Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  She showed us a clipping from the Orlando Sentinel dated September 1, 1991—“Political Sham—The Rise and Fall of Goldsboro.” The newspaper article talked about a man named Forrest Lake, Seminole County’s “sharpest politician of the early 1900s….But Forrest Lake might also have been one of the worst characters in the shadowy, back-room politics of his day,” the Opinion page article read.

  “Forrest Lake went to the state capitol in Tallahassee and got the legislature to dismantle the Goldsboro charter and the Sanford charter and the Sanford Heights charters,” said Ms. Oliver. “And then three days later he came back with one charter called Sanford.”

  On April 26, 1911, the legislature passed a bill essentially allowing Sanford to annex Goldsboro and Sanford Heights, and black Goldsboro disappeared. At least as a city unto itself. The black citizens remained, only now they had no town of their own. Their businesses, their city jobs, their post office, their school, their jail, even their streets, or at least their street names, which were changed from honoring Goldsboro’s African American founders to numbers, would all eventually disappear. Now the citizens of Goldsboro were on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, which divided the white side of Sanford from the black side. “That’s where the hundred-year feud started,” said Ms. Oliver. “From that point on there was a wall between the black community of Sanford and the white community. The black citizens of Goldsboro refused to be part of Sanford, and for more than forty years, from 1911 to 1953, Goldsboro and Sanford were in litigation over the money that Sanford owed Goldsboro at the demise of Goldsboro.”

  A lawsuit was filed by the leaders of the now-defunct Goldsboro in the Florida Supreme Court. “And for forty years they battled Sanford and they never got restitution for what Sanford owed Goldsboro and its citizens,” said Ms. Oliver. “They lost the lawsuit and it can never be reopened.

  “Goldsboro had room to expand land-wise, but the city of Sanford couldn’t expand because of geographical boundaries. There was just no room to grow. In the 1950s Sanford gerrymandered Goldsboro, redrew the boundaries,” she said, explaining how most of the black citizens were even now unable to vote on local matters because, through redistricting, they were living in Seminole County and not the city of Sanford. “So white people controlled Sanford, even though they weren’t the majority,” Ms. Oliver said. “To this day, I can’t vote in the city of Sanford because I live in Goldsboro. But the people who live on the next street, just one street away from mine, can vote in the city of Sanford.

  “I came to Sanford in 1946, when I was four years old,” she said. “We came on the overground railroad, the name for the segregated railroad cars the blacks took to flee Alabama and Mississippi Jim Crow, government-sanctioned racial segregation. My daddy came in search of an all-black city, and landed in Goldsboro, which was still all black, but it wasn’t its own city anymore.

  “Well, everything was going fine in the 1950s,” she continued. Fine at least for segregated Sanford, she said, where blacks and whites stayed separate: in their neighborhoods, businesses, churches, and schools. “Everything was separate. We were divided by a railroad track, and what happened on one side of the railroad track didn’t have anything to do with the other side of the railroad track.

  “But then, in the early sixties, came the Civic Center,” she continued. “The city built this big, beautiful Civic Center and everyone was looking forward to it—until the city manager said that blacks would never be able to use the Civic Center.

  “Well, that totally divided Sanford,” she said. “After it was built, the white kids were having dances there and things like that. And the black kids decided one night that they were going to integrate the Civic Center.

  “I was with that group that night,” she said. “I was about seventeen years old in the eleventh grade. It was February 14, Valentine’s Day night, 1960, and since it was February, it was cold, at least cold for Florida. There were about five carloads of us. We parked on the side where the river is, and we were walking across the street to the Civic Center. Through the Civic Center’s windows, we could see the white kids dancing and having a great time. And we heard a man say, ‘Here they come,’ and then they turned the fire hydrant hoses on us. As soon as we saw the water hoses we ran back to our cars. I don’t know if they were firemen or not. We outran the water. It was too cold to get wet that night. But some of the kids that went there that night were arrested the next day. I’ve got that article, too, to prove what I’m saying.”

  Sure enough, she did. “City Won’t Tolerate Violence, Demonstrating, Negroes Told,” read The Sanford Herald headline of March 8, 1960. The story detailed the arrests of six students, who “massed downtown and demanded use of the Civic Center or improved facilities of their own.”

  “They arrested the boys who they thought had created the idea of integrating the Civic Center,” she said.

  Despite the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Florida didn’t integrate its schools until 1971, when the Court upheld the use of busing to achieve integration. “The decree came down from the state of Florida that all schools had to be integrated that year,” said Ms. Oliver. Her daughter, attorney Natalie Jackson, was bused twenty miles to a newly built white high school in Lake Mary, even though the school she had been attending was walking distance from her house. “Sanford’s only black high school was Crooms Academy high school on Goldsboro Avenue. A lot of the whites didn’t want their children to go to that school. So they did all they could to close the school down, including burning the school, setting it on fire.”

  She showed us a front-page Sanford Herald newspaper article from 1970: “Crooms High Is Partially Burned” read the headline.

