He’s been jokingly called “Black America’s attorney general” by the Rev. Al Sharpton. But Florida-based civil rights attorney Ben Crump said not everyone has gotten the joke.
“I get asked so much ‘When is your election coming up? I’m going to vote for you again!’” Crump said with a laugh. “Many people believe it’s a real position. Absolutely!”
But Crump takes his role seriously. He’s responsible for making household names out of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others.
“We get about 10,000 calls a week from a lot of marginalized people who feel that they don’t have a voice — a lot of African Americans, a lot of Latinos,” Crump recently told WTTW News as he sat in a conference room at Romanucci and Blandin. Crump collaborated with the Chicago law firm on the Floyd case and many others. “So the good thing about working with people like Tony (Antonio Romanucci) and other lawyers around the country is you can try to scale, you can try to assist more people in having a chance at justice.”
“For every Breonna, for every George Floyd, I dare say there’s over 500 that are just as bad, that nobody knows their name,” Crump said. “People think, ‘Oh, it’s a big case and we’re taking it,’ when most of these cases when they call us, it’s not a big case. The media don’t show up.”
He continued: “Breonna Taylor is the perfect example. Her local lawyer and her family called pleading with me to get involved so something could happen where Breonna just wouldn’t be swept under the rug. And then it was a lot of effort, a lot of ingenuity that made everybody say her name: Breonna Taylor.”
Crump and Romanucci said that while progress in federal police reform has been slow, they’ve taken another approach to police reform across the country.
“We know that the federal system isn’t fixing the policing issues,” Romanucci said. “So we are taking it upon ourselves. We’re putting it on our shoulders to go from state to state. Anybody that will listen to us to speak, to actually preach the word of why this is so important. So if we can’t fix the problem on a federal level, we’re gonna try state by state, county by county, city by city.”
“We have made progress,” Crump said. “I don’t want our supporters to get discouraged. There have been over 100 bills across America enacted in the name of George Floyd, talking about banning chokehold, talking about a duty to intervene. … If we wanna honor George Floyd’s legacy, we finally need to have substantive police reform.”
Crump was back in Chicago to join Romanucci for a conversation at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center about the reverberations of Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.
Follow Brandis Friedman on Twitter @BrandisFriedman
