Letter From Obama to Family of Trayvon Martin
Trayvon Martin Is Still Making America Confront Its Original Sin
"1 of the most of import things that came out of this tragedy was the activation of an unabridged new generation of civil rights leaders." That was part of what President Barack Obama told The Times when we asked him what the killing of Trayvon Martin, ten years agone Saturday, meant for the United States, the movement for ceremonious rights and for him personally.
On Feb. 26, 2012, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, spotted Martin in a hoodie walking through a gated townhouse community not far from Orlando.
Suspicious, Zimmerman called 911 and followed Martin. Dispatch told him, "Nosotros don't need you to do that." There was an encounter between the two before Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest at close range.
Martin was merely 17 years old, a boy, and he was where he was supposed to be.
He was unarmed. He was carrying Skittles and a tin can of iced tea.
In that location was something about the killing of this particular boy that prepare information technology autonomously from all other killings of Black people, that struck a chord in Black America, that awakened a generation.
Jesse Jackson once called the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-twelvemonth-old Chicago boy brutally murdered in Mississippi, the Big Bang of the ceremonious rights movement. In the same mode, the killing of Trayvon Martin was the Large Bang of the new ceremonious rights motility, Black Lives Matter.
The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag would be built-in but later Zimmerman was acquitted of murder. But the motility itself started afterwards the killing.
Zimmerman had been questioned past the police but was released without any charges. Well-nigh 3 weeks later, with Zimmerman still free, I wrote a cavalcade to help drag the case, articulate the pain of this family and illuminate the oddities of how the case had been handled. It was published on a Friday. The following Wednesday, activists organized the Million Hoodie March in New York Metropolis. Ii days later, President Obama famously said, "If I had a son, he'd await like Trayvon."
When I interviewed Sybrina Fulton, Martin's mother, in Miami the post-obit day, she was a cleaved woman, all the same trying to cover the incomprehensible, trying to fight for her son, trying not to lose herself. But information technology was clear to me that the president had now helped to set the male child on two tracks: He had belonged to Fulton, well-nigh assuredly, only he would now too belong to the world, as archetype and icon of Black victimization in a society hostile to black. His killing would epitomize a collective trauma.
The president'southward comments also fabricated Martin a proxy for Obama. Attacking and discrediting boys similar Martin became a roundabout fashion of attacking and discrediting the president. Martin would become not only an anchor for activism but too an object for political acrimony.
Non every killing connects with the civilization and activates a mass movement. In fact, few do. It's exceedingly rare. But maybe once in a generation, maybe once in a century, one lands similar a friction match on dry out kindling.
Martin'south killing did just that.
The air itself, at the fourth dimension, was crackling with defection. The Arab Bound had just swept the Arab world as young people rebelled against oppression, authoritarianism and stagnation. And in the Usa, Occupy Wall Street, an overwhelmingly white move, was changing the narrative of economics and wealth, by spotlighting social and income inequality. Young people everywhere were flexing their muscles with surprising strength. And immature Blackness people in particular were coming of age in an era of social media, watching the rise of Black Twitter with its activist instinct, learning almost intersectionality, the thought that multiple forms of oppression can and do overlap like a Venn diagram, and reading Michelle Alexander'south wildly successful "The New Jim Crow."
A new racial consciousness was awakening, and to exist fully conscious of American racism is to be fully enraged by information technology.
Martin's killing, similar Till's, was a catalyst; their images became iconography, and their lives became fable.
Though different in many ways, both killings transformed our culture, as immature Blackness people with pent-upwards free energy came to place with the victims.
As Timothy B. Tyson put it in his book, "The Claret of Emmett Till," the "lynching became a decisive moment in the development of their consciousness around race."
Rosa Parks was much older than Till when he was lynched — she was 42 — simply fifty-fifty she said that she was thinking of him when she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus later that year, sparking the historic bus boycott.
The same can be said of the killing of Martin.