  “They burned down the main building,” Ms. Oliver said, “which had all of the school records, but they were able to save the side classrooms. But after they couldn’t burn it down, two or three years later the school board shut it down,” which sparked a lawsuit, which kept the school open. “Crooms Academy is open to this day. It’s a magnet school of technology, and rated number one in the state of Florida.”

  She took a breath because she was now ready to discuss the present-day Sanford, which, she said, was like any other Florida city, or many Southern cities, in the 2000s when it came to race relations—at least before February 26, 2012. It was a place that seemed to live up to its slogan, “The Friendly City,” and would soon even have its first African American city manager, Norton Bonaparte, Jr., and an African American city commissioner, Dr. Velma Williams.

  “Now, after about fifty years, I would say in about 2000, three consecutive new mayors reached out to the black community,” said Ms. Oliver. Especially, she added, Sanford’s current mayor, Jeff Triplett, a good man who, with the shooting of my son, would become caught in an extremely volatile situation. “Like a character out of a John Grisham novel” is how our attorney Natalie Jackson described him. Triplett is a full-time banker and a part-time mayor. His wife went to school at the historically black Florida A&M University law school in Orlando. Ms. Oliver is a close friend of Jeff Triplett’s mother, and Jeff is known around town as “a nice guy,” said Jackson. He became mayor to do his part for his city, only to become caught up in a crisis the likes of which Sanford had never seen.

  “Once they started reaching out to the black community, there was the response that, you know, we might get together, we might finally sit down to the table and talk,” Ms. Oliver told us. She paused. “And then your son was killed.

  “So when Trayvon happened and the neighborhood watch volunteer admitted that he shot him and he went in the front door of the police station and out the back door, well, the black citizens of Sanford and Goldsboro and Seminole County said, ‘Enough is enough.’ That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But a majority of the white citizens of Sanford didn’t come with us. They believed George Zimmerman killed Trayvon in self-defense. So we’re separated again.”

  —

  For me, in the two years
I visited before Trayvon’s death, the Retreat at Twin Lakes was a sunny place, a gated community like thousands of others across America, where residents spend their hard-earned money for a home that feels safe, protected. Kids played in the streets. Neighbors waved hello. Cars drove down sunny streets with names like Twin Trees Lane and Retreat View Circle.

  But the Retreat had a seamy underside that was mostly invisible to me. The media would report that townhouses that once sold for $250,000 were selling for $100,000 or less, if at all. Some people bought at the height of the market and when the bubble burst went into foreclosure. Investors took over, buying and renting out the townhouses to newcomers. Some of the original residents who stuck it out believed that the newcomers, the ones who came after the bust, didn’t come alone—they brought something with them: crime.

  I never once in my two years of visits saw one thing that alarmed me there, even though burglaries and break-ins were by then a reality of life for some residents.

  There was something else I never saw and most residents didn’t know about: on the streets and in the shadows, there was a man with a gun.

  He carried a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm pistol in a hidden holster behind his back in the waistband of his pants. And while the homeowners’ association at the Retreat had appointed this man the head of the community’s neighborhood watch, responsible for alerting police to suspicious activity but prohibited from confronting suspects himself, nobody seemed to know about his gun.

  The media would call him a vigilante, but for Sybrina, our family, our attorneys, and me, the killer’s gun told us everything we needed to know about him. Because no matter what else is said about this case, one thing is certain: if he hadn’t been carrying a gun on the night of February 26, 2012, our son would still be alive.

  —

  Just like Ms. Oliver told us, the black community of Sanford had our back, but things started slowly.

  At nine A.M. on Saturday, March 3, six days after the killing of my son, two dozen African American residents from Goldsboro, the African American community of Sanford, crossed the railroad tracks and gathered in front of the Sanford police station. Francis Oliver herself was in Alabama, participating in the memorial Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, and she didn’t know about the first rally protesting the shooting of a seventeen-year-old young man at the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Even we didn’t know about the protest, and only heard about it later.

  No media was present to record the event, just a small group of protesters with a few homemade signs to show their outrage over the shooting of a seventeen-year-old kid in their city, and the lack of an arrest of the man who shot him dead.

  “Where is everybody?” Francis Oliver’s sister, Debra Detraville, asked her by phone.

  “What do you mean?” Ms. Oliver asked.

  “We’re at the police station,” said Debra Detraville.

  “For what?” asked Ms. Oliver.

  “We came up here because of that boy who got killed with the Skittles,” she was told.

  Ms. Oliver sprang into action, as she knew someone had to lead the protest in case the police came outside the station. Eventually, she was told that Oscar Redden, founder and vice president of Brothers Keepers, which helps people recover from addictions, was present, sitting in his truck.

  “I said, ‘Take Oscar the phone and let me talk to him,’ and I said, ‘Oscar, will you take charge and serve as the spokesperson in case the police come out and try and arrest somebody?’ ” Ms. Oliver told us she said that day.

