Civil rights attorney Ben Crump sees a throughline from representing the family of Patrick Lyoya, who was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to his racial discrimination lawsuit against Wells Fargo bank.
“America has to come to grips with the racial discrimination that exists in all the institutions of American society. We shouldn’t expect policing to be any different from banking or environmental injustices. It’s part of our culture to marginalize minorities in America,” Crump, who represented George Floyd’s family, told the Guardian on the same day a state report found that Minneapolis police had engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination.
Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 sparked a movement against police brutality, Crump has become a fixture at the side of families whose loved ones were killed by law enforcement. In recent years, Crump has expanded that civil rights work to expose the root causes of racial inequality, from housing discrimination to medical racism.
In July 2021, Crump sued Johnson & Johnson on behalf of the National Council of Negro Women who alleged the pharmaceutical giant promoted talcum-based baby powder to Black women, despite links to ovarian cancer. (Johnson & Johnson denied the allegations.) A month later, the family of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer tissue cells had been taken by doctors without her knowledge in 1951 and later used to create medical advances, hired Crump to explore litigation against pharmaceutical companies they say had made fortunes off her HeLa cells. (By October 2021, they sued a biotech company for allegedly profiting off the “stolen” cells.) And on 14 April of this year, Crump joined a class-action lawsuit against Wells Fargo, America’s largest mortgage lender, alleging that the bank approved more loans for white borrowers than Black borrowers and gave the latter higher average interest rates.
“Part of my life’s mission is to try to make sure we hold a mirror to America’s face to say that we have to be better than this if we’re going to make the words in the Declaration of Independence real and not just rhetoric,” Crump said.
The Minnesota human rights commission just released that report about the Minneapolis police department, nearly two years after George Floyd’s murder, engaged in a pattern of racial discrimination. What went through your mind when you heard about the report?
They provided evidence for what we have always believed based on excessive force committed against minorities, especially Black men commensurate with the demographics. The fact that you had George Floyd, Amir Locke, Jamar Clark, David Smith – these are things that jump out in your mind right from the beginning when you think about the Minneapolis police department and their interaction with Black people in Minneapolis that were killed unjustly. We got in many ways objective evidence to show that it was unjustified.
You once said that just like police brutality killed Black lives, the discrimination that’s exhibited by Wells Fargo killed Black opportunities. In some ways, the same could be said around the exploitation of Black bodies for profit, as seen in the case of Henrietta Lack’s family. In your eyes, how are those situations interconnected when talking about the lives of Black Americans?
Some see it as an evolution of Ben Crump, but you know, I see it as a very similar, familiar fight against bias and discrimination and racism. It’s the same whether our children and people in our community are being killed by police excessive force or whether people are being killed by environmental injustices or being killed, in Henrietta Lacks’ case, with scientific racism experimentation, or whether they’re killing our spirits with discrimination in banking, denying us access to capital to close the wealth gap. To me, it’s the same fight. We just have different opponents.
With that canvas of work, what does it tell us about the ways structural racism manifests in American society?
It just speaks to the fact that it is part of all of our institutions - this notion that minorities don’t matter, that it’s OK to marginalize them, to treat them as less than human, as less than equal. And so we have to continue to try to expose the biases, whether they’re explicit or implicit. So many of them say it’s implicit, but the more you see the results of stuff like banking while Black, you say it has to be something explicit about it. That it was intentional. That it was deliberate. It’s an old familiar dynamic that even if we can’t describe it, we know what it is when we see it.
How does litigation as a strategy act as a means to address the structural racism that undergirds policing, lending, medical racism and other issues?
I use this weapon [litigation] as an instrument for good, not as a weapon for evil. Discrimination is evil. I try my best to make sure that we use litigation as a truth-seeker, because first you have to get transparency and truth, and then you can get justice. Transparency and truth are the cornerstones for justice. And so we use litigation to help us discover transparency and be able to come to what the truth of the matter is, and then you can expose it. Sunlight is a good disinfectant, and we have to always continue to shine the light on these issues of bias and discrimination.
People seem to condone the racist act, but they don’t want to be categorized as a racist. So we do whatever we have to do to expose the truth, because what we want is not your words or your rhetoric, what we want is your action.
That’s why I fight police brutality, I’m fighting Wells Fargo and banking while Black. We have to fight in the court of law and the court of public opinion. And with the court of public opinion, if we can win there, then we can prevail in the court of law.
We’ve seen over the past few years that killings persist, exploitation of Black bodies persists, housing discrimination, financial disfranchisement - all of that persists. How do you overcome those obstacles?
It’s real simple to me. I think about my first year of law school. They talk about precedent and everything had to be based on precedent. I didn’t really accept that. Because I knew that, based on precedent of the United States supreme court, we were slaves. And if we based everything on precedent, I would still be a slave today. So even though I rejected them trying to teach us that, I did understand what they were trying to tell us when they talked about precedents. They would tell us everything must be based on precedent because you wanted the laws in the future to be consistent with those in the present and those in the past.
What I believe is that’s not an absolute, but I understand what they’re trying to teach us. That precedent is a good indicator of what’s likely to come. I think about the precedent of Black people in America at the founding. These people were labeled three-fifths of a human being. Yet we overcame that.
I think about the Dred Scott decision where the United States said there was no right that a Black person had that a white person was bound to respect. And we overcame that. I think about how we overcame all the Jim Crow laws, how we overcame the carpetbaggers during Reconstruction, how we overcame Jim Crow Jr, and how, no matter what, based on the precedent set by our ancestors, we will be able to overcome whatever obstacles that the enemies of equality throw at us next.