Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  I felt he was speaking not only as a parent but as an African American parent of African American children in a country where black children are still so vulnerable to violence of all kinds. Our children can’t just be kids; they have to be so much more. Our children don’t always feel safe in their own communities.

  “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin,” the president continued. “You know, if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon. And, I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

  We were overwhelmed that our tragedy, and our son’s name, had reached the White House. We sat in the car stunned. The president of the United States was talking about Trayvon Martin.

  By the time Tracy pulled his truck into my driveway, the news was on every television set in my home. Meanwhile, homes across America and around the world were hearing about our case being discussed at the highest possible level.

  It took others to put what the president had said in perspective. Once again, as it had been from the start, the media was our best ally.

  In the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart would later call President Obama’s comments about Trayvon the “most powerful remarks on race since his speech on the subject that saved his presidential campaign in 2008.”

  Later, President Obama would speak again about Trayvon’s death, at another press conference: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”

  In saying this, “the President reached past one man and one boy and one case in one small Florida town, across centuries of slavery and oppression and discrimination and self-destructive behavior, and sought to place this charged case in a cultural context…,” wrote Charles M. Blow in the New York Times, who also noted, “And while words are not actions or solutions, giving voice to a people’s pain from The People’s house has power.”

  The president’s words unleashed a deluge of support. In Miami, Dwyane Wade, then a shooting guard for the Miami Heat, and his future wife, actress Gabrielle Union, apparently spent several days talking to each other about Trayvon, wondering how they could best join the growing demand for justice. Eventually they decided that Wade could make a bigger statement with his team than he could as an individual.

  When the Heat players hit the court in Detroit on March 23, 2012, against the Pistons, several players, including LeBron James, Udonis Haslem, and Dwyane Wade, ran out with messages written on their sneakers: “RIP Trayvon Martin” and “We Want Justice,” which they later gave to me as a memorial to my son.

  A few hours later, James posted a picture on Twitter and Facebook, encouraged by Wade and Union’s idea to make a strong statement about Trayvon. Wade and Union had gathered other Miami Heat players at their hotel in Detroit. Thirteen members of the team were wearing hoodies, their hands in their pockets and their heads bowed.

  The post was tagged #WeWantJustice, and it quickly went viral.

  “Last Christmas all my oldest son wanted as a gift was hoodies,” Wade told the Associated Press, lamenting a world in which an article of clothing worn by a young black man can immediately raise suspicion and guilt. “So when I heard about this a week ago, I thought of my sons. I’m speaking up because I feel it’s necessary that we get past the stereotype of young black men and especially with our youth.”

  “It really is a tragic story,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra told a local newspaper after Twitter and Facebook posts about the team’s actions began flooding the Internet. “And the more you learn about it, the more confused you get. But for them to come together, to draw more light on the subject, I think is a powerful move, and we all stand behind them, not only the staff, but the Miami Heat organization.”

  In Toronto, the New York Knicks’ star player, Carmelo Anthony, tweeted a picture of himself head down in a gray hoodie before his game against the Raptors. Across the front of the photo he wrote, “I Am TRAYVON MARTIN!!!!!” in red letters.

  Anthony’s teammate at the time, Amar’e Stoudemire, who was born and raised less than an hour from Orlando, arrived at Air Canada Centre in a hoodie sweatshirt and wore it, both in solidarity and as a protest, during warm-up.

  The National Basketball Players Association, the labor union that represents NBA players, sanctioned these actions. They stood with my family and me, calling for not only an arrest but also an investigation into the Sanford Police Department.

  The hoodie had become an instrument of protest. But not for everyone. For some, the hoodie was the root cause of Trayvon’s shooting—and therefore the shooting was Trayvon’s fault for wearing it. But we all know that this is ridiculous because people from all walks of life wear hoodies. Trayvon’s only crime was the color of his skin. The theory that a hoodie could have led to my son’s shooting was most prominently presented by Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera. “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was,” he said on the Fox & Friends show.

  “Trayvon Martin, God bless him, an innocent kid, a wonderful kid, a box of Skittles in his hand. He didn’t deserve to die,” Rivera continued. “But I’ll bet you money if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.

  “You cannot rehabilitate the hoodie,” Rivera concluded.

  To which I would say: Trayvon could have taken off the hoodie, but he wouldn’t be safe unless he could also have taken off the color of his skin.

  Geraldo Rivera’s words triggered another explosion in our case. Rivera’s own son wrote him to say he was “ashamed” of his father’s comments. But Rivera didn’t back off. He tweeted, “Parents must do whatever they can to keep their kids safe,” meaning make them take off the hoodie.

  The reaction was immediate—and fierce.

  “What I gotta stroll around rocking a tux 24/7 so I can put others who are ignorant at ease? What about the OTHER side of that coin?” the Roots drummer Questlove tweeted to Rivera. The comedian Aziz Ansari was more direct. “It’s really appropriate to tweet this any day, but seriously, F--k you Geraldo,” he wrote.

  MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry opened her weekend morning show with a mock news segment called “Dress Code for Black Safety,” which poked fun at legislation banning excessively saggy pants and suggesting black men dress like Steve Urkel, the nerd next door from the 1990s sitcom Family Matters. She also held up always elegantly dressed Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as an example of safe attire before showing a 2009 picture of him being arrested for attempting to enter his own home.

  —

  But people like Geraldo Rivera were not relevant in our progress. On March 23, Change.org announced that a petition on its site calling for an arrest had become the fastest-growing petition in its history, with more than 1.5 million signatures.

  The movement was growing stronger.

  March 26, 2012, was the one-month anniversary of my son’s death.

  One month!

  It seemed like a lifetime. But it had only been thirty days.

  We had a number of events scheduled to commemorate the day, including a Sanford City Commission meeting to address some of our concerns. The day before would turn out to be a pivotal day in our fight for justice. It began as so many things would begin in our quest for justice: with prayer.

  On Sunday, March 25, several prayer vigils were held in Sanford, mostly in the black community of Goldsboro, one of which was attended by Sanford mayor Jeff Triplett along with his two sons. Just south of Sanford, in Eatonville, Florida, the legendary civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who had come to Florida to attend our rally the next day, spoke with the congregation at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, which had been founded in 1882 by newly freed slaves in search of their own place to worship.

  That same Sunday, Trac
y and I rushed from one media event to another, running between churches, cameras, and microphones, from one end of Sanford to the other.

  But we weren’t the only ones talking to the media. As it turned out, the death and rape threats and the misguided news segments by people like Geraldo Rivera were only the tip of an ugly iceberg. There were people who wanted us to fail, and who would do anything they could to undermine our case. We were not just demanding justice for Trayvon; we were now also forced to defend Trayvon’s name against what we believed were leaks to the media, possibly by those in the Sanford Police Department, perhaps also by the killer’s supporters and representatives, to discredit Trayvon and cast doubt upon his character and his actions.

  We had heard that the police department had split into pro-Zimmerman and pro-Trayvon factions. Leaks to the media seemed to be coming from both sides. There would be a leaked video of the killer arriving at the police station with no apparent injuries. In the weeks and months to come, other photos of him would leak and he would have a swollen and bloody nose, and blood on the back of his head.

  Then leaks that focused on Trayvon’s character began appearing in the news.

  While Bill Lee was still police chief, he had supposedly tried to put an end to the leaks and put his station on lockdown. Our attorney Natalie Jackson told us that one of the reasons Lee lost control was he had originally blamed leaks that were favorable to Trayvon on Sanford’s black police officers. So black officers were understandably offended. In fact, there was a sentiment among Sanford’s black officers that it would not be advisable for one of them to leak any information since there were so few of them, elevating the risk of being caught.

  But the leaks on all sides continued, most of them negative toward Trayvon. First, his school records, which we were told weren’t supposed to be released. Not when the student is a minor with no prior police record. But a school administrator released his records to the media.

  Then there were the drug and alcohol tests, and background checks, which the authorities felt necessary to do on Trayvon, while not doing drug or alcohol tests on the killer. Trayvon’s background check came back clean because he had never been arrested for anything. Once again we felt the sickening prejudice against the victim and toward the killer.

  The tests showed traces of THC in Trayvon’s system at the time of his death. I didn’t know what THC was, but the story of the THC in Trayvon’s system became the media story of the day. And so as soon as I came out of the hotel we were staying in, a dozen reporters rushed us, asking, “What do you think of Trayvon being on drugs?”

  But he wasn’t “on drugs”; he had trace amounts of THC, which I came to learn was the chemical term for marijuana, in his system. Was that a reason to kill him? Hell, no.

  On March 26, after a noontime forum hosted by CNN’s Roland Martin to discuss the case, we had to confirm reports that one of the reasons for Trayvon’s ten-day suspension from school just before his death was for possessing a small bag that contained marijuana residue. We didn’t see how it was relevant to the killing of our son.

  “They killed my son and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” I told a group of reporters, fighting back tears and a growing sense of rage.

  I have to admit, I was no good for the rest of the day. I retreated to the hotel room, where I knocked everything off the desk and dresser until it was all over the floor.

  “Sybrina, are you all right?” I heard someone say from the hallway. The person had surely heard the crashing commotion.

  I wouldn’t let anybody in the room. I just cried and cried and cried. And I said, What is this? THC? Whatever. I didn’t know what it was—until it was leaked and all over the news. I just couldn’t believe people were on the news justifying a seventeen-year-old teenager being killed by a twenty-eight-year-old man because he had traces of THC in his blood.

  Next, the Orlando Sentinel reported that law enforcement officials said that after the killer lost sight of Trayvon and he headed back to his truck, “Trayvon approached him from behind, the two exchanged words and then Trayvon punched him in the nose, sending him to the ground and began beating him.” They said Trayvon then climbed on top of him, slamming his pursuer’s head into the sidewalk before my son was shot.

  We weren’t buying it, and neither were some of the most influential columnists in America.

