Finding my family's history in Brunswick, Georgia, where Ahmaud Arbery was murdered
BRUNSWICK, Ga. – I remember frolicking in the Atlantic Ocean off Jekyll Island, the endless waves lapping around me. The hot sun reflected off the water as my maroon one-piece bathing suit, too big for me, kept creeping down and exposing my chest. I wore my glasses because I wanted to be able to spot various shells in the shallow shoreline and scoop them up.
It was the first beach experience I can recall. The year was 1980.
I returned to Jekyll Island last month – 41 years later – as part of a reporting trip related to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. He was killed a short drive from the island, in a neighborhood called Satilla Shores. I wanted to see where Arbery died and to talk to his family and members of the community about the impact of this tragic death on the small coastal town where I have deep familial connections.
For many Americans, Arbery’s death put Brunswick on the map for the first time. For my family, Brunswick is home.
Arbery's death was devastating for the community, for my family, for me. His smile is seared into my psyche. The pain of his loss continues to punch me in the gut. The idea that he was hunted and killed like an animal keeps me awake sometimes. It's not the first time a Black man has been slaughtered, of course. But coming face-to-face with those in his community – a place I used to visit during the summer as a naive child – caused great heartache.
"This moment in time happened in Brunswick, Georgia, but historically there has been a pall over this country and over this state that people have just been able to ignore," Dwala Nobles, my cousin who lives in Brunswick, told me.
Prayers for Arbery's killers
Still, many in the community decided to pray for the men who killed Arbery, to offer grace. To understand why some in a mostly Black city would pray for the men who killed Arbery, you have to know Brunswick. I understand now.
“The city of Brunswick is so loving and so forgiving, and so we came together,” Brunswick Mayor Cornell Harvey told me. “Now even though we have major differences sometimes, we still came together during this time, and the jury got it right.”
The three men convicted of killing Arbery were sentenced Friday. Travis McMichael, the man who pulled the trigger, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His father, Gregory, was also sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
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Annie Polite, 87, a petite woman with arthritis so bad that her gait is slow and unsteady, attended the two-week trial each day, from the first gavel bang until the last. She protested outside the Glynn County courthouse, sitting on a walker bench and holding signs. She said she was determined to be there for the Arbery family because “it was just the right thing to do.”
Polite attended the first public high school to open in Brunswick for African Americans with my mother. She doesn’t remember her. What she does recall is the volatility of the civil rights movement and the fight for voting rights.
Arbery’s death, like so many before, shook Polite. When we talked, I saw the pain of decades of struggle, decades of fear and decades of disappointment in America’s justice system. I also sensed that her hope for a better tomorrow has not been dimmed despite her 87 years, many of them painful, as a Black woman.
“I think we're going to see a big change because more and more of these various incidents of brutality people have been able to see because of these telephone cameras,” she said. “The pictures show the treatment of the minorities. So many people have had their eyes open to what has been going on for so long, and it is so brutal and heartless. So I think that there is a measure of hope.
"White America has been indoctrinated to the point that they were made to feel superior to us if you are Black or from some other race or background,” Polite continued. “They lived it all their lives so that's all they knew. Now with the pictures that they've seen, now they realize how horrible things have been for us.”
Yet she prays for Arbery's killers.
Finding history 'behind God's back'
On my second day in town, I agreed to meet two of my cousins on Jekyll Island for lunch. As we chatted, watching bikers enjoy the sunny shoreline paths, they shared the history and their memories of the island.
For decades, Black people were permitted only on St. Andrews Beach, near the most southern tip of the island. It’s not even an oceanfront beach; it’s a slice of the Atlantic that connects to the Jekyll River and empties into St. Andrews Sound. It’s so hidden that I can describe it only using a term my mother often said: “behind God’s back.”
Segregation that stretched into the early 1970s meant that the Black people of Georgia – including my family – could enjoy one public beach, but only behind God’s back. They would have to arrive early to claim a spot because the beach is so small and it was the only one in the state open to African Americans.
Today, large driftwood dots the hard-packed white sand that sports stunning patterns formed from the beat of the ocean. I returned, alone, a few days later to walk St. Andrews Beach during the low tide, taking in the salty smells and navigating around the crab shells. I had it all to myself.
It was peaceful, but I was uneasy and overwhelmed. I studied the interactive memorial path marking the spot where a ship called the Wanderer arrived on Nov. 28, 1858, carrying more than 400 smuggled slaves. They were one of the last known groups of enslaved Africans sold into captivity on American soil.
One of those enslaved was named Manchuella. She was given the slave name Katie Noble, the surname of my ancestors. I stared at her photo and saw myself in her features. Her mouth, her nose, her cheeks, even the furrow of her brow. She wore a necklace; I'm rarely caught without one.
History: Hundreds of thousands of Africans were enslaved in America.
Post-slavery, my family kept the name Noble but added an s on the end. I have no hard evidence that Katie Noble is my ancestor, but no one could convince me otherwise. I have pledged with my cousins to try to trace her existence, to connect the dots that so many Black families must do because of slavery.
I could kick myself for not asking more questions about our history in Brunswick when members of my family who could recount it were still alive.
Generations buried in Brunswick
My mother, who passed away in 2015, was adamant about returning home to be buried next to her mother. There was no way I was going to deny her final wish, even though the logistics of arranging burial in Georgia while living in Ohio was less than ideal.
My mother was the youngest of five siblings. She loved Brunswick – at least her Brunswick – and always talked about going home. We didn’t visit as much as she wanted; she often lamented how she wished she had extra money for airfare.
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My mother and her older sister attended historically Black colleges founded by Episcopal clergy whose mission was to educate freed slaves and develop a generation of African American teachers. They often described it as a boarding school. After graduation, they participated in America’s Great Migration, as did millions of other Black people who fled the South looking for better job opportunities and a better life.
