The mother of Trayvon Martin used the 10th anniversary of her son’s death Saturday to urge those who sought justice for her family to continue to fight.
“I never do anything on the 26th, I never even plan anything on the 26th of February,” Sybrina Fulton said at the weekly meeting of the National Action Network, the civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem.
She told an audience that included Sharpton and Mayor Eric Adams that she wanted to be there to support her supporters. Adams, a New York state senator at the time, was among several Black lawmakers who wore hooded sweatshirts to a 2012 legislative session to call attention to the 17-year-old’s death in Sanford, Florida.
Trayvon Martin had been wearing a similar sweatshirt when he was fatally shot on his way back from a store while visiting his father in a gated community in the Orlando suburb. George Zimmerman, a member of the community’s neighborhood watch, confronted the teenager and shot him after reporting him to authorities as a suspicious person.
Zimmerman, who told authorities that Martin had attacked him, was acquitted of second-degree murder in 2013.
The shooting refocused attention on race and justice in the United States. Sharpton, who early on met with Martin’s family and their attorney Ben Crump as they worked to draw attention to his death, on Saturday compared Martin’s legacy to that of Emmett Till, the Chicago teen whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 stoked the civil rights movement.
“Today is a bittersweet day,” said Fulton, who with her family created the Trayvon Martin Foundation to raise awareness of gun violence. “I thank God for all the Trayvon Martins that you don’t know, all the young ladies who have been shot and killed and our Black and brown boys who have been shot and killed and you don’t know their names. Thank you for standing up for them. Thank you for praying for them. Thank you for supporting them. They need you. They need your voice. And if you don’t do anything else, don’t give up.”
Adams praised Fulton for “turning pain into purpose.”
(AP)
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What a travesty. What a liar this woman is. Her darling son was a vicious thug, who tried to kill someone and was killed in self defense. His race had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. When George Zimmerman, a dark-skinned Hispanic man with a black grandfather, saw him casing a house for future burglary, he didn’t even know what race he was. That wasn’t a factor at all; his only concern was to protect his neighbors from a potential burglar, by calling the police, and keeping an eye on the suspect until they would get there. When the police dispatcher said he didn’t need to do that if he didn’t want to, he took her advice and returned to his car to wait for the police, only to find that Martin, having gone home, had gone out again and circled around to ambush him, because he took offense at being suspected of the truth. How dare some interfering busybody take an interest in his doings? So he attacked Zimmerman and tried his best to murder him, until eventually Zimmerman had no choice but to shoot him.
The police understood this very well, and decided not to arrest Zimmerman, because he’d done nothing wrong. And had he gone by the name Jorge Mesa that would have been the end of it. But he uses the English version of his first name, and his German-American father’s surname, so when Al Sharpton heard the story he jumped to the false conclusion that he was a Jew, and so he made a fuss, led demonstrations, threatened to burn down the city, and led to a corrupt prosecutor brought in from elsewhere filing false charges against Zimmerman and ruining his life. Even after his acquittal he’s unemployable, and therefore his life has been a mess.