April 1, 2012
From Martin to Martin
By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.
(TriceEdneyWire.com) -- As we approach April 4th, the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, we’re looking at the murder of Trayvon Martin. We’re as outraged now as we were over the murder of Dr. King. We’d begun to think racial hatred had subsided a bit. We weren’t naive enough to believe it had ended, but 2008 raised our hope that things were slowly getting better.
Two years later, racial hatred blew in from nowhere! The Tea Party made no secret about its intention to set us back to the bleakest days when African Americans were unwelcome after slavery and sharecropping. An often heard phrase is, “We’re taking back our country”. It is clear to us what that means. As hatred escalated, not only were African Americans targeted, but so were Hispanics and women. The hatred has come to a boiling point.
When Trayvon was murdered, rallies around the country seem to indicate that some have decided not to take it anymore. I’ve attended rallies and witnessed others around the country. I see a new determination on the part of people to speak out against the evil that’s been lurking around us for a very long time. People appear to be ready to stand up and fight back.
Knowing he’d be criticized by the lunatics promoting all this hatred, President Barack Obama, spoke out regarding the murder of Trayvon. True to form, Rush Limbaugh blasted him for saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”. Rush missed the fact that thousands of Americans were saying the same thing and thought of their own children when Trayvon, walking home from the store with Skittles and iced tea, was presumed to be a criminal because of the color of his skin. It was easy for Rush to say, “It is the least important thing, what the kid looks like” because he never had to leave home and have his mother fear he might not return. Yet, so many African mothers still know that fear, and were right to worry because many of their sons, like Trayvon, never returned.
Racial profiling is real. Both Martins were murdered as a result of racial profiling. There’s no other explanation. The explanation given by the police department has astounded us. Every piece of evidence leaked out or publically supplied confirms what we already knew. Trayvon was racially profiled and there’ve been a lot of attempts to cover up the crime.
There are more questions than answers. Why was Trayvon’s body kept for 3 days without notifying his family he had been killed? Did it take the police that long to manufacture a self defense claim for Zimmerman? So much evidence is available to prove that Zimmerman pursued Trayvon. Zimmerman had the gun and had a problem with a young Black man being in the neighborhood.
Trayvon was unarmed. The “Stand Your Ground” defense belonged to Trayvon. The police never did a thorough search of Zimmerman, never tested him for drugs or alcohol, or kept his jacket or gun for evidence. They allowed him to walk away, pretending no crime had been committed. Why was the state’s attorney in the Sanford police station that night? Was he there to help with the cover-up? If it were raining that night, why would water on Zimmerman’s jacket be significant to prove he’d been pushed to the ground? Are we asked to believe a big man like Zimmerman could be wrestled to and held on the ground by the much smaller Trayvon?
We’ve never learned who murdered Dr. King. Here we are many years later, knowing who murdered Trayvon, but no arrest. Has anything really changed regarding murdering Black men from Martin in 1968 to Martin in 2012?
(Dr. Williams is National Chair of the National Congress of Black Women. www.nationalcongressbw.org. 202/678-6788.)