Martin’s death ignited a movement
Teen’s shooting five years ago fueled outrage
SANFORD, Fla. — Francis Oliver took to the streets of Sanford with more than 8,000 other people, demanding the arrest of the man who killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old.
When Martin’s killer went on trial the next year, she cooked meals for his parents and let them take naps at her home.
“Black Lives Matter was not created before Trayvon Martin,” Oliver said. “Black Lives Matter was created after Trayvon Martin.”
Specifically, the phrase was coined on July 13, 2013, the day a Seminole County jury acquitted George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who shot Martin after phoning 911 and describing him as suspicious. Zimmerman had been arrested six weeks after the shooting and was charged with second-degree murder.
That shooting was five years ago Sunday.
It unleashed a firestorm of public protest, not just in Sanford, but in major cities across the United States and beyond: in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and London. Cries for help
Ese Ighedosa, 29, now an attorney for the NFL, was a protester and a student at the Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando at the time of the shooting. She was at Sanford City Hall with Martin’s parents the night city officials played a 911 call for them that captured cries for help — and then a shot.
“This was really the resurgence of the civil rights movement,” Ighedosa said.
When Zimmerman shot Martin, Barack Obama had been in the White House for three years and, “many Americans felt that we were in a post-racial era,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who traveled to Sanford twice in March 2012 to lead rallies calling for Zimmerman’s arrest.
Sharpton got involved, he said, because “I realized how vulnerable we were, that this guy wasn’t even a policeman, and he could just kill this kid and not even be arrested. That’s what outraged me.”
Sharpton said he doesn’t think young black men are better off now than they were when Martin was shot, but there is one big change: The movement led to accountability. He said people now demand answers when police kill young black men, and they’re willing to take to the streets in protest.
“The demonstrations, the rallies that many of us came and started led into what later happened two years later around Ferguson (Mo.), around Eric Garner; but it started, the seeds of that started in Trayvon Martin, so Trayvon Martin energized a renewal of civil rights activism in the 21st century like Emmett Till energized it in the 20th century,” Sharpton said. Police chief fired
A few days after the shooting, Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, hired Tallahassee civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump and went on national television with their story: An unarmed black high school kid who was doing nothing unlawful was fatally shot, and Sanford police wouldn’t arrest the light-skinned Hispanic man who did it.
Sanford’s police chief at the time, Bill Lee Jr., said there wasn’t enough evidence to justify an arrest.
The president of the national NAACP also came to Sanford and demanded that the police chief be fired — and he eventually was.
On March 19, 2012, Ighedosa, the NFL lawyer, and about 75 other protesters marched outside the Seminole County Criminal courthouse. They insisted upon — and got — a sit-down meeting with the county’s lead prosecutor.
The shooting and protests surrounding it were “life-changing. … That showed me how powerful my voice is and also what my responsibility is to speak out,” Ighedosa said.
Zimmerman, 34, would not comment about the anniversary of Martin’s death.
In addition to his acquittal in state court, he was cleared of federal civil rights charges following a grand jury investigation.