20 new york | july 8–21, 2019
The Trayvon Martin case set the pattern for everything that
Crump is doing today. The family heard about him through a rela-
tive, a Florida lawyer who had followed his career. He showed up
within days of the shooting and brought on a local lawyer and a
publicity specialist, and soon protests started bubbling up across
the state. Then kids on the internet started putting out memes like
the faceless hoodie, which launched the Million Hoodie March—
“The image of that hoodie changed more minds than a thousand
court cases,” Crump says—and President Obama kicked the story
into hyperdrive with his famous remark that Martin could have
been his own son. Grieving relatives began calling Crump from all
over the country—he says he gets as many as 50 calls a day now—
and he became a fixture on TV news.
Two years later, he got a call from Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s
father, who told him, “Ben, they need you in St. Louis!” Crump
turned on the television, saw Mike Brown Jr. lying facedown in
the street. Soon, he was making headlines all over the world with
incendiary quotes like “Their baby was executed in broad day-
light.” Far-right websites like People’s Pundit Daily and The Daily
Stormer have called him a “race hustler” who should be disbarred
for inciting the Ferguson riots. Crump offers no apology: “They’re
killing our children and they tell us not to make a disturbance?
We try to disturb.”
In the years that followed, Crump became a perpetual-motion
media machine, investigating the death of Tupac Shakur in a five-
part A&E documentary, hosting a documentary series about
wrongful convictions for TV One, and even acting—he made a
cameo appearance as the young lawyer who joins forces with
Thurgood Marshall in the last scene of Marshall. Last fall, he
started his own production company, which is now making two
documentary series for Netflix. “I don’t think there’s anyone else
like him,” says Kenneth Mack, a professor of law at Harvard. “It’s
actually hard to keep track of all the things he’s done.”
This strategy of showmanship and vilification worries even
some who are sympathetic to the cause. “We black people make
race the central theme in a discussion of crime, policing, and
punishment in this country at our peril,” Glenn Loury, a professor
of social sciences at Brown University, wrote in 2015. “My fear is
that a discourse which readily cites the race of a citizen and the
race of a cop as the touchstone of moral outrage—‘Yet another
unarmed black teenager is accosted by yet another white cop!’—
invites a counter-discourse in which the race of the perpetrators
and victims of everyday street crimes comes to be accepted as a
legitimate topic of public argument.” This is exactly what hap-
pened when “White Lives Matter” became a slogan on the right.
It can backfire in other ways, too—the state prosecutors who
brought charges against Trayvon Martin’s killer failed to get a
conviction, and it’s possible that the publicity Crump stirred up
was partly to blame, pushing them to overreach with a second-
degree-murder charge. “Would I approve of every use of the
media he’s engaged in?” Mack says. “No. But as long as there have
been civil-rights lawyers, all the way back to Thurgood Marshall,
they’ve tried to publicize their cases and garner support. It’s
simply part of the job.”
Crump frames his response in legal terms: “We get the oppor-
tunity to at least put America on notice, and notice is two-thirds
of the law. When you see that policeman shooting bullet after
bullet into Laquan McDonald, or Philando Castile’s girlfriend cry-
ing in the next seat while he bleeds to death, or Mike Brown lying
there in the street for four hours with all those black people curs-
ing and fussing behind the police tape, you see what black people
have known forever.”T
he morning after the “Banking While Black”
meeting, Crump calls me with bad news—the execu-
tive decided he needed more time to think, so the
press conference is on hold.
I ask him what he’ll do next. This is the schedule
he gives me:
Sunday: Tallahassee. Going to church with his wife and
daughter.
Monday: Birmingham. Meeting with the parents of Emantic
“E.J.” Bradford, a 21-year-old who was killed in a suburban mall
by a police officer.
Tuesday: Little Rock. Interviewing victims of a series of “no
knock” police raids.
Wednesday: Sacramento. Holding a press conference with the
family of Stephon Clark, who was killed in his grandmother’s back-
yard by two police officers who thought the cell phone in his hand
was a gun.
Thursday: Atlanta. Meeting a woman who can’t get a murder
conviction off her police record even though she was declared
innocent ten years ago. Also the “Banking While Black” press con-
ference, he hopes. And Tallahassee, to get some clothes and attendWith the family of Markeis McGlockton in 2018. At a memorial for E.J. Bradford Jr. in 2018.
PHOTOGRAPHS: DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD/TAMPA BAY TIMES VIA AP PHOTO (MCGLOCKTON); SHAUNA A. STUART/THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS VIA AL.COM (BRADFORD); KEVIN HAGEN/GETTY IMAGES (HARVARD)