrongly accused of whistling a white woman. An all-white jury convicted the white men charged with murdering Till, who was 14. His death helped intensify the civil rights movement and ultimately brought about the passage of federal civil rights legislation.

“The modern-day lynching of Mr. Arbery is yet another reminder of the vile and wicked racism that persists in parts of our country,” said the Rev. James Woodall, state president of the Georgia NAACP. “The slothfulness and inaction of the judicial system, in this case, is a gross testament to the blatant white racial privileges that permeates throughout our country and our institutions.”

Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, said that before he was killed, she thought her son, a former football player in high school, was jogging for exercise.

Gregory and Travis McMichael told police that they suspected Arbery was the same man that was being recorded by a security camera breaking in. The McMichaels grabbed guns when they saw Arbery running on a Sunday afternoon, stepped into a pickup truck and pursued him.

Video footage-released Tuesday — shows a runner wrestling with a shotgun-armed man. Shots are shot, and drop and staggers the rider. A statement by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the McMichaels approached Arbery with two guns, and Travis McMichael shot Arbery fatally.

The death of Arbery has provoked strong responses and expressions of grief throughout the United States. Trump called the video “very disturbing”, and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said it was like seeing Arbery “lynched before our very eyes.”

Bottoms said the shooting shows national leaders having to take a stand on racism. “I have four kids, three of whom are African-American boys,” she said. “They are angry and afraid and it speaks to the need to have leadership at top who respects all communities in words and deeds as well.”