Ten 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 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.
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 target 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 online 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. Many Black parents recognized their own sons and were not shocked by minor conflicts with authority or reflecting the popular culture. But White liberals need the perfect, sweet boy often because they were themselves afraid of young Black males in hoodies.
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. In 2017 the House of Representatives voted to pass the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching
Act 65 years 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.
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 suffering and 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.
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 heartbreaking parade of them really, have reinforced
the growing rage in the Black community.
Many of those have involved police killings. In a very real sense, the Black Lives Matter owes its existence
to what started with the Trayvon Martin protests.
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 streetlamp 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.
—Patrick
Murfin
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