Ahmaud Arbery holds us accountable

As a graduate student and before he enrolled in law school, 1994 Furman University alumnus Jim Barger, Jr. spent nearly two years in the briny marshlands of coastal Georgia where he studied and documented African American folkways. His experience sets the backdrop for the story he wrote in “The Bitter Southerner” about Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man, who perished in February at the hands of two white men. Barger describes Arbery’s 200-year-old roots in the Satilla Shores community near the Georgia Sea Islands, how he was loved, how justice failed him and what his community will have to reckon with in the wake of his death.

Jim Barger, Jr., Class of 1994

Barger, a Furman English and philosophy graduate, teaches White Collar Crime at the University of Alabama School of Law and represents whistle blowers nationwide as a private attorney general on behalf of the United States and the states against corporations that defraud government programs.