Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has worked on hundreds of police brutality cases—representing the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Tyre Nichols, Ahmaud Arbery, Daunte Wright, and Jacob Blake, winning multimillion-dollar settlements, and earning the nickname of “Black America’s attorney general.”
Now the ubiquitous, media-savvy 54-year-old attorney is embarking on a new career: crime novelist. Never one to downplay his ambition, Crump told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that he will create a “whole new genre” through his seven-figure, two-book deal with Bantam Books.
“There were no Black superhero lawyers out there in all these legal thriller books that have been written,” Crump said. “And God said, ‘Well, the reason there is not is because that’s your calling.”
