“Even when people don’t appreciate the fight, you have to still fight for our children, because they’re our children; if we don’t stand up and fight for our children, nobody is going to do it,” said Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Parks and Crump, the firm that has represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, among others.
Looking up to people like his childhood hero, Thurgood Marshall, Crump has created a career that revolves around justice, what he believes to be a moral responsibility not only to the community, but to mankind in general.
“I’m reminding everybody what Dr. King said in that letter from the Birmingham jail, ‘We as more minded people have a moral obligation to oppose injustice when we see it,’” Crump states. “He said we have a moral obligation to do it, so you just can’t take the money and run. You can’t sell out the people. What you (have) to do is stand there and fight, knowing that you’re going to get (back) almost 300 years of racism and oppression.”
With the ongoing violence between the police and young adults, Crump says, a change needs to happen, and in order to achieve it, there needs to be a demand for it.
“Many people would much rather stand on the sideline and try to be critics versus going in there and saying, ‘I’m going to take a stand for this child and I’m going to fight even if it’s not a popular thing to do, knowing that all the odds are against us (and that) all of the suspicions are against us. We’re going to stand up and fight,’ That is what I think is the most important,” Crump said.
Crump talked about the duties that come with being a civil rights attorney.
“…well the only thing we as private civil rights lawyers can do is to bring a wrongful death lawsuit, which by and large we do and make the state compensate the family for the loss based on a monetary basis. That’s the only power in our legal system that private lawyers can do, and whether it’s Trayvon Martin, whether it’s Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, you know, all these cases. We have done our job and been successful at it.”
He continued to discuss how some elected officials fail to do their job when it comes to holding people accountable for taking the lives of children, and therefore it is the job of a civil rights attorney, like him, to hold people accountable for their actions.
His position sometimes puts him in the spotlight of what some consider difficult cases, but he still decides to takes a stand.
“You know, a lot of my friends (ask), ‘Crump, why do you even fight for people to go to jail? This is America; they will not send a white police officer to jail for killing Black people. … Why are you even arguing about that?’ I wish I could do that, but I can’t do that. It’s not who I am,” Crump said. “To sell out and say, ‘No, no, partial justice is OK,’ We deserve full justice, as well.”
Crump said since he was a young boy looking up to Marshall, he wanted to fight so that everyone had a chance at the American Dream.
Crump will have his work featured in an upcoming A&E mini series exploring the life of the late actor/rapper, Tupac Shakur. By showing Tupac’s life, Crump hopes to use his story to present how the examples of injustice and failure to provide due process, despite being a beloved public figure, corroborates with the social justice movement taking place in the present. Series like these are important to Crump, because of their effect on audiences.
“What we see (are) images. These are a certain number of images that are equipped for having an effect on our thinking and an effect on how we think about us, how Black people think about us, how the government thinks about us,” Crump states. “So it is very important that we are trying to speak truth to power in the biggest platforms that God has given us access to. So, I want to use all of this notoriety that I have to try to impact society — to try to make it better for our community and our people just like I shared about this 9-year-old boy who said ‘I want to be like Thurgood Marshall,’ I want to try and make it better for my community, for my people.”
