Tag: Trayvon Martin

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Local Leaders Oppose TN ‘Stand Your Ground’ Bill

CREDIT: Tn.gov

Local civil rights leaders are opposing a new bill that will allow the use of deadly force to prevent personal — or personal property crimes. 

House Bill 11 would allow citizens to take matters into their own hands if their personal property is being violated. At first glance, the bill seems reasonable, but local civil rights leaders fear that it will put innocent people in direct danger.

“Similar to what happened to Ahmad Arbery in Georgia, they perceived him to have stolen something in that house then they chased him down and killed him,” said Rev. Walter Womack of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. That incident turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, where neighbors thought a man jogging in their neighborhood was a criminal. 

ShelbyCountyTn.gov

Van Turner

Van Turner, president of the Memphis chapter of the NAACP, raised the same concerns.
“This is a piece of legislation that comes from nowhere in the midst of a pandemic,” he said. “Every day, for the last two weeks, I’ve gotten a report of someone that I know who has passed from COVID-19. In the midst of all this death and despair, the efforts of our Tennessee General Assembly should focus on relieving folks from this.” 

The Tennessee bill seems much like the Castle Doctrine Law better known as the ‘Stand Your Ground law,’ where individuals have the right to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to protect themselves against an intruder in their home. 

The difference in the House Bill 11 and the Castle Doctrine is that the language states  “When and to the degree the person reasonably believes deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent or terminate the other from committing or attempting to commit the following offenses …” This means that the person being violated would not have to be in immediate danger, themselves. 

Under current law, if a suspect is running away from the scene of the crime, you cannot legally shoot at them. If this bill is passed, a citizen can do so without penalty. 

Tn.gov

Jay Reedy

Rep. Jay Reedy, who sponsored the bill, argues that citizens should have the right to protect their possessions. “I would like to understand why people should not be able to protect their property, and I’m waiting for a returned phone call from the NAACP.” 

As soon as the NAACP posted their grievance about the law, Reedy says his office tried to to call and set up a meeting to hash out the language in the bill. Turner said that he has not received a call from Reedy’s office. 

“The bill is so vague that if you thought that someone stole from you, then you can kill them,” said Vickie Terry, Executive Director of NAACP, Memphis. “It’s racially based and since it is a statewide law, it’s a kind of loophole for shooting unarmed people.” 
    

The law raises the case of Trayvon Martin, where George Zimmerman took it upon himself to profile and shoot the unarmed teen because of his perceived threat against the community. “You can’t allow people to just go and deputize themselves and take the law into their own hands,” said Womack.

The timing isn’t appropriate. Plus, the focus should be on people and not things” said Turner. “The measure would promote even more violence in the city.” 

The bill, which was filed several weeks ago, is slated to go to the state house floor in early 2021. The session starts January 12th and probably won’t be heard in committee until the end of January or early February.

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News News Feature

Byhalia, Mississippi

If Trayvon Martin were your son, would you want him presumed innocent and given the benefit of the doubt? If confronting your community’s prejudiced past boosted the odds of a more equitable future for black residents, wouldn’t you embrace the lesson? These questions and themes of empathy, honesty, and forgiveness form the foundation of playwright Evan Linder’s latest work, Byhalia, Mississippi, which has its world premiere at TheatreWorks in Memphis, and three other cities, January 8th.

Linder, co-artistic director of Chicago’s New Colony theater, always knew he’d write what he calls a “red-state show.” And what better place to locate such a show than the town down the road from his parents’ Collierville home, a place with a painful and mostly overlooked racial history?

When Linder wrote Byhalia, Mississippi in January 2014, he had 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and and the black boy’s killer, neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, on his mind.

On a drive through the tiny Byhalia town square, Linder snapped a photo of a black teen outside a barbershop. The boy wore a hooded sweatshirt like the one Trayvon had on when Zimmerman fatally shot him. The photo, which is on the play’s website, frames a central question for the character Jim Parker, who is white.

