july 8–21, 2019 | new york 21a protest at city hall for the right of felons to vote, which the citi-
zens of Florida restored in a referendum the Republican legisla-
ture is trying to reverse.
Friday: Memphis. Giving a speech to a group of black law
students.
Saturday: Lumberton. Gathering evidence for a lawsuit against
the international conglomerate that owns the railroad tracks.
Also, Chapel Hill, to—
I stop him there. “You’re going to Lumberton?” He sketches out
the story, which is also outlined in a class-action suit for which he’s
hoping to recruit additional claimants. A multi billion-dollar
international conglomerate called CSX owns the tracks at the
center of town now, he says, and it ignored the official state studies
that show a significant risk of a catastrophic flood coming through
a railroad underpass on the Lumber River levee. Then Hurricane
Matthew arrived, causing $250 million in damage. Crump rushed
up from Tallahassee in a panic. Uncle Jesse was going through
chemotherapy, and he had diabetes, too; how was he going to
survive a flood? When he finally pulled up to the house, he saw his
uncle crying in the street, his home destroyed by a wall of water
six feet high. “He said something so deep,” Crump tells me. “He
said, ‘It’s all gone, it’s all gone, everything.’ And he said, ‘We need
you to make them do right by us.’ ”
After that, the city started planning a flood-control system, but
CSX refused to attend the meetings. Two years later, as Hurricane
Florence started roaring up the coast, the city tried to organize a
sandbag brigade, but CSX refused to give it permission to step on its
land. The governor finally issued an emergency order for CSX to
back down, but by then the rain was already falling.
This time, fortunately, Uncle Jesse was in a fema house on
higher ground. But two years later, after his fifth heart attack,
he’s still living in that fema house. His friends and relatives have
scattered, and the life he built is gone forever. So, yes, he’s goingto sue the railroad company. “It’s a burden on me,” Crump says.
“Can I get it done before he leaves this Earth?”C
rump is the most ferocious networker I’ve ever
seen. Shaquille O’Neill, Jesse Jackson, and Michael
Jordan are just members of Omega Psi Phi, the largest
international black fraternity in the world. Crump is
its Grand Counselor. He was the president of the
National Bar Association. He’s on the boards of the Innocence
Project and the National Black Justice Coalition. He’s been to the
White House with Oprah Winfrey and spent quality time with
Beyoncé and Jay-Z, who produced his documentary on Tupac
Shakur—names he’s not shy about dropping, though he does it
with a tone of wonder and immediately follows with a promise
never to forget the little black boy who grew up in the projects of
Lumberton. The high moral purpose he projects draws more peo-
ple to his cause. Why did Al Sharpton show up at Ferguson?
“Because Crump called,” Sharpton told me. “There are people I
make money with, but it’s all about the money,” Fernandez Ander-
son told me. “With Ben, you feel like you’re doing something for a
higher cause.”
In Tallahassee at Sunday dinner, I sit next to his mother. “Did
he tell you about the letter to President Carter?” she asks.
When her son was in fourth grade, she says, he sent a letter
informing the president of the United States of the racial divisions
in Lumberton. Even the schools were fancier on the north side, he
said, with big American flags flying outside. Would Carter please
give his school an American flag?
Carter sent the flag.
And oh, how her son loved the microphone, she says. He’d get
up in church at Christmas and Easter and give speeches that
lasted for hours, and everybody would applaud.
When Crump drops her off at home, they stop in front of a pic-
ture of a dark woman with a face like a gravestone. It’s his great-
grandmother, Mittie. “Tell the saying that she always told you,” his
mother commands. “ ‘We’ve done so much with so little ...’ ”
Smiling, Crump obeys: “ ‘Black people have done so much with so
little, we’re qualified to do almost anything with almost nothing.’ ”
Tell the story about the newspaper, she says.
Crump’s expression gets almost dreamy. Mittie couldn’t read,
he says, but when he was in first or second grade, she took out a
newspaper subscription and they started sounding out the words
together. He learned about Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher,
the fights over affirmative action and the war in Iran. That showed
him there was a world beyond Lumberton. She made him prom-
ise not to smoke or drink, too, and he’s never had a cigarette or let
alcohol touch his lips. She would tell him, “You’re gonna be the
one. You’re going to make it better for our people.”
After kissing his mother goodbye, Crump hurries to his office
to go over his pending cases with his new partner, Scott
Carruthers—two years ago, Carruthers approached Crump and
Parks with the idea of starting a national firm. Crump wanted to
do it and Parks did not. Now Crump and Carruthers take on
giant companies like Johnson & Johnson and Gilead Sciences
over allegedly defective products that disproportionately
affected black communities.“THE ONLY WAY THEY’RE GOING TO STOP
DOING IT IS IF THEY GO TO JAIL.”
Announcing a lawsuit against Harvard University in 2019.
(Continued on page 72)