Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “Even though I am broken hearted my faith is unshattered,” Tracy tweeted. “I WILL ALWAYS LOVE MY BABY TRAY.”

  —

  While those outside the courthouse tried to make sense of the verdict, both the defense and the prosecution held press conferences.

  Flanked on both sides by her prosecutors, Guy and de la Rionda, Corey spoke first, repeating her promise to seek the truth, to get both sides of the story and present the facts in court. “As Mr. Guy told the jury yesterday, ‘To the living we owe respect, to the dead we owe the truth,’ ” she said. “We have been respectful to the living. We have done our best to ensure due process to all involved, and we believe that we brought out the truth on behalf of Trayvon Martin.”

  She thanked the media and her team of lawyers and assistants, and she gave her sympathies to us as a family before turning over the lectern to de la Rionda.

  “I am disappointed, as we all are, with the verdict, but we accept it,” he said matter-of-factly. “We live in a great country that has a great criminal justice system,” he said. “It is not perfect, but it’s the best in the world, and we respect the jury’s verdict.”

  Guy was more emotional. He didn’t have much to say, but what he did say was delivered in the same passionate style he had used in the courtroom. “We have from the beginning just prayed for the truth to come out and for peace to be the result, and that continues to be our prayers and we believe they have been answered.”

  Richard Mantei, who played a smaller role in the trial, focused his comments on our family, thanking us for how we handled ourselves throughout the case. “They’ve been dignified, they’ve showed class,” he said. “They have kept their pain in check when they needed to and they have grieved when they needed to….It can’t have been easy and it won’t be easy. I know you all have a job to do, but when you approach all that, keep them in mind, too.”

  Our attorneys held a press conference of their own that night, although they were all still numb and reeling from the rendering of the not-guilty verdict. The next morning I called Crump and told him that a not-guilty verdict was not the end of our fight for justice, if not for Trayvon, then for other people’s children; it was only another beginning. Our attorneys became our voice after the verdict. They were swamped with media requests from around the world, and we all had a responsibility to use that moment to send a positive message, to bring a message of hope for a better future for the Trayvons yet to be born. We had an international audience interested in knowing what happened to my son, and what would happen next, after the not-guilty verdict. Attorneys Crump, Parks, and Rand all did dozens of interviews for three days straight—Parks said he did thirteen interviews on the Sunday after the verdict alone, saying, show after show, that the jury couldn’t see Trayvon as their child or our child, and that the defense put Trayvon on trial but the prosecution didn’t put the killer on trial. The killer was portrayed as the good guy, the helpful, friendly neighbor to people in the community, while Trayvon was incorrectly portrayed as a thug.

  They were on every major American network—including CNN, MSNBC, and Fox—and on international networks, too, reaching audiences as far away as Australia and Japan. Jasmine Rand speaks Spanish, so she also did appearances updating the Spanish-speaking world on Telemundo and other stations that broadcast in Central and South America. Our attorneys continued to be our voice, telling the world that a not-guilty verdict did not mean George Zimmerman was innocent and that the verdict was a report card on the status of racial equality in our nation. While we had failed to deliver the equality promised in our Constitution, under no circumstance would we give up fighting for justice and equality for the other Trayvon Martins in the world. The defense put Trayvon on trial, and now our nation had been put on trial by a global community that, like our family, was not willing to accept that an adult man could shoot an unarmed seventeen-year-old walking home from a convenience store in a hoodie and walk away free.

  Outrage over the verdict spread worldwide, in living rooms, on streets, and even stages.

  The singer Beyoncé took a moment of silence for Trayvon at a concert in Nashville, and then sang the chorus of “I Will Always Love You,” a Dolly Parton song made popular by Whitney Houston.

  Stevie Wonder announced he would not play another concert in Florida until the state government repealed its Stand Your Ground law. (Florida still hasn’t repealed the law.)

