july 8–21, 2019 | new york 19and “No Justice, No Peace.” He told me about growing up in a little
North Carolina town called Lumberton, about his mother working
in the tobacco fields, about watching one of his uncles get beat up
by a policeman for the crime of getting into a white college:
“I guess he wanted to let him know that no matter where he went,
he was always going to be black.”
Some of his stories seemed honed through retelling to an unbe-
lievable perfection, like parables from the Bible, and a phrase he
often used to introduce them—“I’ll never forget”—was tinged with
the reverence of an oath. He’d never forget his great- grandmother,
who raised at least a dozen grandchildren while their parents
worked, some not even family. If you said you were too sick to go
to school, she’d hold up a switch and say, “Are you gonna die? No?
Then you can go to school.” His mother taught him about unions
and working-class solidarity. When he won first prize in an essay
contest, and her supervisor at the Converse factory wouldn’t let
her take the day off to go to the ceremony, she said, “I don’t care
what you do. I’m gonna be there to support my son.” When she got
back, he fired her. So she cleaned hotel rooms and worked in the
tobacco fields. And he was born in 1969—this wasn’t ancient days.
Many of his stories centered on the railroad tracks that ran
through the middle of Lumberton. The white people lived north
of them, the black people on the south side. The only hospital was
on the north side, the only library was on the north side. But when
he was going into fifth grade, his mother told him the white kids
and the black kids were going to start going to school together
because of a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall and a case called
Brown v. Board of Education. September came and the school bus
took them across the tracks. “And I’ll never forget,” he said, “there
was this little white girl who had a hundred-dollar bill. My mother
would have had to work a whole week—maybe two weeks—to get
a hundred-dollar bill. I was like, ‘Who gave you that?’ She’s like,
‘My parents gave it to me, and I can do what I want with it!’ ”
You had to cross the tracks to play on Lumberton’s youth football
team too, so Crump’s uncle Jesse—the only person he knew who
had a car—used to drive him and his friends to practice, six or seven
of them packed in like beans in a jar. Then the city issued a rule that
all football players had to have a phone at home. “That pretty much
ruled out most of the black kids,” Crump said. But Uncle Jesse had
a phone, and he told the recreation lady, “These are my boys, call
me.” She said, “Jesse, you trying to tell me that all of these are your
children?” “Yes, they’re all my boys,” he said again, trying avoid adirect lie. “No way are all of these your biological sons,” she insisted,
and Uncle Jesse got stubborn. “Yes, they are,” he said. “They’re all
my boys.” So they all got to play football that year.
By the time he left that town, at 13, Crump knew what he wanted
to do. He got his law degree from Florida State University in 1995
and started a two-man firm in Tallahassee with a classmate, Daryl
Parks, splitting time between bread-and-butter work like personal-
injury cases and “trumped-up charges against black people.”
Crump and Parks won some impressive settlements—
$10 million for a man whose face was burned off by a gas explosion,
$13 million for the family of a mother and child who were killed in
a plane crash, $5 million for the family of a preacher who was killed
by a drunk driver. Crump had a way of selling a vision that was more
like a political rainmaker than like another courtroom lawyer, a
settlement counselor named Fernandez Anderson told me, giving
the example of a difficult negotiation with an Avis executive who
was nickel-and-diming them over the payout for a man who’d been
paralyzed for life by an Avis car. “It was right before Christmas, and
Ben does something only Ben can do—he appealed to the humanity
of the guy. He said, ‘Don’t you want to go home and tell your son
you did something good for Christmas?’ It had nothing to do with
the law, nothing to do with facts, it was just one person talking to
another person. And we walked out of there with the deal done.”
In the case that put him on the road to national fame, he sued
the Florida state government over the death of a 14-year-old boy
named Martin Lee Anderson in one of its “boot camps” for trou-
bled teenagers and came away with $10 million. Even better,
Florida shut down all its teen boot camps. But seven guards had
beaten Anderson for more than 30 minutes, then held him down
and forced him to inhale ammonia until he suffocated. Still, the
coroner said he died from a blood disorder. Without the protests
and media uproar, Crump says, they’d be beating black kids in
boot camps right now. And despite all that, the jury that sat in
judgment of the guards a year later—an all-white jury—brought
back a “not guilty” verdict. When it comes to the police-violence
cases, Crump’s track record is not as impressive as he wants it to
be. That’s not because he doesn’t win—he’s fought about 250 so
far and won cash settlements in almost all of them. But the killing
goes on. “I used to think that if we made a city pay $5 million or
$10 million every time they shot black or brown people, they
would stop doing it,” he says, “but as we’ve seen, the only way
they’re going to stop doing it is if they go to jail.”With the parents of Michael Brown in 2014. With the grandmother of Stephon Clark in 2018.