Today, February 26, 2022 marks 10 years since the passing of young Black man, Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman. He would have been 27 years old today.
Trayvon Martin, a Black 17-year-old whom George Zimmerman gunned down on February 26, 2012. 10 years ago today. One decade. Let that sink in.
On the night of the shooting, Zimmerman, who was a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida, called 911 on Martin. Zimmerman described the teenager using a label that's long been tagged to Black boys: suspicious. Disregarding police orders not to engage, Zimmerman confronted the teenager. An altercation broke out; Martin was shot dead.
Zimmerman claimed that he acted in self-defense, and he was eventually acquitted. The case illustrated in heartrending fashion a long US history of weaponizing the principle of self-defense against Black men and boys and, more to the point, portraying them as unpredictable aggressors whose every move must be controlled.
Trayvon, visiting relatives in order to watch a basketball game on TV, never had a chance against Zimmerman driving an SUV and wielding a gun. Zimmerman would be acquitted by the jury and now has a target on his back for his actions that night, 10 years ago.
Not unlike young Emmet Till. History is filled with examples of the sometimes lethal consequences that racist perceptions have for Black boys. Maybe the most infamous example occurred in 1955.
In August of
that year, 14-year-old Emmett Till,
who was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, was accused of flirting with
or making advances at a 21-year-old White woman, Carolyn Bryant (later Bryant
Donham). Four days later, her then-husband and his half-brother kidnapped Till,
beat him, shot him in the head, tied a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to his neck with
barbed wire and then discarded him in the Tallahatchie River -- all
punishment for the boy's alleged violation of the state's racial order, for the
danger he, a mere child, posed to it.
An all-White jury acquitted the two men not even a month after Till's swollen and mangled body was retrieved from the river.
Till's story exemplifies a wider truth: Black boys are often viewed differently than their White peers simply because of their race.
On Tuesday, February 22, a jury issued a guilty verdict in the federal hate crimes trial of the three White men who killed 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, supporting the prosecution's case that the men chased and murdered Arbery precisely because he was Black.
Perhaps coincidentally, the verdict was released almost two years ago to the day -- February 23, 2020 -- on which Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan followed Arbery through the streets of a Georgia neighborhood and gunned him down.
To illustrate that the McMichaels and Bryan pursued Arbery out of racial animus, the prosecution highlighted that the three men talked about Black Americans using racist language.
Prosecutor Christopher J. Perras said during closing arguments on Monday that Arbery's killers saw "a Black man in their neighborhood and assumed the worst of him."
"This wasn't about trespassing. This wasn't about neighborhood crimes, either. It was about race -- racial assumptions, racial resentment and racial anger," Perras said.
Last year, during the state murder trial of the three men, Laura Hogue, one of Gregory McMichael's lawyers, unsuccessfully sought to win sympathy for her client by making a comment to jurors about Arbery's "long, dirty toenails" -- a move that was decried as a sop to racial assumptions that cast Black men and boys as beasts.
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It’s astonishing to me that all of this hatred of African-Americans spewing out of White people, a majority population in the U.S. in the 21st century causes those same White people to forget how our African-American brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and friends came to be here in America: White Europeans seeking religious freedom from the Church of England came to North America and then decided that, [Doing my best backwoods, hillbilly impersonation] “You know what? We gonna need to find us some help building and taking over all of this land. I’ve got it! We’ll take us some boats, go to that dark place (Africa) and bring us back a whole heap of them peoples to do that back-breaking work for us. Then we’ll put ‘em all back on them boats and send ‘em home.”
Yeah. How did that work out for you?