  In Limerick, Ireland, Bruce Springsteen dedicated his song “American Skin (41 Shots),” the song inspired by the twenty-two-year-old unarmed Bronx man who died after four plainclothes police officers fired forty-one shots at him, to Trayvon, saying, “I want to send this one out as a letter back home for justice for Trayvon Martin.” I looked up the song, and the lyrics stopped me cold—they reminded me of what my mother taught me, what I taught Trayvon, and the unfair burden put on some Americans because of the presumption of guilt that follows them:

  If an officer stops you, promise me you’ll always be polite

  Even President Obama issued a brief statement shortly after the verdict, asking for “calm reflection” and to “ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities.”

  I went to sleep that night feeling hopeless, feeling angry, hurt, and more than a little disgusted, and, most of all, wondering what to do next.

  —

  In the coming days, so many people would come to our side, lending their voices, their support, their anger, and their rage. Beyoncé and Jay Z joined a “Justice for Trayvon” vigil in New York City. Jay Z and Justin Timberlake dedicated a rendition of the song “Forever Young” to Trayvon in a concert at Yankee Stadium.

  Six days after the verdict, at 1:33 P.M., President Obama, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, addressed the press, and the nation, about Trayvon’s case and the issue of race. It was a seventeen-minute monologue that spoke volumes and will, to my mind, go down in history as one of the most eloquent statements about race in America.

  “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” he began. “Another way of saying that is, Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago….

  “There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often. And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.

  “How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction?” the president asked, urging protesters to take a nonviolent path. “If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family,” he said. “But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, Are there some concrete things that we might be able to do?…

  “Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it would be productive for the Justice Department, governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.”

  This would include “training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing,” he said.

  “Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it—if they are designed in such a way that they may enco
urage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than defuse potential altercations.”

  As for the Stand Your Ground law, the president asked what kind of message is being sent if “someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

  “And for those who resist the idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

  “Number three—and this is a long-term project—we need to spend some time in thinking about how we bolster and reinforce our African American boys. And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?…

  “And then, finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. There has been talk about [whether we should] convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked in to the positions they already have. On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s the possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about: Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.”

  I had to take a breath. It was all too surreal, that our son’s death had motivated an American president to finally speak about race issues that had so long been festering beneath the surface of life in this country.

  “And let me just leave you with a final thought,” he continued, “that, as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean we’re in a post-racial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But when I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are—they’re better than we were—on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.

  “And so we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues,” he said. “And those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature, as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union—not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.”

  —

  The day after the verdict was a Sunday. I got up and I went to my church, Antioch Missionary Baptist of Miami Gardens.

  I just thought it was important, especially on this Sunday. I wanted to clear my head and try to figure out my next steps and where I would go from this point forward. I was, of course, more than disappointed. I kept thinking about how people still judge African Americans as if they are already guilty—even, in Trayvon’s case, in death. I kept thinking that there are so many times when no one knows who committed a crime. But in our case, we knew everything. Still, the killer walked free.

  I tried not to bring those thoughts into church. But I knew God would give me unyielding spiritual strength.

  I have a regular seat in our church: midway pew, in the middle, surrounded by friends and family. But on this Sunday, I sat alone in the back.

  As the choir began singing, I silently gave my thanks to God; even the verdict was a kind of conclusion. That part I was glad about. I was sick of the trial, sick of going back and forth to Sanford. Tired of the endless process in the slow grind to justice. The verdict at least offered an end to all of that—the end of the trial—even if it wasn’t the outcome we had fought so hard to bring about.

  I sat through the service, praying, grieving, giving thanks to God and trusting that He would, as always, guide my path.

  Then I went home, back to my purple bedroom. That numb feeling had returned. Once again, it was an out-of-body experience, a feeling that the jury’s verdict, like Trayvon’s death, wasn’t real and I would wake up in the morning and things would be different.

  But the next morning only brought more of the same. The phone began ringing: Crump, as always, asking me to come forward with statements, interviews, media appearances.