They rarely talked about the racism they experienced growing up. I have no idea why. I've asked other relatives around the country and those who live in Brunswick, and they can only surmise that their silence was part protection for us kids, part pain and part pride.
"When they traveled, they had to pack their food because they weren't allowed to enter restaurants, or if Black people were allowed, they had to use the back door," Brunswick community organizer and businessman Cedric Z. King told me. "As we were growing up, that tradition continued; they cooked our chicken, wrapped it in aluminum foil and we hit the road. But they also wanted for us so bad to be able to walk through the front door."
I hadn’t been back to Brunswick since Mommy's funeral and burial, so it was obviously emotional to return. My last memory was flying away six years ago, looking out of the plane window and realizing I was leaving my mother there – for the last time. I sobbed as the plane ascended, sitting next to my first cousin, who is more like my brother. He didn’t know what to say to me.
I’ve always had mixed emotions about Brunswick. I was always angry when my grandmother, my Big Mama, would leave Ohio to go spend time down south. She was my favorite person in the world, and as a child, I couldn’t understand why she would leave me for months at a time.
My extended family still lives in rural Brunswick; we refer to it as the country. Off Pinnick Road, the family church, Good Shepherd Episcopal, is a quarter-mile from our family cemetery. Generations are buried there – my great-grandparents, my grandparents, myriad aunts, uncles and cousins, and of course, my mother.
I had to go visit. The sky opened up as soon as I pulled into the grassy field that leads to my family's plot. I sat in my rental car for an hour waiting for the December storm to pass, watching the Spanish moss on trees dance and sway in rhythm with the raindrops.
I had been in Brunswick for a few days, and my head was swimming with thoughts and the words of those whom I had interviewed. We had talked a lot about race relations in Brunswick, the horrors of discrimination and racism they had experienced.
Ms. Polite remembers being asked to count how many beans were in a jar when she tried to vote. Harvey, the first Black mayor of Brunswick, remembers being told to stand down from pursuing office and allow a white man to run instead.
Columnist Connie Schultz: Hiding from history, even the 'disgusting and gross' parts, doesn't protect us. It hurts us.
I had visceral reactions driving around town and seeing too many Confederate flags to count, Trump signs still in yards (including in the neighborhood where Arbery was killed) and one man rocking a "Unite the Right" T-shirt when I went to pick up Thai food for dinner one night. I saw a woman wearing a "Let's Go, Brandon" T-shirt as she exited a Golden Isles Plaza store.
These aren't my people, I thought. But I've often believed that about Brunswick. I've rarely seen the appeal.
When I would go visit, it was always in the summer. It was oppressively hot, and there was always the threat of snakes and spiders making their way into the backhouse where we would stay. My Southern family seemed so different from me. I felt like a Northern heathen compared with them. When called, they answered their parents “Yes, ma’am” or “Ma’am,” “Yes, sir” or “Sir.”
I wasn’t permitted to say “what?” when my mother called me, but a “yes” did suffice. To me, they seemed behind the times with no interest in evolving, but I now realize their Southern upbringing wasn’t right or wrong – it was just different from mine.
I’m more Southern at heart than I care to admit. I remember racing barefoot with my cousins on dirt paths and exploring the vast gardens of my aunts and uncles while swatting away bothersome gnats.
But my grandmother taught me how to garden in Ohio, and it remains a big part of my life.
This is my story, too
I never met my maternal grandfather; he passed away in 1965, before I was born. Still, I marveled at the legacy he and my grandmother built. Big Daddy was born in 1889; Big Mama in 1900 – one generation at best removed from slavery. They raised their five children, sending them to college, to the military or both, and owned land in the country. Their offspring and grandchildren have become teachers, business owners, college administrators. There's even a national columnist in the pack (me).
"That group of people valued family at the core," Pastor John D. Perry II, former president of the Brunswick chapter of the NAACP, told me. "The generation we're talking about embraced the concept of family. How in the midst of all of this that's going on, how do I hold my family together? How do I provide for my family? How do I make tomorrow better for my kids?"
Arbery's family had the same dreams for him. The 25-year-old former high school football player who liked to stay fit by running had a loving family and support system. A couple of months before he died, his mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, reached out to Arbery's aunt to inform her that she needed to travel to Texas for work and asked that she make sure he had food and got a haircut.
Thea Brooks said she would visit the house Arbery shared with his mother at least three days a week to check in. She calls Arbery "Quez" because his middle name was Marquez. He wasn't much of a talker, but he always told her he looked forward to his daily runs. And food – he loved to eat.
He often started his run along Georgia Highway 17, a busy four-lane thoroughfare, before darting in and out of neighborhoods. When he was spotted by Gregory McMichael on that fateful day in February 2020, he was believed to be a suspect in a rash of break-ins. McMichael described him as "hauling ass," according to the initial police report.
Because a Black man running through a mostly white neighborhood must certainly be a thief. Of course.
"I was distraught – I remember just losing it," Brooks said about the day she heard Arbery was killed. "I just couldn't believe that happened to him, and a burglary just didn't sit right with me. My intuition was telling me something was wrong, that it was not true. He didn't burglarize anybody. That's not his character."
When charges didn't come for his murder, she began to organize protests in the neighborhood. She created a Facebook campaign. She called in activist reinforcements from Atlanta.
Like the generations before her in Brunswick, she fought for her family the only way she knew how – with grit, determination, passion and frustration. It's a story that spans centuries. As Black people, it's our story.
And these people are in my blood.
National columnist/deputy opinion editor Suzette Hackney is a member of Paste BN’S Editorial Board. Contact her at shackney@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @suzyscribe