Wrote Linder: “What would it take (and was it even possible) for Jim to see a boy in a hoodie walking across the street in Byhalia and immediately register that young man as someone else’s child before seeing a young black male? And could he ever see that child as his own?”

The play begins with Jim and his wife, Laurel, also white, expecting their first child. To Jim’s surprise, the baby is born with brown skin. The child is the product of Laurel’s brief affair with Paul Price, the married black principal of Byhalia High School.

As the Parkers’ marriage reels and Ayesha, Price’s wife, grapples with the proof of her husband’s infidelity, she confronts Laurel, who is naïve about what it means to raise a black boy in Byhalia.

Laurel knows about Byhalia’s best-known decedent, author William Faulkner, Ayesha snaps, but does she know about Butler Young Jr. or Alfred “Skip” Robinson?

Here Linder whets the audience’s appetite with a bit of history from the 1970s, when Byhalia was the scene of what Time magazine called “one of the longest civil rights boycotts in Mississippi history.”

The boycotts of white-owned businesses were sparked by the death of Young, a 21-year-old, unarmed black man shot and killed under questionable circumstances by Byhalia police in the summer of 1974. Robinson led the protests as president of the United League of Marshall County.

Then, like now, black residents demanded that the officers involved be charged with murder. Then, like now, black citizens used the only power they had — economic — to try to force the white power structure to give them a measure of justice.

Then, like #blacklivesmatter activists today have found, justice was elusive.

According to a 1974 Harvard Crimson article, “The population of the town is 750 persons, and although 70 per cent of them are black, the mayor, the town leader and all the merchants are white.”

And while Faulkner, who merely died in Byhalia, gets a shout-out on the town’s website, the boycotts, which could be a source of pride and a testament to black citizens’ resilience, are unmentioned.

“People have been fine with letting that history slip away,” Linder said.

The play is not meant to be an indictment of Byhalia specifically, Linder noted, but of our collective selective memory and how our failure to reckon with it honestly hamstrings our future.

As Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Linder, who is white, wants to do his part to deal honestly with race, and this play is a start. “The only way things change is if people are forced to look at it.”

Editor’s note: The world premiere of Byhalia, Mississippi is January 8th in Memphis, Chicago, Toronto, and Charleston, South Carolina. Readings will occur in Los Angeles, Boulder, Colorado, and Birmingham, Alabama, in mid-January. On January 18th, audiences from all seven cities can participate in an online conversation. Go to wpconvo.com/online-conversation to join. Byhalia, Mississippi runs January 8-31 at TheatreWorks in Memphis.

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News News Feature

Black Lives Matter

If racial stereotypes and misconceptions about urban violence had a baby, it would look like the billboard that black businessman Fred Davis erected over his insurance office last month. It reads: “Black lives matter. So let’s quit killing each other.”

Davis insists he’s not mocking the Black Lives Matter movement, which was born in 2013 after neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen.

With each extrajudicial killing of an unarmed black man, woman, or child by white officers, the slogan gained traction, growing into an indictment of structural inequality that accounts for poorer outcomes for African Americans in every measurable way.

“Black folk should be reminding white folks all the time that black lives matter and [to] stop the legal lynching,” said Davis, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. But, he added, “all over the country, we are marching and saying that black lives matter, and black people didn’t get the message. Why aren’t Chinese killing Chinese in large numbers or Italians killing Italians in large numbers?”

Because Davis is 81, he can be forgiven for equating nationalities — such as Chinese and Italian — with races. But he does not get a pass for perpetuating the lie that blacks are inherently criminal, and, therefore, fundamentally inferior, so much so that they need to be reminded that homicide is bad.

Although the myth of “black on black crime” has been thoroughly debunked, it’s worth noting yet again that homicide is a function of proximity.

In segregated areas (read: every big city in America), it follows that the victim and assailant will be of the same race. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, most homicides are intraracial: Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims were killed by black people, and 86 percent of white homicide victims were killed by white people.

