Category Archives: Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin compared to Emmett Till on 10th anniversary of death

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Martin’s mother says fight for justice must continue as Al Sharpton makes comparison with teen lynched in Mississippi in 1955

Trayvon Martin’s mother used the 10th anniversary of his death on Saturday to urge those who sought justice for her family to continue to fight.

Sybrina Fulton spoke to the National Action Network, the civil rights organization founded by the Rev Al Sharpton in Harlem. She said she had come to New York City from Florida in order to support her supporters.

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‘It is so much bigger than Trayvon’: how bereaved mother Sybrina Fulton fought back

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She had a joyful life before the killing of her teenage son, Trayvon Martin, in 2012. Since then, she has been determined to change laws and minds – as an activist, an author and by running for office

Few people have acquired such a high-public profile as reluctantly as Sybrina Fulton. Before February 2012, she was content to be an anonymous Floridian, working for the Miami housing department and raising her two sons with her ex-husband, Tracy Martin. Then one of her sons, 17-year-old Trayvon, was shot and killed.

Trayvon had been walking to his father’s fiancee’s house one evening, unarmed, minding his own business; an armed neighbourhood watch coordinator named George Zimmerman decided the teenager was acting suspiciously. Zimmerman called the police, and, against their advice, decided to follow Trayvon. Moments later, after a violent encounter, Trayvon was shot dead. Zimmerman claimed he had acted in self-defence. At the trial, five months later, he was found not guilty of second-degree murder.

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Black Lives Matter’s Alicia Garza: ‘Leadership today doesn’t look like Martin Luther King’

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In seven years, BLM has gone from hashtag to global rallying cry. So why has the co-founder stepped away from the movement she helped create?

Alicia Garza is not synonymous with Black Lives Matter, the movement she helped create, and that’s very deliberate. The 39-year-old organiser is not interested in being the face of things; she’s interested in change. “We are often taught that, like a stork, some leader swoops from the sky to save us,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Oakland, California. That sort of mythologising, she says, “obscures the average person’s role in creating change”.

Garza is also scornful of fame for fame’s sake and of celebrity activists. The number of people who want to be online influencers rather than do the work of offline organising – knocking on doors, finding common ground, building alliances – depresses her. “Our aspiration should not be to have a million followers on Twitter,” she says. “We shouldn’t be focused on building a brand but building a base, and building the kind of movement that can succeed.”

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