Trayvon docuseries surveys American society
Sentinel television writer Hal Boedeker and breaking news editor Jeff Weiner will discuss each of the six parts of “Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story” Monday nights at 9 p.m.
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In the documentary “Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story,” the teen’s parents make heartrending appearances.
Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin tearfully and frankly discuss the death of their son, who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in Sanford in 2012. A year later, the neighborhood watch volunteer would be ■ Trayvon Martin’s parents tell their story as well as his.
acquitted in the death of the 17-year-old from Miami Gardens.
“There are so many things that are dividing us as Americans,” said co-director Jenner Furst. “But one thing we can all identify with is the plight of a mother and a father. That was the narrative heartbeat of this whole story.”
Fulton says: “I always wanted Trayvon to be famous, but not in this manner.” Martin says: “You ask yourself, ‘How can I get out of this news story?’ But there’s no getting out of the news story.”
Yet the six-part series, which debuts at 10 p.m. Monday on Paramount Network and BET, has a far wider focus than Trayvon’s family.
“We wanted to have our series
make a direct line from Trayvon to Trump,” said codirector Julia Willoughby Nason. “We really wanted to show that thread from Trayvon being killed, to his assailant not being arrested, to the trial and the not guilty verdict, to the birth of Black Lives Matter.” The movement campaigns against violence and racism.
The series goes on to show “the white backlash that led to political chaos and the election of Donald Trump,” Nason added. “Our series really puts into context all these elements in the last six years. It feels like an explosion in the new civil rights era.”
Furst and Nason are white. Nason traces her commitment to issues of race to their 2017 documentary “TIME: The Kalief Browder Story,” which won a Peabody Award.
The six-part “TIME” tells the story of Browder, an African-American who served three years in New York’s Rikers Island jail without being convicted of a crime. The Peabodys honored that series “for creating an evocative, chilling and revelatory exposé embodied by the tragic story of one person.”
Rap superstar Shawn “JAY-Z” Carter was an executive producer on “TIME,” and he is back in that capacity on the Trayvon series. Trayvon’s parents are also executive producers, but they trusted the filmmakers to tell a bigger story, both directors said. The directors incorporated the parents’ book, also titled “Rest in Power,” then did an independent investigation and drew on many sources.
“It’s our story as Americans — they understood that,” Furst said. “This was a definitive incident in American history.”
Benjamin Crump, the parents’ attorney, said the series will help teach about Trayvon for decades to come. Crump says Trayvon has become a historical reference similar to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
It’s “almost like a measure of how far we’ve come in the quest for equal justice for all Americans,” Crump said. “I think that is what Trayvon Martin will forever be remembered for.”
Nason said she hoped the series gets people talking, especially about race. “I want viewers to see how vulnerable people of color in this country are,” she said. “As white people, we need to check our privilege and ask ourselves some tough questions about the history of this country and America’s original sin and how it really plays out.”
The series revisits Zimmerman’s trial and acquittal of second-degree murder and examines how defense attorney Mark O’Mara surpassed prosecutors.
“He was a very skilled defense attorney,” Furst said. “He was able to catch the state flat-footed more times than you can count.”
Commentators in the series blast the prosecution as repeatedly falling short. “Race played the biggest role in this trial,” Furst said. “The problem is the defense played it like a violin, and that prosecutors just got played.”
Florida’s “stand your ground” self-defense law becomes another crucial theme, and Nason called it a huge roadblock to justice in the trial. “George Zimmerman did not claim it, but stand your ground loomed over this entire case from the beginning,” she said. The law seems extremely biased on the side of people who own guns, she added.
Crump said the series could be a teachable moment on the issue. “If we don’t come up with a way to reverse stand your ground law, there’s going to be more senseless bloodshed all over America,” he said.
Why did Trayvon’s story generate such a powerful reaction?
“For African-Americans the idea that you could be killed by law enforcement is a known fact,” Furst said. “What happened with Trayvon Martin pointed to the idea a civilian could kill you and get away with it, that a teenager could just be walking home, and his choice of clothing that night could be the difference between him being dead or alive.”
Nason cited two reasons. “It happened in a time where social media became this tool of activism,” she said. “Trayvon Martin also symbolized the all-American kid. He was a middle-class kid from a really great family who loved him, who were there for him. A lot of people, black and white, could identify with that.”