Annie Polite puts on a button for Ahmaud Arbery outside the Glynn County Courthouse as the jury deliberates in the trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery on Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2021 in Brunswick, Ga. Greg McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, were found guilty in the February 2020 fatal shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. (Sean Rayford, TNS - TNS/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

This weekend we pause to honor the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to interpret his words calling upon America to see the content of the character before judging anyone's person.

On Feb. 23, 2020, a 25-year-old African American man lay dead in the street of a predominantly white neighborhood near Brunswick, Ga., killed by three white vigilantes. His crime: jogging in the streets of a white neighborhood and looking into a house under construction to see concepts of his dream to become an architect.

In 1955, a 14-year-old African-American boy comes to Money, Miss., for summer vacation with his extended family and is killed with a gin fan strung around his neck, wrapped in barbed wire, shot in the head and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His crime: allegedly offending a white woman.

The disregard of the killers of the content of the character of Emmett Till is what drove King to wonder aloud about his children being judged not by the color of their skin but by the substance of the character of their person.

The content of Ahmaud Arbery's character was also not known by the three white male vigilantes in Brunswick before they hunted him down in their neighborhood, cornered him "like a rat" and blew his chest wide open so that daylight could be seen through his body.

America has made progress between the acquittal of suspects in Till's case by an all-white jury, without consideration of his character, and the unprecedented conviction of the three white vigilantes who killed Arbery by a jury of 11 white citizens and one Black citizen in southeast Georgia.

In evaluating the meaning of King's words regarding his four children being judged not by their skin color but by the content of their character, it is important to first understand that one needs to see beyond the race of the Emmett Tills of America, beyond the race of the Ahmaud Arberys of America, before judging them and their alleged acts.

At the most basic of foundations, it is absurd to say that Till and Arbery were not judged by the color of their skin before being killed. They were killed because of the lack of character in the white vigilantes, and the killers' preconceived prejudices prevented them from considering Till or Arbery as worthy of positive character. Neither the content of Till's character nor the content of Arbery's character was considered before their executions.

The question lingers, however, about what King meant by not being judged by the color of one's skin but the content of one's character. We believe that the ugly thread of invidious prejudice and vicious racism runs so deeply in America that while King was speaking of the prejudgment made against the Tills of his lifetime, it is mirrored in the prejudice against today's Arberys.

It is a diversionary tactic to become entangled in the maze of the conservative argument that race should not be considered in social, political and business settings. To fully embrace the conservative philosophy of not deploying reparative strategies is to ignore the enduring physical and psychological chains of slavery; to ignore the laws permitting, nay requiring, discrimination and devaluation of Black people; to ignore banking laws that permitted redlining to deny equal housing opportunities to Black people; to ignore the continued state legislative efforts to disenfranchise Black, brown and other vulnerable voters; and to ignore denying qualified Black farmers federal funding but providing abundant federal government backed financial funding to white farmers (a practice that continues to this day) and then declaring, "Why can't you keep up? There's something amiss with your character."

Unquestionably, as demonstrated from the vigilante lynching of Till in 1955 to the vigilante shooting of Arbery in 2020, too often the color of one's skin continues to dominate and dislodge consideration of the content of one's character in our nation's financial, political and social discrimination.

Barbara R. Arnwine is president and founder of Transformative Justice Coalition and Daryl D. Jones is board chair and executive vice president of the coalition. They wrote this for InsideSources.com.