Davis presupposes that black Memphians are unmoved by murder. This surely comes as news to the dozens of anti-crime, anti-gang, anti-violence organizations in Memphis, including FFUN (Freedom From Unnecessary Negatives), founded by Stevie Moore, a black man whose black son was killed by a black man.

Critiques of urban violence almost always ignore the problem of easy access to guns, which are used in 92 percent of gang-related homicides and 68 percent of all homicides. Countries that have stricter gun laws have fewer homicides, but there’s no political will in the United States to adopt even modest gun control measures.

Sadly, Davis conflates police brutality — implicitly sanctioned by the state, funded by taxpayers and rarely punished — with violence committed by individuals. This isn’t the first time Davis has been guilty of respectability politics, which glosses over systemic failures to instead chastise people.

Two years ago, he put up a billboard that read: “Show your mind, not your behind.” The sign juxtaposed a photo of a black man wearing a cap and gown with a photo of a black man wearing pants that dipped below his waist. 

I wrote then: “Black men could cinch their pants around their necks and the systemic bias against African Americans would still remain.”

“I was given an award by the Church of God in Christ for that,” Davis said proudly. He reminded me that his philanthropic endeavors include a scholarship fund at Manassas High, a program that helps ex-offenders get jobs, and his role as a founding board member of Christ Community Health Center, which provides health care to low-income Memphians.

But what he doesn’t explore are the reasons why Manassas’ virtually all-black student body needs financial help to go to college. He doesn’t denounce the prison industrial complex that disproportionately sucks black men into its clutches. He has no public criticism of the legislature’s refusal to expand health-care access for low-income Tennesseans.

The cure for urban violence is complicated. It demands good jobs that pay enough to make illegal means of making money unattractive and not worth the risk.

It requires public investment in neighborhoods of color so that children can find a safe haven in libraries and community centers.

It calls for an end to mass incarceration, which strips communities of fathers and stability and has not been proven to make neighborhoods safer.

The solution doesn’t lend itself to slogans, and it certainly won’t fit on a billboard.

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News News Feature

Afraid to Love?

I am afraid to love my 18-month-old nephew because he is a black boy, and in my country, police hunt and kill black males as if they were the enemy.

On April 4th, yet another unarmed black man was killed by a white police officer, this time after a traffic stop for a broken tail light in North Charleston, South Carolina.

A brave onlooker caught the incident on his cell phone: Walter Scott, a Coast Guard veteran, was running away from Michael Slager when the officer fired his gun at him eight times, striking him in the back. On the video, Slager walks over to the victim and then jogs away to pick up something in the grass. He returns and drops the object next to Scott’s body.

Slager has been charged with murder, fueling hopes that in this case, justice might be served. But I don’t want justice for my nephew, who I will not name here. I want him to live.

Black men, even when unarmed, are far more likely to be killed by police than any other group. My government doesn’t want us to know how many lives law enforcement officers take, so they don’t track the deaths.

Civilians have their own tally: In 2015, police killed more than 300 people, including at least 18 since Scott was slain.

Do you know what it does to your soul when you mark a young black life with a timeline of deaths?

My sister was pregnant with my nephew when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed deputy of a Florida neighborhood, was found not guilty in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was unarmed.

When New York police strangled Eric Garner, also unarmed, for the capital offense of selling loose cigarettes, my nephew was learning to stand on his own.

He was 10 months old when a white cop shot and killed John Crawford, 22, after he picked up an air rifle in a store that sells guns in Ohio, an open carry state.

When an Asian officer in New York shot and killed Akai Gurley, also unarmed, for the capital offense of walking in a dark stairwell, my nephew was walking.

My nephew turned 1 a few weeks before a white officer gunned down 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who stood in a Cleveland park with a toy gun.

This wake that never ends warps my relationship with my dear, sweet nephew. My girlfriend diagnosed me, after listening to me gush about my niece, who is almost 3. When she asked about my nephew, I replied simply. He’s fine.

“I need you to love this baby more,” she told me.

The love is there — I just hold it in a faraway place. I catch myself when I stare into his hazel eyes or run my fingers through his sandy brown hair.

