He was armed with Skittles and a drink, and he was on his phone. What made Trayvon suspicious? Zimmerman was told by the operator to stay in his car to wait for police. Instead, he walked after Trayvon, who told his friend he was being followed. There was a physical altercation, and Zimmerman shot the teenager dead.
The local police chief did not file charges against Zimmerman, saying there was no way to disprove his claim of self-defense. In July , a six-woman jury, five of whom were white, acquitted him. I will never understand how a jury was unable to see that Zimmerman engineered the entire tragedy and was responsible for creating the situation that left Trayvon dead.
How is it that a man follows and intimidates a Black teenager, picks a fight, gets beaten up by the terrified kid, kills the youngster and is found to have been within his rights? How is it that a man creates the very circumstances under which he is allowed to kill in the name of self-defense?
Across the country, in Oakland, a Black woman named Alicia Garza was devastated by the Zimmerman verdict. Our lives matter. Their friend Opal Tometi helped them spread the word on social media. Thus was born one of the most important and consequential social justice movements in the history of our nation.
The trio are charged with murdering Arbery, a former high school football player who was jogging through a neighborhood called Satilla Shores near the town of Brunswick. They claim they were acting in self-defense. But at the very least, we should remember that it isn't Rachel Jeantel who's on trial for murder in front of all of us. It's that guy on the other side of the room.
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This article is from the archive of our partner. Rachel Jeantel was on the phone with Trayvon Martin minutes before George Zimmerman shot and killed him, and she could make or break a murder case that was supposed to be microcosm for race and violence in this country. Rachel Jeantel was also on every cable news network in America for upwards of six hours today in her second straight day on the witness stand, and she really didn't want to be.
But that didn't stop Zimmerman's defense attorney, Don West, from repeatedly saying Jeantel was "lying" about Martin's description of his client as a "crazy-ass cracker. But after the prosecution got the basics out of their key witness on Wednesday , the defense's strategy in the all-day show trial today was clear through hours upon hours of questioning: West wants to connect Jeantel's confusion about herself with an apparent confusion about her story of that fateful night, which paints Zimmerman as the aggressor.
West repeatedly asked Jeantel today why she failed to tell Martin's mother, during an interview with the family's lawyer in March, that Martin had described Zimmerman on the phone call as a "creepy-ass cracker" who was following him. West asked her if she had "cleaned up" the language of the call so as not to hurt his mother's feelings. Her testimony was also littered with interruptions from the court reporter, who was making absolutely sure she understood Jeantel's mumbled words.
Ignoring the evidence will not be allowed! Thank you. Anonymous December 5, at PM. Obwon December 6, at AM. Anonymous December 7, at PM. Obwon December 8, at AM. Anonymous June 28, at AM. Obwon June 28, at PM. Daniel May 19, at PM. Obwon December 13, at AM. Newer Post Older Post Home. The basic fact was never in dispute: on February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed year-old Trayvon Martin in the town of Sanford, Florida.
This month historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries examines the long history of racial violence in America and how the issue of race permeated every aspect of the tragedy from the shooting, to the reluctance of the local police to arrest Zimmerman, to the conduct of the trial itself.
After deliberating for sixteen hours, the jurors in State of Florida v. Zimmerman, a year-old neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida, had been charged with second-degree murder for killing African American teenager Trayvon Martin on February 26, They had left Tallahassee hours earlier.
Waiting for the verdict had become unbearable. On the charge of second-degree murder, the six-woman panel found Zimmerman not guilty. The jury of five whites and one Latina reached the same conclusion on the lesser charge of manslaughter. At the end of the day, GOD is still in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!!
In the name of Jesus!!! As word of the not-guilty verdict spread, spontaneous protests erupted in cities across the country. From Miami, Florida to Oakland, California, thousands took to the streets to vent their anger and frustration. In Washington, D. Like the Martins, many people shared their grief and outrage through social media. Others used social media to express their dissatisfaction with the spate of gun laws that have made it increasingly difficult to prosecute people who claim self-defense to justify their use of deadly force.
Still others drew attention to the long history of racial violence against African Americans, and to the even longer history of perpetrators of such crimes going unpunished. The hurt and anger emanating from every corner of the black community was palpable. After the trial, the chasm in perspective remained. According to a Pew Research Center poll , 86 percent of African Americans were dissatisfied with the verdict, as compared to just 30 percent of whites.
The reason for the gap is no mystery. African Americans placed the shooting and trial in historical perspective. They located it on the continuum of anti-black violence, assumed black criminality, and racial bias in the criminal justice system that stretches back generations. Sanford, Florida never wanted Zimmerman arrested. White Americans, meanwhile, tended to ignore the racially discriminatory aspects of the black experience, past and present.
There are facts about the night that George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin that will never be known for certain because Martin is not here to tell his side of the story.
But it is possible to know why African Americans and white Americans viewed the situation so differently. African Americans made tremendous gains politically and socially immediately after slavery ended in Drawing on their newly won citizenship rights, they ushered in an era of expanded democracy that saw, in addition to the election of African Americans to state and federal offices, African Americans serving on juries. In the process, they began to transform the South.
But African American advances were short lived. Southern whites clung feverishly to a slaveholder mentality and wanted desperately to reestablish control over black labor. And so, when southern whites returned to power in the s, they began enacting laws that stripped African Americans of their most basic freedom rights, including equal justice under the law.
The federal government sanctioned the process of turning back the clock. After Homer Plessy challenged segregation on public transportation by deliberately sitting in a whites-only car on a Louisiana railroad, the U.
Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation. In Plessy v. Ferguson the court ruled that in all facets of public life African Americans and whites could legally be kept separate as long as equal accommodations were provided.
The court ignored the fact that separate always turned out to be unequal. In the wake of Plessy, white southerners rapidly created the extensive Jim Crow system of laws and customs that locked in and enforced southern racial segregation.
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