Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People, by Ben Crump

In Open Season, award-winning attorney Ben Crump exposes a heinous truth: Whether with a bullet or a lengthy prison sentence, America is killing black people and justifying it legally. While some deaths make headlines, most are personal tragedies suffered within families and communities. Worse, these killings are done one person at a time, so as not to raise alarm. While it is much more difficult to justify killing many people at once, in dramatic fashion, the result is the same—genocide.

Taking on such high-profile cases as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and a host of others, Crump witnessed the disparities within the American legal system firsthand and learned it is dangerous to be a black man in America—and that the justice system indeed only protects wealthy white men.

In this enlightening and enthralling work, he shows that there is a persistent, prevailing, and destructive mindset regarding colored people that is rooted in our history as a slaveowning nation. This biased attitude has given rise to mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, unequal educational opportunities, disparate health care practices, job and housing discrimination, police brutality, and an unequal justice system. And all mask the silent and ongoing systematic killing of people of color.

Open Season is more than Crump’s incredible mission to preserve justice, it is a call to action for Americans to begin living up to the promise to protect the rights of its citizens equally and without question.

“Benjamin Crump's work - his research, his voice, his fight - is paramount to the black community. Open Season must occupy a dominant place in the classroom, in libraries, in the workplace, in police training programs. Crump's masterful voice and expertise of America's corrupt power structures will alter the hierarchy by which we dangerously abide.”---Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and New York Times bestselling author of When They Call You a Terrorist

“Ben Crump offers a deft and unflinching expose on America's treatment of people of color. He charges America to live up to its status as the great “melting pot” by protecting and serving all of its citizens. His passionate voice lifts the true stories of wronged Americans off of the page and emblazoned them onto our hearts. A mouth-gaping read from one of the most steadfast champions for justice of our time.”-- -Kenya Barris, creator of Black-ish

"Ben Crump is a warrior on the front lines of the war for social justice. These notes from the legal battlefield of civil rights pushes us beyond lazy presumptions of where we are as a society to the hard truths of what we have achieved and how far we still have to go.”---Reginald Hudlin, writer, director, and producer.

Through a steadfast dedication to justice and service, renowned civil rights and personal injury attorney Ben Crump has established himself as one of the nation’s foremost lawyers and advocates for social justice. He has worked on some of the most high-profile cases in the U.S., representing the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Stephon Clark, among others. He has been nationally recognized as the 2014 NNPA Newsmaker of the Year, the National Trial Lawyers Top 100 Lawyers, and Ebony Magazine Power 100 Most Influential African Americans. In 2016, he was designated as an Honorary Fellow by the University of Pennsylvania College of Law. He is the founder and principal owner of Ben Crump Law.

October 15, 2019