I read the books he brings to me. I chase him in endless loops around his house. He giggles, looking behind him to make sure I’m still in pursuit. He has that intoxicating baby smell of sweetness and potential, but I don’t inhale.

The fewer memories there are, the less there will be to forget. If I love him completely and the police steal him from my family, it might kill me. I don’t want to die. I don’t want him to die. Withholding my adoration, I tell myself, is an act of self-preservation.

I know this sounds crazy. It feels crazy. Racism is crazy making.

My family can distance him from the parts of town where gun violence, gangs, and drugs are common. There’s no way to keep him from police. I cannot guarantee he will never be stopped for driving a nice car or for matching the generic description of a suspect.

Some who read this will insist that if my nephew never runs afoul of the law, I have nothing to worry about. If he submits immediately, even to unreasonable demands by the cops, if he is passive when police are aggressive, if his brake lights never go out, if he never plays loud music, if he swears off hoodies, if he avoids poorly lit stairwells – he’ll be fine.

To those people I say this: You lie.

Some readers will sympathize. Others will empathize. Others will scoff and dismiss me as an emotional aunt who sees danger where none exists. My only hope is that my confession will help me heal before it’s too late.

I want to love, but I’m scared.

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Calling the Bluff Music

Two-Year Anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s Murder

Trayvon Martin

  • Trayvon Martin

On February 26th, 2012, George Zimmerman shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin as he walked through a subdivision to his father’s fiancée’s home. The shooting occurred in Sanford, Florida, a city that holds a population less than 60,000 and has a crime rate higher than both its state and national average.

After walking to a 7-Eleven convenience store to purchase a sweet tea and some Skittles, Martin headed back to his father’s fiancée’s townhouse. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator at the time, noticed Martin walking and reported that he saw “a suspicious person” to Sanford 911; he was instructed not to get out of his SUV or approach the person. Refusing to comply with instructions, he subsequently trailed Martin, which led to a verbal exchange and physical altercation between the two. In the end, Zimmerman fired a single shot into Martin’s chest, killing the teen.

Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder with the option of manslaughter for the shooting. He argued that he shot Martin in self-defense. In July 2013, a jury found him not guilty for the murder.

It’s now been two years since Martin was killed. And it’s presumable that the emotional wounds that his family and friends suffered from the occurrence are still as fresh as they were the day it happened. His murder brought forth a blitz of community outrage and support. People across the globe rallied and protested in his honor while sporting similar hooded sweatshirts as the one he wore the night he was killed. President Barack Obama even commented on the incident, stating if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”

Ultimately, justice, in the eyes of many, wasn’t served. The person responsible for Martin’s murder is free and the media frenzy surrounding his death has ceased. Nevertheless, Martin’s memory still lives on, and although his life was ended before he could reach his full potential, the movement that his death brought forth will forever be a part of history.

Worth noting, Martin was killed during Black History Month, a period set aside for African-Americans (and other races) to reminisce and/or learn about the sacrifices that black people have made throughout the years, the hardships they’ve experienced, the life-threatening circumstances they’ve overcome, and the contributions they’ve provided to the world.

Martin’s story is another part of that extensive historical catalog, despite the fashion it was added to it. It’s imperative that we all learn from his unfortunate and untimely death. And it’s equally important that we do what we can to help limit similar occurrences in the future.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

On the Zimmerman Case: An Addendum

Zimmerman_Martin.jpg

Consider this a second take on the essay I wrote this week entitled “Two Trials,” which compared and contrasted the O.J. Simpson and George Zimmerman murder trials and conveyed my view that both cases were skewed by an overdose of racial perspectives.

I appreciate all the comments appended to that piece and all the points of view I hear expressed on all the TV forums, some of them well-intentioned, some of them not. What mainly concerns me is the extreme prevalence of red herrings in so many of the ongoing discussions about the Zimmerman case.