  “The media is trying to get in touch with you, and they want you to make a statement,” he said, listing the television shows that were eager to speak with Tracy and me and pushing us to say something.

  I wasn’t ready. I didn’t think we should jump right out there again. Not yet. Not when we were so emotional, not when we were so bitter.

  “We need time, Crump,” I said. “I think we should have some time. So we don’t say anything that we’ll regret later.”

  I’m not the kind of person to just give voice to every violent or angry thought that passes through my mind. That’s not who I am, but that’s how I felt at that moment. My emotions were high. My feelings were ugly. I wasn’t thinking about what to say publicly. I was thinking about what to do. My son was dead and his killer was free. Those were the facts. No turning back the clock.

  How could I turn my anger into action?

  How could we honor Trayvon in death and create a legacy where there was once a life?

  I thought the best way was through the Trayvon Martin Foundation. We created it in the agonizing months after Trayvon’s death. Donations would come in through the Miami Foundation, which handled the financial management. Our activities were limited to an Annual Remembrance Dinner and a Peace Walk and Peace Talk. But we needed other programs to continue Trayvon’s legacy and, hopefully, bring about change. We created a mission statement: The Trayvon Martin Foundation is dedicated to embracing social and civic changes for justice through awareness of senseless gun violence. We began meeting—at Starbucks, IHOP, the Miami-Dade Public Library—and asking ourselves: how can we create programs to support families of gun violence, bring awareness of the effects of gun violence and, ultimately, end gun violence, before another child is killed?

  Then, slowly, deliberately, Tracy and I reemerged. We had more to say.

  —

  July 26, a Friday, I attended the National Urban League in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where I was scheduled to give my first major speech after the verdict. It had been thirteen days since the acquittal of the man who killed my son, and the National Urban League, America’s oldest civil rights organization, created in 1910 “to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power, and civil rights,” seemed the ideal place to speak.

  Six thousand people were in the audience that day in Philadelphia, including many of the leaders of the civil rights movement: Reverend Al Sharpton, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and National Urban League CEO Marc H. Morial. I was introduced, and a powerful, surprising wave of applause washed over me. I placed my hand over my heart, and all I could say was “Wow.”

  I was emotional, but I was determined that the audience wouldn’t see the broken Sybrina. I was determined to show them the woman that had once been broken but who had somehow been able to get back u
p. The Sybrina who couldn’t get out of her bedroom had been reborn. I was no longer walking alone; I was now the voice for Trayvon.

  “Let me start off—because I have to put God first,” I began. “I need to tell you my favorite Bible verse is Proverbs three, verses five and six, and it says, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your path.’ ”

  I paused. “Let me just say that I stand here before you today, only through the grace of God, only because of the spirit that lives within me,” I continued. “Because, as a mother, Sybrina couldn’t do it. Sybrina could not lose her baby. Sybrina could not lose one of her children. It’s only through God that I stand before you today. And as I said before, Trayvon was my son. But Trayvon is also your son.”

  That massive audience applauded again.

  “I just ask you, as a mother, to wrap your mind around what has happened. Because I speak to you as Trayvon’s mother. I speak to you as a parent. And the absolutely worst telephone call you can receive as a parent is to know that your son—your son!—you will never kiss again. I’m just asking you to wrap your mind around that.

  “Wrap your mind around no prom for Trayvon,” I said. “No high school graduation for Trayvon. No college for Trayvon. No grandkids coming from Trayvon. All because of a law. A law that has prevented the person who shot and killed my son to be held accountable and to pay for this awful crime.

  “What is my message to you?” I asked. “My message to you is: Please use my story. Please use my tragedy. Please use my broken heart to say to yourself, ‘We cannot let this happen to anybody else’s child.’ ”

  Now the applause grew louder.

  “And I hope I’ve delivered that message,” I continued. “Because on the way here, I gave the driver one of my business cards, and it has a picture of Trayvon on there.”