Obama was fifty when Trayvon died, but as he told The Times, he, too, saw himself in the teenager. He still believes "that maybe the only matter that separated us was luck and the fact that I was living in a place, in Hawaii, where the likelihood of a gun floating around or a private citizen stopping me on the street was a lot lower."
That sense of kinship and identification was what transformed the killing into a motility. As the Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it, "equally of progress on the issue of justice in policing, all the way to George Floyd," can exist traced back to that killing. The civil rights activist and cable news host, the Rev. Al Sharpton, called it an "enkindling."
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During both ceremonious rights movements, the outrage shifted apace from the actions of individuals to the indictments of systems, as activists sought not just justice for the victims but cardinal changes to the laws that prevent progress, the politicians who crafted them, the attorneys who employed them and the judges who interpreted them.
As Martin Luther King said:
It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but beliefs can exist regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it tin restrain the heartless. It may be truthful that the police force cannot make a man love me — religion and education will have to do that — but it tin can restrain him from lynching me.
The climax of the civil rights movement as a protestation movement came with the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Liberty. Past so, the movement was much larger than Till. It took place on the 8th ceremony of his lynching, just none of the primary speakers mentioned his proper noun. And within a decade, the motility had succeeded in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included the Fair Housing Act.
The ultimate policy victories of Black Lives Affair are not yet known. On the federal level, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed in the House, died in the Senate. But the movement has had much more success on the city and state levels.
In 2020 and early 2021 alone, more than 30 states passed at least 140 new constabulary oversight and reform laws. In total, vii states have mandated the use of body cameras, 5 states have limited qualified amnesty for officers (Colorado and New Mexico eliminated it), and at to the lowest degree 24 states accept passed legislation restricting neck restraints.
Even before 2020, there were nationwide pushes for the use of body cameras by officers and to take cameras installed and operational on their vehicles.
Black Lives Thing has too experienced a backlash. Resentments always chimera to the surface when a movement experiences some success, and racists rise upwards to repel its advances. But that'south not what I'm talking most. The backlash that e'er feels like betrayal is the shifting of allegiances among supposed allies, the people who are with you merely upwards to a indicate, the point at which your liberation threatens their privilege.
The same dynamic played out during the ceremonious rights move. A New York Times survey, conducted in the months following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, found that a bulk of white New Yorkers, a supposedly liberal bastion, "believed the Negro civil rights motility had gone besides far." Some of the respondents spoke of Black people getting "everything on a silver platter" and of "reverse bigotry" against white people.
When the Kerner Commission released its 1968 report pointing out inequality, highlighting the pernicious nature of police brutality and pushing the Johnson administration to invest heavily in improving Blackness people's living conditions, Congress refused to act on any of those recommendations. Nor did information technology advance police reform alongside socioeconomic improvement, as the Blackness community wanted. Instead, as the Marshall Project's Nicole Lewis has written, "the federal regime responded by equipping police force with new tools to control violent expressions of civil unrest."
Today, Democrats are one time again shrinking from — or, in some cases, running from — constabulary reform in the face of ascension vehement criminal offence information, worried about being labeled "soft on crime," or worse, a defund-the-police pusher.
And that's only function of the backlash. Elsewhere, conservatives have made inroads in swing districts by stoking the Critical Race Theory panic, which is an attack on history and the teaching of it. Republican lawmakers have too sought to clamp down on peaceful protests. According to the International Heart for Not-for-Profit Police, since 2017, 45 states take considered 245 bills that would restrict the right to peaceful assembly. Thirty-half dozen of those bills passed. Some of them would protect drivers who hit protesters with their cars on public streets.
It is too early to know precisely where we are in the life of Black Lives Matter as a national movement, whether it's waning or nonetheless vibrant and viable; no move lasts forever. Just at that place is no denying that the movement changed this country, and information technology all started with the tragic killing of a Florida teenager.
Equally President Obama put information technology, "My promise is that when we look back at what happened with Trayvon and are able to say that that was the beginning of America looking inward, and, in fits and starts, coming to terms with what was our original sin."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/opinion/trayvon-martin-obama.html
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