Series relives teen’s killing in US
The killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who went to a Florida store for Skittles but was shot dead by a neighbourhood watch volunteer, inflamed the US in 2012.
Six years later, a new television series is reliving what happened and forcing viewers to confront the gut-wrenching agony of losing a child in what Trayvon’s parents and the filmmakers hope will enact change.
Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story premiered on the Paramount Network and BET on Monday, a docu-series bankrolled in part by rap mogul Jay Z and due to run in six weekly instalments.
It crystallises human loss – showing up close Trayvon’s mother Sybrina Fulton being forced to choose between grief and fighting for justice.
The viewer sees father Tracy Martin recalling a nine-year-old Trayvon saving him from a burning kitchen but heartbroken at not being able to protect his 17-year-old son in a gated Florida community.
“I want people to use what happened with Trayvon as an example – that you need to get busy now,” Fulton told a screening in Harlem.
“Don’t wait until something happens to your child or to your loved one in order to say ‘ok, I need to do something’,” Fulton said.
The series interlaces America’s ongoing racism problem with the debate about gun control and how the powerful National Rifle Association has lobbied to make guns easier to buy and shoot.
It explores the family’s quest for justice, how shooter George Zimmerman became a far-right hero, and draws a line from Trayvon’s shooting to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the so-called “white lash” that influenced the 2016 election of US President Donald Trump. Zimmerman was acquitted. “We opened up Pandora’s Box and I had no idea what was going to happen,” says Tracy at the end of the first episode, after a clip of Trump shouting his campaign election promise “We will make America great again.”
Reviews have been positive. The Guardian called it a “triumph” that examines racial injustice “with skill and packs an almighty punch”.
Trayvon died in Sanford, a town with a history of racism where Zimmerman called police repeatedly about black people and the Ku Klux Klan had black baseball hero Jackie Robinson kicked off the pitch in 1946. —