You would think someone working to convince a jury his client didn’t help form a white supremacist mob and murder a Black man would avoid trying to outright ban Black people from the trial. You would think the last person that attorney would try to ban would be a noted civil rights leader and minister like Al Sharpton. You would think that, but you’d be wrong. “We don’t want any more Black pastors in here,” attorney Kevin Gough actually said in court on Thursday. He spoke as if he were making some kind of compromise after granting himself the power to allow Sharpton’s presence.

Gough represents William “Roddie” Bryan, who—along with former cop Gregory McMichael and his son Travis—are accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020 after spotting him running near the site of a home under construction in Brunswick, Georgia. The case, in which a prosecutor is indicted for alleged misconduct, has prompted so much outrage in Georgia and beyond that although some 1,000 potential jurors were summoned, attorneys had a hard time seating 12 people who didn’t openly communicate a bias during voir dire. Only one of them is Black, and social media users have frequently spread a running-while-Black hashtag denoting the popular belief that Arbery was only targeted because he was a Black man. This is the context in which Gough felt it appropriate to target Sharpton. 

The white attorney said:

Gough went on to say that there are “only so many pastors” the Arbery family can have. “And in the fact that their pastor is Al Sharpton right now that’s fine, but then that’s it,” he added. “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here or other, Jesse Jackson whoever was in here earlier this week sitting with the victim’s family trying to influence the jury in this case.”

His voice oozed with so much privilege even the white judge appeared offended, and not for the first time. Judge Timothy Walmsley called another defense attorney in the case “rude” on Tuesday. In Gough’s instance, Walmsley offered these words: “I don’t hear a motion, and I will tell you this, I am not going to blanketly [sic] exclude members of the public from this courtroom.”

Thursday, Nov 11, 2021 · 10:54:58 PM +00:00 · Lauren Floyd

Sharpton responded in an interview with TMZ: “I think it is an arrogant display of insensitivity.”