Mike Kenny, Alston & Bird, Atlanta. (Courtesy photo)

"I hear the painful wail of millions" —Frederick Douglass

I'm an old white trial lawyer. I'm privileged and don't pretend to understand, at an emotional level, how African Americans feel about racial injustice, police brutality, Confederate flags and army bases named after Confederate generals. And yet I must try.

You can't be a jury trial lawyer if you don't have empathy. Persuasion is the name of the game—it's not so much what you say, it's what the jury hears. One of my favorite lines I tell young, aspiring trial lawyers is from Maya Angelou: "People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

That is why the closing argument Matthew McConaughey's lawyer character delivered in "A Time To Kill" is so morally and emotionally compelling. The lawyer, a white man, was defending a black father charged with murdering two heinous white men who savagely brutalized his little daughter. The lawyer asked the jurors to close their eyes as he slowly recounted the horrific treatment of a sweet, innocent little girl who was left for dead. Then he asked the jurors to imagine that the little girl was white. Silence and tears. They knew how it felt. The common bonds of humanity.

In 1966, Bobby Kennedy visited South Africa during apartheid. He was told that the church to which most of the white population belonged taught that apartheid was a "moral necessity." Kennedy responded: "But suppose God is black? What if I go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and he is not white? What then is our response?" No answer, only silence. They understood how it felt.

The Fourth of July is approaching. A time for flag and celebration. But what about full memory and reflection? The average life expectancy in the United States is 78 years. So, in only two full lifetimes ago, in 1852, with slavery in full legal force and effect, Frederick Douglass, who understood the depth of despair, the degradation of body, the destruction of soul, delivered his brilliant speech—"What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?"—in Rochester, New York. Douglass deliberately delayed and delivered the speech on July 5.

Douglass took the raw pain and anger and dehumanization of the African-American experience and transmuted it into  a searing, soul-stirring speech. As you read the snippets, use your ears, not your eyes: "Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, tendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. … I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. … Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. … There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."

Just as there is not one among us who does not believe that 8 minutes and 46 seconds is wrong—for any human being. Watching the George Floyd video, we can all feel it. But only some among us fear it could be them prostrate on the ground, gasping, "I can't breathe." Only two full lifetimes ago, Douglass vividly described the treatment of African Americans—close your eyes and imagine these were your ancestors: "What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?"

Vile and dehumanizing treatment has memory. Abraham Lincoln spoke of the mystic chords of memory that, he hoped, would enable the better angels of our nature. But practices and policies that perpetuate the stain and rip at the wound, inflame, not improve, the painful memory.

What if whites had been enslaved instead? How would whites feel about racial injustice and police brutality directed at them because of the color of their skin? About a Confederate flag that symbolizes treason and represents that peculiar institution whose echoes still sting today? About army bases named after losing generals who fought for a contemptible cause? How would whites feel about constant reminders of a shameful past that won't go away. I know how I would feel—mad as hell. When Douglass said, "At a time like this, scorching iron, not convincing argument is needed," I would have said: "Amen."

Yet we must hope and appeal to the better angels of our nature. Shortly after Selma and before signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson told the House of Representatives that, "at times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. … It is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

This old white trial lawyer surely hopes that our country is at a turning point. In the words of the Greek poet Aeschylus, let's hope we can take further steps to "tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

Mike Kenny is a litigation partner at Alston & Bird.