Trayvon Martin is today’s Emmett Till

The killing of Trayvon Martin nearly went down the memory hole. He had just turned seventeen when he was shot dead late last month in Sanford, Florida. His killer, a neighborhood-watch volunteer named George Zimmerman, was not even arrested. Zimmerman told the police that he had fired his nine-millimetre handgun in self-defense. The police actually knew better. They knew that Trayvon Martin had been unarmed. They knew that Zimmerman, who is twenty-eight, outweighed Martin by more than a hundred pounds. They knew, because Zimmerman had called them when he spotted a “black male” in a gated townhouse community, that Martin had been on foot while Zimmerman tracked him in his S.U.V., and that Zimmerman had ignored the police dispatcher’s request that he stop following Martin. And yet self-defense is a potent claim under a 2005 Florida law known as “Stand Your Ground.” “If we arrest, we open ourselves to a lawsuit,” said Sergeant Dave Morgenstern, of the Sanford Police Department, presumably unaware of how pitiful (and pitiless) that sounded. Zimmerman wasn’t even tested for drugs or alcohol. Those tests were conducted on Trayvon Martin’s body, after he was sent to the medical examiner as a John Doe.

Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, found him only after checking the local hospitals and reporting him missing. He and Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, in their grief, found the police unsympathetic and inert. It didn’t seem to matter that Trayvon, a junior in high school, had no criminal record (Zimmerman, who was once arrested for assaulting a police officer, was described by the police as “squeaky clean”), or that Trayvon had simply been walking back to his father’s fiancée’s house from a convenience store, carrying Skittles and a can of iced tea. (Zimmerman had called the police forty-six times in fourteen months, most often to report a “suspicious” person.)

Six different people had apparently called 911 to report the shooting. Could they at least hear the 911 tapes? No, the police said. Trayvon’s parents hired lawyers and filed suit to gain access to the recordings. A witness said that police had questioned her account, with officers suggesting that she had heard Zimmerman, not Martin, crying for help. The N.A.A.C.P. and the A.C.L.U. got involved and, almost entirely because of the efforts of Trayvon’s parents, the local press—Sanford is a suburb of Orlando—kept asking questions. But an online petition demanding Zimmerman’s arrest languished, and the investigation seemed stalled at best.

Slowly, though, the story began to gain national traction. It was so stark, and so inescapably racial. Did anybody really believe that, if a black man had killed a white youth in similar circumstances, he would not have been arrested? Zimmerman wasn’t speaking to reporters, but his father sent a letter to the Orlando Sentinel saying that his son was not a racist—that he was, in fact, half-Latino. Then the Sanford police, under growing pressure, released the 911 tapes, including a recording of Zimmerman’s call immediately before the killing. His words were a study in fearful, hopped-up racial profiling. “These assholes, they always get away,” he said. He declined to say where he would meet the officers being dispatched. He left his vehicle, armed.

After the tragedy, Tracy Martin had the sense to check his son’s cell-phone records, something the police had not done. He found that Trayvon had been talking to his girlfriend less than five minutes before he died. She was able to take up the story from Trayvon’s perspective.

She told ABC News that Trayvon had said that he was being followed: “I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast.” She heard him being confronted. “Trayvon said, ‘What are you following me for,’ and the man said, ‘What are you doing here.’ Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the head set just fell. I called him again, and he didn’t answer the phone.” The girl, who is sixteen, was afraid to give her name. The 911 tapes make harrowing listening. Desperate cries for help are punctuated by two shots. The second bullet pierced Trayvon’s chest, killing him. There had been a scuffle, and Zimmerman told the police that the cries for help were his. But Trayvon’s parents had no doubt whose voice was whose. Sybrina Fulton said, “It just broke my heart again to hear him screaming out for help and pleading for his life.”

With the picture filling in, Trayvon’s death became big news. Charles Blow wrote a powerful column in the Times. The online petition began to gather signatures at a record clip, nearing a million and a half last night. The Justice Department opened a civil-rights investigation this week, and the Seminole County state attorney said he would refer the case to a grand jury. Even the White House, responding to a question at a press conference, said that it was “monitoring” the situation through the central Florida office of the F.B.I. On Wednesday, Trayvon’s parents spoke at a rally and march in Union Square. (Matthew McKnight and Jelani Cobb weighed in for The New Yorker.) The next day, the police chief in Sanford said he would “temporarily remove” himself from the job. With this breadth and level of public attention and outrage, it is becoming possible to imagine the death of Trayvon Martin taking its place alongside, say, the death of Emmett Till as a terrible marker of the ongoing peril of being young, black, and male in this country.

Openly racist, all-white juries made certain that the confessed killers of Emmett Till (who was fourteen) walked free in Mississippi in 1955. In Florida today, the Stand Your Ground law may yet block the workings of justice. The law extends the traditional Castle Doctrine, under which the use of force is permitted to defend one’s home, to the highways and beaches and bars, affording legal immunity to someone who uses “deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” Note the freewheeling vigilantism invited by the last phrase, “or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” This is a true “shoot first” law. It even bars civil suits by the family of the deceased. Its passage was strongly backed and loudly celebrated by the National Rifle Association, whose leaders vowed to replicate Stand Your Ground in other states. To date, with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a secretive, corporate-funded, right-wing pressure group, the N.R.A. has succeeded in getting Stand Your Ground laws passed in some twenty states.

Can the American gun-rights movement ever go too far, politically? In Florida, prosecutors and police associations opposed Stand Your Ground, to no effect. Since the law was passed, the number of “justifiable homicides” has tripled. Last year, according to the Tampa Bay Times, “twice a week, on average, someone’s killing was considered warranted.” This week, the state attorney in Tallahassee, Willie Meggs, told the Times, “The consequences of the law have been devastating around the state. It’s almost insane what we are having to deal with.” Gang members, drug dealers, and road-rage killers are, according to Meggs, all successfully invoking Stand Your Ground. “The person who is alive always says, ‘I was in fear that he was going to hurt me.’ … And the other person would say, ‘I wasn’t going to hurt anyone.’ But he is dead. That is the problem they are wrestling with in Sanford.”

That is one of the problems they are wrestling with in Sanford.

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* This article was first published by The New Yorker.
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