Red herrings:: I’ve already indicated I thought race was one. I’ll do some add-ons. Upon further reflection, Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which I expressed implicit criticism of in the original essay, is another. And genderism: I have since heard someone contend quite seriously on CNN that a jury of “six white women” (actually five “whites” and one Hispanic) could never have grasped the state of mind when Trayvon Martin, young, male, and African-American, turned on someone he regarded as his pursuer..

Not that there isn’t some sense to all of these memes, but that’s what they all are: just memes, self-contained little tautologies, and none of them touch the heart of the case. The one word which comes closest to getting at the fundamental problem that ended with the death of Trayvon Martin is “vigilantism,” and, to extend that concept more fully, vigilantism coupled with an absurd amount of gun permissiveness. Another word that comes close?: “macho,” which, writ large, is a sense that “I, not the law, am the law.”

POINT ONE: Lookit, no private citizen, no one who isn’t a law enforcement officer, has any business stalking someone else on a dark street with a gun. Just think about it. George Zimmerman was advised to cease and desist when he phoned in his suspicions about Trayvon Martin to a dispatcher, and he ignored that perfectly good advice.

Under the circumstances — under any circumstances — to do what Zimmerman did would be over-the-top provocative and asking for big trouble.

POINT TWO: To do what Trayvon Martin did, whether scared, angry, or just fed up with being stereotyped — i.e., to physically attack someone else holding a gun — is insanely reckless. (This is true whether he knew Zimmerman was armed or not; given the degree of 2nd Amendment fetishism these days, it may be impossible to judge that for certain about another individual who isn’t stark naked.)

You hear about people committing “suicide by cop?” Well, this, arguably, was a case of suicide by stalker.

The evidence in the case — however unpalatable to the legions of special-interest pleaders now exploiting the outcome for this or that pre-existing thematic purpose — is that Martin was the aggressor, the initiator of an altercation, the one on top meting out serious physical punishment, and doing all this to a man with a gun.

Was that brave, crazy, rash, or, again, suicidal? And Zimmerman: If he was indeed in the physical danger he says he felt himself to be in, he has no one to blame but himself for being in that kind of mortal peril. He, too: Had be died — from a blow to the head, say — could have been considered the victim of a kind of suicide.

It hardly matters who was black, who was white, or what it is that “Stand Your Ground” laws permit. There was enough logic to a self-defense argument to influence the jurors’ verdict, but even it is a stretch. Zimmerman wasn’t being followed, he was following someone else — and with a gun. And Trayvon Martin wasn’t some innocent, pure-hearted teenage Gandhi. He yielded to a dangerous macho impulse.

Nothing in the dialogue which allegedly began the confrontation between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin — “Why are you following me?” followed by “What are you doing here?” —- should have led to fatal consequences. Nothing in the racial makeup or perspective of either man should have, and nothing in the line item of “Stand Your Ground.”

That it did can ultimately be credited to the presence of a private individual’s gun and a feeling, significantly on George Zimmerman’s part but also on that of Trayvon Martin, that “I, not the law, will handle this,” the “this” being based, in both instances, on a stupid misapprehension.

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Opinion

Wharton Says Memphis Is No Detroit

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Memphis Mayor A C Wharton said Friday it is not a time to “pile on” Detroit in the wake of its bankruptcy, but took pains to make a case that Memphis is a much healthier city.

Wharton called reporters to City Hall for a comparison-making session that he admitted was not unlike the athletic director who calls a press conference to announce support for the football coach — which is often the kiss of death. He said his first reaction was that the comparison “is so inept that I am not going to dignify it by responding,” but respond he did.

“They need to hear that we do recognize our challenges and are going to meet them head on,” he said. “They need to hear that from me.”

He produced a chart showing that the Memphis city pension plan is nearly 75 percent funded, with more than $2 billion in the bank. Memphis, he said, has roughly half as many city employees for close to the same population, and a budget approximately one fifth as large. Memphis has a more diverse economy. The “key difference” he said is “there is no denial in this city” that there are financial challenges even during the heat of council debate over the budget. As for the state comptroller’s letter, “we had started down that path even before that without any warning or threats that said we have to change some things in the pension situation.”

Wharton opened the session with some comments about Trayvon Martin.

