by Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier
On a Sunday evening in late February 2012, I gathered around the TV with my family in Los Angeles to watch the NBA All-Star Game. I was all in for LeBron James and the Eastern Conference, while my two sons, born and raised in L.A., went for Kobe Bryant and the West.
In Sanford, Florida, a continent away, a teenage boy named Trayvon Martin was also getting ready to watch the game, and like most 17-year-olds, he wanted some snacks for the matchup. He put on a hoodie and headed to the convenience store for a pack of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced tea.
He never made it back home. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood vigilante, shot and killed him.
Trayvon Martin should be turning 30 today, Feb. 5. He should be reminiscing with his crew about how Kevin Durant, suited up for the West and LeBron James, for the East, both dropped 36 points, and how Dwayne Wade broke Kobe Bryant’s nose. But he will forever remain 17 because he was a Black teenager — seen as a threat simply for existing — and gunned down by a man who decided Trayvon didn’t belong in his own neighborhood.
“Happy heavenly birthday, Trayvon,” his mother, Sybrina Fulton, posted on Instagram.
Black people, particularly boys and men, are not safe.
Fulton took her grief and used it to create Circle of Mothers, a nonprofit that works to heal and empower women who have lost children or family members due to gun violence.
It’s an organization she shouldn’t have had to create. But it’s still needed because America doesn’t want to admit the truth: Black people, particularly boys and men, are not safe — not in their neighborhoods, not in their schools, and certainly not in a country that too often sees their skin as a threat.
Maybe you saw the video of L.A. police beating Rodney King on your evening news in 1991. You might’ve seen my city burn after the officers who broke King’s body with their nightsticks walked free. Maybe you lived in New York City when cops murdered Amadou Diallo, or perhaps you frequented the Fruitvale BART train station in San Francisco, where a transit cop shot and killed Oscar Grant.
Maybe you had a “woke” history teacher who taught you about Eugene Williams — murdered by an angry white mob in Chicago, my hometown, during the Red Summer of 1919 for floating past an invisible line while swimming in the waters of Lake Michigan. Maybe you grew up listening to your parents or grandparents talking about what it was like to learn about the white men who tortured, beat, and shot Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, then tried to hide their barbarity by tying his brutalized body to a cotton gin and throwing him into the Tallahatchie River.
His mother, Mamie Till, kept his casket open so no one could deny the truth or create alternative facts about his disfigured corpse. And that sparked the anger and action that fueled the civil rights movement.
Urana McCauley, Rosa Parks’ great-niece, told me in 2018 that her aunt usually avoided the driver of the bus she was arrested on.
But “That particular day,” McCauley said, “she wasn’t paying attention because she was thinking of Emmett Till, who had been murdered that summer.” Her aunt “didn’t stand up when the driver demanded that she stand up because she kept thinking of him being killed,” McCauley said. “She was that angry.”
We got used to typing and saying and wearing T-shirts that proclaimed Black Lives Matter.
In 2022, on the 10th anniversary of Trayvon’s killing, Charles Blow, a columnist for The New York Times, noted how “Jesse Jackson once called the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy brutally murdered in Mississippi, the Big Bang of the civil rights movement. In the same way, the killing of Trayvon Martin was the Big Bang of the new civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter.”
We got used to typing and saying and wearing T-shirts that proclaimed Black Lives Matter, all while hashtagging Black death on social media. We said their names: Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and more.
We marched, we demanded justice. Now, a two-block area of 16th Street NW in downtown Washington, D.C., is Black Lives Matter plaza. It’s a stone’s throw from the White House, where Donald J. Trump is now sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump, the man who paid $85,000 to take out full-page ads in four papers, including The New York Times, demanding death sentences for the now-exonerated Central Park 5. Trump, the man elected because millions of white Americans couldn’t stand the fact that a Black man, Barack Obama, had become president.
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son,” Obama said in 2013 as protesters took to the streets after Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”
Fox News used the words of the first Black president to stoke the flames of white racism. Conservative attacks on Trayvon, Blow wrote, “became a roundabout way of attacking and discrediting the president.”
Indeed, the whitelash to the calls for justice for Trayvon, for Obama’s remarks — for Obama’s very existence — put us where we are today. A nation where Trump’s attacks on DEI are designed to put Black America back in its place.
Trayvon Martin’s life deserves to be honored not with empty gestures but with action.
Economic violence, state-sanctioned violence, vigilante violence, and the psychological toll of living in a society that denies Black folks’ humanity and basic human rights, time and time again — none of that is going away in 2025. But Trayvon Martin and all the other Black lives that matter didn’t die for us to give up now, even if the phrase Black Lives Matter has all but disappeared from our social feeds.
“I want my son to rest in power,” Sybrina Fulton wrote in an op-ed for USA Today in 2021. “I want his name and his spirit to rise, to change the world.”
Trayvon Martin’s life deserves to be honored not with empty gestures but with action — even when we’re tired and know we did not vote for the coup happening in plain sight. But his legacy is our fight, and whether we hashtag it or not, Black lives still matter.
Source: Seattle Medium
