Trayvon Martin Didn’t Make It

We live in dangerous times. They are not as heinous as the days of my youth when it seemed that from Memphis to Chicago white America was burning with rage, spoiling to inflict pain. But when a life is wasted in bigotry and fear it is hard to qualify one death as worse than another. The loss of potential is complete in death. We all died a little when Trayvon Martin was gunned down outside Orlando over the weekend. Death, unwarranted and shockingly, stunningly, immediate cannot be explained or understood.  I doubt the tears spilled these past days by the mother and father of Trayvon Martin are more or less any different or pained than those shed by other moms and dads. Parents should never outlive their kids, and Trayvon should still be able to sit on the couch watching the game with his dad and younger brother.  

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner should still be with us also.  These three young men were Civil Rights workers killed by the Klan in June of 1964 in Mississippi. Chaney was from nearby Meridian, and Goodman and Schwerner were from the New York.  White folks, north and south, but especially in Mississippi, were fearful of the black population, long suppressed, who lived in what the white population perceived to be their communities. Fear metastasized to hate, which was often expressed in violence. In 1964 the state seldom found reason to respond. Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered by the side of a Mississippi road, and buried under mounds of dirt in an earthen dam, their broken bodies bulldozed in a swamp.

The horrible men who committed these crimes were not brought to any sort of justice for three years. In 1967 they were tried and sentenced, but Southern Justice only went so far. None of the men were convicted of murder and none served more than six years. Finally in 2004, 40 years later, Edgar Killen, who was thought to have planned the attack was finally tried again and found guilty of manslaughter. Killen was 80 at the time and had by then had lived his entire adult life without interruption or prosecution.

In 1964 a young black man’s life, and those of the white northerners who struggled by their side was worth little. Time will tell if Trayvon’s life carries any greater value.

How long will it take until George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon in the chest after a still poorly understood struggle, is measured by the Scales of Justice? Zimmerman had a license to carry a concealed weapon to protect the gated community in which both he and Trayvon’s father lived. Zimmerman made out from the hoodie Trayvon wore and what he reported to the police was a hand in his waste-band that the 17 year old football player was “up to no good”. The Police advised Zimmerman not to follow the boy. He did. Minutes later Trayvon was dead, a bullet in his chest and a bag of skittles, purchased minutes earlier for his little brother at a local 7-11, in his pocket. He was unarmed.

Mr. Zimmerman is an active community watch volunteer with a self-appointed need to be armed. He claimed self-defense, has not been charged or arrested, but also has yet to explain how you can be attacked by someone you are following surreptitiously. The local police did not perform alcohol or drug tests on Zimmerman. Police claim that Zimmerman’s record was clean, but he has at least one prior arrest for assaulting a police officer.  There are many unanswered questions regarding the imprecise investigation conducted to date by the police. Charles M. Blow wrote an excellent and detailed piece for the NY Times last Saturday.

One has to wonder what drove Mr. Zimmerman. Why did he follow Trayvon is an obvious question. But also why did he make so many other calls to the police on his Neighborhood Watch duties? Nearly 50 according to some reports.  What words rang in Zimmerman’s head, words that made a 17 year old black kid someone to fear or to all too easily suspect of being “up to no good”?  

What has the litany of hate has done to our communities?

 Our African American President, the pride of America’s ability to be open in our hearts and our minds and to change, is delegitimized at every turn. His opponents call him a Socialist AND a Muslim, a contradiction that cannot be bridged or explained except through the prism of blind hate. At rallies they call Obama a monkey, using nearly every available insult, everything short of the word they really want to use but owing to the distance to 1964 for the most part withhold.  

Meanwhile, immigrants in search of a better life for themselves and their families are smeared as aliens for political purposes, and blamed for the economy of hurt that affects so many Americans. Crimes of the wealthy barely register on the scale that faults the immigrant South or Central American, the urban teen, or the poor family in need of food stamps for every wrong in our society. Women are sluts in this calculation, and gay people are infecting the morals of American youth, their search for love an affront to presidential candidates and debate audiences.  Our churches, a refuge of reconciliation to earlier generations, are now just another battleground, the front line for what so many call culture wars.  Opponents in political dialogue, owing to the sins they perceive to be perpetuated by their opposition, now feel empowered to express their abiding hatred for those they oppose. Americans hate both the sin and the sinner. A turn of the cheek is long out of fashion.  All we need is love… How quaint.

Trayvon Martin did not make it through. We do not know for sure that hate was at the root of the confrontation, but there can be little doubt that there was fear in the air that night. Trayvon was walking home with a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman was afraid.

There are those who in defense of the indefensible will point to the crime perpetuated in other communities. They will work hard to shed the indictment of their efforts to remove strand by strand the safety net which sustains the brothers and sisters who live in need in our midst all across America.  Trayvon was not the only life of potential to be wasted on Saturday. Across the country just outside Seattle, Jasmyn Tully, also 17, was killed by a drug addled teenager who said he “wanted to hurt somebody”. There will be criticism for those of us who protest the violent act which took Trayvon’s life and the poor application of justice. They’ll call us hypocrites, because Jasmyn Tully will garner no comparable headlines.

Well, anyway it doesn’t matter to me. American hurts today, or at least we ought to. A young boy and a young girl with all the promise two 17 year old kids could hold are no longer with us. We are met with senseless violence and have no answers. All around us we see hard hearts, and yet we still wonder how these two lives could be taken. Trayvon’s mother and father search for answers and justice in their community. So far they can find none. Two lives gone. No one wins.