“I have six sons and four grandsons and have been in courtrooms a good part of my life, so for me it wasn’t just can you comment on something on a tv screen,” he said.

He said he is “glad folks are going to rally” for a “noble cause, that is to ask for some redress.”

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Opinion Viewpoint

Two Trials

It’s been 18 years since the conclusion of the O.J. Simpson murder trial and my writing an op-ed for the Flyer expressing a reaction to the jurors’ verdict of “not guilty” that highly gratified some readers and outraged others.

I should point out that I saw that verdict coming and wrote my dissatisfaction with it a day or so ahead of time. The late Dennis Freeland, who was then the Flyer‘s editor, was glad to have something that topical in the can (the verdict was due right at our deadline time), but we agreed that I should write another version just in case of a guilty verdict.

The backup version was congratulatory of the jury’s efforts; the original version — the one I felt sure we’d be using and had written more or less spontaneously — was critical. In essence, it suggested that the jury, motivated more by racial factors than evidentiary ones, was responding more or less politically to a case which the defense had stage-managed perfectly and the prosecution had botched.

Challengers of the Zimmerman verdict are alleging something similar in a case in which, once again, the accused and the deceased were of different races.

There are clear differences, of course. The element of self-defense, which strengthened the defense’s reasonable-doubt position in the Zimmerman trial, was totally lacking in the Simpson case. That one, the violent slaughter of Simpson’s wife and a visiting male friend, was murder pure and simple. The question there was: Did Simpson, the accused, do it or did someone else?

There was no doubt in the current case that Zimmerman, performing a neighborhood-watch round, shot and killed Trayvon Martin in an altercation resulting from his stalking of Martin as a suspected criminal. Tragically, Zimmerman was wrong; contributing to the tragedy, Martin — apparently innocent of any ill purpose but not quite the timid youth of early reports — seems to have overreacted with undue ferocity to the fact of being shadowed.

One compelling difference between the two cases is the fact that the lawyers on the losing side in 1995 were seriously aggrieved then and have remained so ever since, while the members of the prosecution in 2013 conceded more or less gracefully and have urged acceptance of the verdict and the system that produced it.

Understandably, Trayvon Martin’s family members are less forgiving. And Zimmerman, while technically not guilty and acting, no doubt, in fear for his safety or perhaps for his life, still would not have taken someone else’s life had he, a private individual, not been packing heat and acting under the peculiarly broad license of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law.

There’s a reason why we have officially endowed — and trained — law-enforcement organizations in this country. “Taking the law into your own hands” used to be a serious no-no. Now it’s a practice actively encouraged by the N.R.A. and servile state legislatures. The right wing in this country has traveled a perilous distance from “Support Your Local Police” to co-opting the police power for itself.

Which is to say, the problem with the Zimmerman case was arguably not the verdict, and it was not race, except very incidentally. It wasn’t even Zimmerman. It was today’s permissive attitude toward armed vigilantism. Critics of the Florida jury’s decision should redirect their animus at that fact and cease trying to re-cast poor Trayvon Martin as a latter-day Emmett Till or Medgar Evers.

With the best will in the world (I was a big-time fan of O.J. the player and broadcaster), I still think O.J. Simpson was guilty and that the evidence amply demonstrated the point. The same evidence would later convict him in a wrongful-death civil trial. Were people — including members of the largely African-American jury which acquitted him — influenced by considerations of race? Undeniably.

There is no question, either, that race impacted attitudes toward Zimmerman, though his case has cleaved more clearly along lines of left vs. right. I think President Obama has it right by declining to second-guess the verdict of not guilty, but I think it was inevitable and proper for the Department of Justice to look into the prospects of retrial on civil-rights grounds.

But if the case is revived on that basis, it should concentrate on whether or not the deceased’s civil rights were violated by the legalistic gun fetishism of our time, not by the issue of his skin color or his assailant’s.

That was the wrong lens for seeing O.J. Simpson’s case, and it remains the wrong one to look into the tragedy that befell Trayvon Martin.

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.