AMERICA:Growing demands that 17-year-old Trayvon Martin's killer be arrested have followed national outrage at the manner of his death, writes LARA MARLOWE
“IF I had a son,” president Barack Obama said yesterday, “he’d look like Trayvon.”
Photographs of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old African-American who was shot dead in Florida on February 26th, have been in the news all week. It’s true he looked a lot like the young Barack Obama.
The case prompted vigils and marches in a half-dozen US cities this week. Yesterday was the first time the president commented on it.
Obama said it was “absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this . . . All of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen”.
On the night of his death, Trayvon Martin was walking through the retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community that had seen a rash of burglaries, on the way to his father’s home. It was raining, and he wore a hoodie. The young man was popular at school, where he earned As and Bs, and had no police record.
He carried a can of iced tea and a package of Skittles sweets he’d just bought at the local 7-Eleven. “This dude is following me,” Martin told his girlfriend on his mobile phone.
George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old son of a retired white military man and a Peruvian woman, cruised the streets of the community in his SUV.
A Neighbourhood Watch member who aspired to become a police officer, Zimmerman had placed 46 calls to the emergency 911 number in 14 months, reporting open windows and “suspicious” individuals.
Though he’d been accused of criminal misconduct and violence twice in 2005, Zimmerman holds a concealed weapons permit and carried a semiautomatic handgun the night Martin died.
Martin’s girlfriend told him to run. Zimmerman ignored the police dispatcher on 911 who told him not to pursue Martin.
“Why are you following me?” the girlfriend heard Martin say, then another voice asking: “What are you doing in the neighbourhood?” She heard yelling and the line died.
Martin’s dead body was found in the street. Zimmerman told police he was heading back to his car when Martin attacked him.
Police said Zimmerman’s head and neck were bleeding. They conducted drug and alcohol tests on Martin, but not on Zimmerman.
They let Zimmerman keep his handgun and later said they did not arrest him because he claimed self-defence, as allowed by Florida’s lenient “Stand Your Ground” law.
Twenty-one states have similar laws. “You want to know how you can kill somebody legally in Florida?” Arthur Hayhoe of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence told USA Today. “Make sure you have no witnesses, hunt the person down and then say you feared for your life.”
What started as a local story has grown into a national outrage. Celebrities including film director Spike Lee and actor Mia Farrow, prominent African-Americans such as Martin Luther King III, Rev Al Sharpton and congressman John Lewis, spoke out. Some 900,000 people signed an online petition calling for Zimmerman’s arrest.
Bill Lee, the Sanford police chief, stepped down temporarily on Thursday. Florida governor Rick Scott named a new prosecutor and called a grand jury to decide next month whether Zimmerman should be arrested. Attorney general Eric Holder opened a federal investigation and discussed Martin’s death with black religious leaders at the White House yesterday.
There were echoes of decades past, when the lynching of black men in southern states was tolerated by local authorities who resented the meddling of federal marshals. The 1955 precedent of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who may have made the mistake of whistling at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi, is cited often.
Till was dragged from his bed by two white men who shot him dead and dumped his body in the river. Till’s killers were cleared by an all-white jury.
In 2012, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post notes, “it is ridiculous to imply that nothing has changed.” Mississippi has more elected black officials than any other state. A black family inhabit the White House, and the attorney general is also black.
But a post-racial society remains a mirage. Black men still go through life wearing a bull’s-eye, Robinson says. In 2009, the last time president Obama commented on a racially charged incident – after the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates jnr was arrested in his own home – he mentioned the “long history of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately”.
African-Americans allude to the offence of “driving while black”. Since Trayvon Martin’s death, they speak of the danger of “walking while black”. Protesters wear hoodies or T-shirts saying “I am Trayvon Martin,” and carry iced tea and Skittles.
Pressure for the arrest of George Zimmerman is mounting. Two questions hang over race relations in America. If Trayvon Martin were white, would he have been shot? If George Zimmerman were black, would he have been arrested?