  “To believe Zimmerman’s scenario,” wrote Charles M. Blow in the New York Times, “you have to believe that Trayvon, an unarmed boy, a boy so thin that people called him Slimm, a boy whose mother said that he had not had a fight since he was a preschooler, chose that night and that man to attack. You have to believe that Trayvon chose to attack a man who outweighed him by 100 pounds.

  City Manager Norton Bonaparte, Jr., said the acting police chief would conduct an internal affairs investigation into the leaks and threatened disciplinary action and possibly termination for those who leaked the reports.

  But we never heard of anyone ever being identified, much less disciplined.

  So the stories rolled on in the media: every day, every hour, all the time.

  What they didn’t ask, and what I wanted to know, was this: Why was this information, whether true or false, being leaked out? Before an arrest, much less a trial? We knew that it wasn’t coming from our side. I came from government, my career of over twenty years was with Miami-Dade County, so I knew there were rules and processes for handling confidential material. You abide by policies and procedures or you get fired.

  But now too many things were being leaked. Things the media—and the public—shouldn’t have known if there was an open investigation. Soon they knew things about Trayvon and about the crime scene that even we didn’t know—things that we didn’t even know were true or not.

  In this supercharged atmosphere came the biggest Sanford rally yet, on March 26, 2012, one month after Trayvon’s killing.

  It began with a meeting with the Sanford City Commission, where we, along with the civil rights leaders and other dignitaries who had flown to Sanford to support us, would be allowed to speak to the commissioners. They all came to support us. There was Reverend Jackson, Pastor Jamal Bryant, Judge Greg Mathis, NFL star Ray Lewis, and, as always, Reverend Sharpton.

  When the word got out about the list of speakers, the city of Sanford was basically shut down. Traffic was at a historic high. Police lined the streets. And everyone was headed toward the Sanford Civic Center, which could hold about 850 people in its auditorium, annex, and lobby.

  Tracy and I led a march to the civic center from the First United Methodist Church. We called it the National Trayvon Martin March for Justice, and marching alongside us was our attorney Crump, Reverend Sharpton, Pastor Bryant, and Reverend Jackson, and many other clergy and supporters.

  We began at the corner of Fourth Street and Park Avenue, where three churches converge: First United Methodist, Holy Cross Episcopal, and First Presbyterian. Tracy and I and our well-known allies stood at the front in a line of banners and solidarity. And behind us, unbelievably, were thousands. We marched north along Park Avenue for three blocks until we reached First Street, Sanford’s main drag, with its restaurants and nearby performing arts theater. We turned right and continued toward the Sanford Chamber of Commerce and continued past the Historic Sanford Welcome Center. At the Chamber, we turned up Sanford Avenue and marched until we reached Seminole Boulevard and the civic center.

  “Justice for Trayvon!” we shouted until our throats were raw and our voices raspy.

  Soon we arrived at the Sanford Civic Center, which sits on the southern shore of Lake Monroe. A large shade tree guards the entrance, and an overhang runs along the building’s front to a small patio with an atrium to the south.

  The crowd that marched with us was too large for the civic center auditorium. For the hundreds who were unable to enter the hall, the city had constructed a large closed-circuit TV screen at Fort Mellon Park, which sits adjacent to the civic center, to broadcast the meeting live
.

  The crowd inside the civic center was large and buzzing with anger, but not violent. As Reverend Sharpton said in our first big Sanford rally, the only shot fired in all of this was the one that killed our son. We were loud in our demands for justice, but there was an understanding that everything was to be done in peace. Violence would only hinder our mission. People filled the hall with chants and cheers. The tension was high, and the speeches would be heated. But it was important to us that everything remain peaceful.

  Shortly after five P.M. the town hall meeting began with a welcome from Sanford mayor Jeff Triplett.

  “I just want to let everyone know where we’ve gone over the last week,” the mayor said after the benediction and the pledge of allegiance, sitting at a long table with four city commissioners and the city manager. “The city manager, Mr. Bonaparte, and I have flown up to Washington, D.C., to meet with Congresswoman Brown and her congressional delegates and the Department of Justice, and openly asked them to come in and review what we’ve done, how we’ve done it, and if we have made a mistake, help us correct it. We’ve reached out to the FBI and…several organizations within the United States Department of Justice, to help us out and take us down the right path.

  “I just want to reaffirm from us sitting up here that we truly are in pursuit of truth and justice, and we’ve looked outside our walls to help people deliver that to us,” said the mayor. “And we will take swift and decisive action when that happens.”

  The mayor surveyed the overstuffed auditorium, his eyes darting quickly back and forth across the expanse of the crowd. I could tell the weight of the moment affected him as both a mayor and as a man. He was a good man caught in a bad situation. He had spoken only four days ago at our rally. But now the city he presided over had become the epicenter of what was fast becoming a new civil rights movement, becoming known not for all the city’s progress and beauty, but for what it had failed to do in a racially charged murder that brought a lot of people back to the darkest days of the South.