  Oscar Redden said he would serve as spokesperson. But no police arrived, no attention was given. The protest, witnessed by only the protesters, broke up after not too long, but the protesters would be back in even greater numbers, and this time they wouldn’t be turned away: not by the Sanford police, not by the legislature, a water hose, gerrymandering, or fire. This time, the black citizens of Goldsboro, Sanford, America, and the world would stand up, and this time they couldn’t be stopped.

  And not only would Sybrina and I be with them, but, almost unbelievably, we would be leading them.

  But in the beginning, though, I was just like that first little group of protesters: upset, angry, and not getting any answers. For many days I remained in Sanford, still reminded day in and day out of the crime scene right outside the windows. I would often walk out the back door and into the communal backyard to stand at the spot on the grass next to the sidewalk where my son fell dead, trying to visualize what actually happened to him out there. Back and forth I would walk, trying to trace Trayvon’s steps, until I finally gave up. The trail had gone cold.

  —

  Sybrina came to Sanford for the first time late at night on Thursday, March 8, driving in with her family.

  I could see the pain in her face, but I could also see the strength. And when I told her, “We have to try to figure out how to get justice for Trayvon, and get an arrest of the guy who killed him,” I could also see determination to do exactly that.

  We were both very nervous. But we told each other, “Let’s tell the truth. Let’s tell what we know. Let’s tell who Trayvon was. Let’s let America know who Trayvon was.” We were both still torn up, leveled, on the brink of a breakdown, and every interview Sybrina would do—at least in the beginning—she would do with a box of tissues.

  But we also knew that we had to hold it together, and be strong, for Trayvon.

  The next morning, we met the media in our hotel, then went to the Seminole County Clerk of Courts, where Ben Crump filed a public-records lawsuit on our behalf against the Sanford Police Department, demanding the release of the 911 tapes.

  At the courthouse, a reporter showed us a photo of a dark-haired man at the Orange County jail.

  “This is his mugshot,” the reporter told us. “He’s been arrested before.”

  What? I had been told by the Sanford police that the killer not only had no arrest record but was “squeaky-clean.” The picture the reporter was showing us, along with the arrest record that she had unearthed, showed that the killer had been detained by police in 2005 for battery of a law enforcement officer and resisting arrest with violence. It was the first time we had seen a picture of the man who had shot Trayvon, and now not only did we have his picture—and a mugshot, no less—we would also soon have his police record, which Crump easily obtained through the county clerk’s office, all of which showed that he was not “squeaky-clean.”

  Later that same day, we met the media outside the Sanford Police Department: me, our attorneys Ben Crump and Natalie Jackson, and, for the first time in public, Sybrina and our son Jahvaris.

  Crump spoke first, angrily demanding the 911 tapes. He held up a copy of the killer’s arrest record. “We confirmed that George Michael Zimmerman had a police record and the police lied to this family,” Crump continued. “They lied to them when they said George Michael Zimmerman was squeaky-clean….And Mr. [Tracy] Martin will tell you in just a second they said that was one of the reasons why they weren’t arresting him….He was arrested in 2005 for resisting arrest with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer. These are violent crimes. He had a propensity to be violent.

  “Trayvon Martin was squeaky-clean. He had never been arrested. He was a kid with a baby face who everybody said always was smiling and was always a happy-go-lucky kid. But yet they are trying to cover up for this adult and sweep this under the rug. So this family just can’t understand why the police is lying to protect this homeowners’ association loose cannon, why they’re trying to cover this up, why they are trying to protect him and not to get to the truth of the matter as to why their son was [shot and killed] while he was coming home with a bag of Skittles and George Michael Zimmerman had a gun.

  “The 911 tape will show,” Crump said at last. “It’s gonna be riveting.”

  One of the reporters asked Crump why we just didn’t wait for the process to unfold, since the police were saying that their investigation was ongoing and informati
on would be forthcoming.

  “If your child had been shot down, and all you wanted was answers, how long do you wait?” Crump shot back. “How long do you wait when there’s this mound of evidence, saying this guy just killed your child, and all your child had was a bag of Skittles? He had a gun. He had a history of violence….This was their child. This is their hope for the future. And he’s gone!”

  Crump was right about the media, and he and our media relations expert Ryan Julison’s strategy of keeping our case alive by taking it to the media would pay off in ways that we couldn’t imagine. The announcement of the killer’s arrest record became news around the world. We started paying attention to certain journalists who picked up on the story with particular care and ferocity. One of them was Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post. We hadn’t met him at this point, but we felt like we knew him. He said things with a directness and eloquence that we didn’t have, but that echoed in me and expressed the still-unsorted feelings in my own soul. “As an African American, this case was personal,” Jonathan Capehart wrote in one column. “The killer of an unarmed black teenager doing nothing more than returning to where he was staying on a rainy evening had to be held accountable in some way. Any life should not be taken so easily or cheaply. I wrote more than 60 pieces seeking justice for Trayvon as if my life depended on it—because one day it might.” Another African American journalist, the New York Times’s Charles M. Blow, who had two sons just like Sybrina and I had before Trayvon’s death, wrote: “This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious.’ That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.