Seven years ago this morning south Floridians woke to a news story about an unarmed Black youth who was shot and killed by someone claiming to be involved in a neighborhood watch in Sanford,
Florida the night before. The story could easily have ended there. Many similar tales from around the country
barely made that level of notice.
But in the course of the next few
days evidence arose that Trayvon Martin
might have been stalked and
virtually executed by wannabe hero George Zimmerman. Despite this local police and prosecutors accepted
Zimmerman’s claims to have acted in self-defense. Although it was never officially invoked, newspaper
articles cited Florida’s recently enacted and controversial Stand Your Ground Law as justification for the shooting. Zimmerman was released without charge and his
weapon returned to him.
Within days local protests in
support of appeals by Martin’s parents began spreading across the country,
particularly in light of the refusal of local authorities to act. It became the number one story in the nation that March. Eventually eliciting an
emotional statement by President Barack
Obama that added fuel to what became a raging, polarizing public debate.
The Trayvon Martin case became a
sort of litmus test for racial attitudes in the supposed post-Civil Rights Obama era. The result of that test was not pretty. Many Whites simply assumed that Martin must
have been guilty of something and deserved to have been shot for
supposedly attacking a physically larger man stalking him through a
neighborhood armed with a visible gun.
Every aspect of his short life was examined and picked apart. He was denounced as a thug for wearing a hoody, being
suspended for minor rule infractions
in school, and goofing around posing
gangsta style in cell phone selfie video. He
was accused of child molestation for
supposedly having sex with a high school sweetheart. Both of his parents, estranged from each
other, were vilified as was anyone who came to his defense.
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Trayvon became the object of an intense and well orchestrated smear campaign. Images and memes like this were shared by many white Americans on social media as Black protests grew.
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Zimmerman, on the other hand, was
proclaimed a hero, particularly by
the NRA and gun rights zealots. Nothing
could dissuade them from this view, not increasing evidence of his mental instability, charges of domestic battery and intimidation, and further run-ins with
the law in which a pistol was brandished. It was Zimmerman,
in their view, who was the victim of persecution
and the real victim of the case.
Among the Black community and for
many White liberals Trayvon became
the symbol a callous disregard for Black lives and the refusal of authorities
to hold assailants of Blacks to accountability.
Posting pictures in a hoody
on line while holding a card reading “I am Trayvon” swept Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Medical
school students, clergy, and even members
of Congress posed for group shots. Mass marches were held across the country,
some involving arrests and outbreaks
of minor violence.
In the process of the rising movement Trayvon was painted as a
totally innocent good kid with a
funny smile, a football player, and
friend who reached out to an ostracized
Haitian girl at school. To be the perfect victim, he had to be the perfect kid.
The Trayvon Martin case has been
compared to that of Emmett Till, the
12 year old Chicago boy, who was tortured and lynched on a visit to Alabama
relatives for allegedly whistling at
a white woman outside a country grocery store. The insistence of Till’s mother on displaying her son’s brutalized, barely
recognizable body in a glass-topped casket at his funeral
helped galvanize a renewed anti-lynching
movement and the Civil Rights movement in general. Just this week the House of Representatives voted to the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching
Act 65 year after the boy’s brutal murder and 128 years after Ida B. Wells began her anti-lynching
crusade during the era of Jim Crow terror.
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Dr. Martin Luther King speaking at the funeral of Jimmy Lee Jackson in 1965.
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But Trayvon’s case could also be
compared to the death of Jimmie Lee
Jackson in 1965. Jackson was a 27
year old Baptist deacon and rank and file voting rights activist
who was shot by Alabama State Troopers and
beaten while trying to defend his 84 year old grandfather and mother from
a beating following the dispersal of a night
march in Marion. After lingering from his wounds for
several days, Jackson died on February 26—not so ironically the same date as
Trayvon. The Marion march was part of
the voting rights campaign centered
in near-by Selma. It was his death that inspired the Selma to Montgomery March.
Despite of its mobilizing impact on
the Black community, the national media scarcely
paid any attention to Jackson’s death.
It was not until weeks later when a white minister, Unitarian Universalist James Reeb, was beaten to death by
Klansmen after responding to a
national call to action in response to the bloody attack on the first attempted
Selma to Montgomery March, that the
focus of the nation swung to Selma. It
was Reeb’s death, and the shotgun murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white mother from Detroit and UU laywoman, after the successful March and not the unmentioned
Jackson, which Lyndon Johnson used
as leverage to finally ram the Voting Rights Act through Congress.
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Trayvon as a symbol of a movement--a Los Angeles protest march.
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The Trayvon Martin case likewise
sparked a growing, and lasting movement.
Although it did not involve a police
killing, it exposed the raw double
standard of the supposed American justice
system. In the years since the boy’s
death multiple cases, a heart breaking parade of them really, have reinforced the
growing rage in the Black community.
Many of those have involved police killings. In a very real since the Black Lives Matter owes its existence to what started with the
Trayvon Martin protests.
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George Zimmerman finally on trial, the real victim in the eyes of much of White America.
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Eventually with national heat on
them, Florida official reluctantly indicted
Zimmerman and prosecuted him with
somewhat less than the customary zeal. To the disappointment
of many but the surprise of few,
Zimmerman was acquitted on July 14,
2013. A new wave of protests roiled the
nation in its wake.
That night I wrote a poem for Trayvon, which appeared the
next day in this blog. Its appearance
was, naturally, not without controversy itself.
But I stand by it.
For Trayvon
After the Verdict
July 14, 2013
In the end they stole you,
every
last one of them,
the
martyr builders
and
the bastards alike.
They poured you out
like
water from
a
swamped boot
and
replaced you
with
the merchandise
of
their own longings,
fears,
and
projections.
A handy flagstaff from which to hang
their
ideologies
snapping
in the gale
that
they created.
But you were just a goofy,
kind
of sweet kid
just
trying to get along
no
angel, no thug.
You took the time to make a friend
of
the big girl with the
funny
accent
everyone else mocked,
And you also toked some weed—
what a shock!
mugged
like a rapper
on
your cell phone,
and
brushed up
a
time or two
against
John Law.
You played football and video games,
danced,
laughed
and
flashed that little grin.
If truth be known,
you
probably got beyond
third
base with that pretty
little
girl friend.
So what?
It
doesn’t matter now.
It
all ended with a tussle
and
a pop on dark night.
Then you were stretched out
flat
on your back
surprise
frozen on
your
face—
an
empty sack of meat.
Now you belong to them.
You
have no say.
Those
who loved you,
hated
your existence
on the planet,
and
all of the users.
Maybe better you should have been
capped
on the South Side
of
Chicago on a busy weekend
where
all you would get
would
be a two minute stand-up
under
a street lamp on Channel 5,
a
quick shot of your wailing mom,
the
posturing of a local preacher.
Then they would put you in the
ground
still
owning your own corpse.
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