Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  I told the governor that I didn’t feel anything was going to be done: no arrest, no trial, no justice. Tracy told him that the Sanford Police Department didn’t even look to see if Trayvon lived in the gated community where he was shot and seemed to just take the killer’s word—and his side—about everything.

  Crump was, of course, always eager to speak, especially to the governor. He told him that everyone knew that the state attorney for Sanford, Norman Wolfinger, wanted to send the case to the grand jury—“where cases go to die,” as he repeatedly told us—and didn’t seem to want to prosecute the killer of our son.

  The governor told us he had already contacted Wolfinger, who would be stepping down from our case. In his place, the governor was appointing by an executive order a special prosecutor: Angela Corey, a veteran of thirty years in the state attorney’s office, where, we read, she had tried several hundred cases, including more than fifty homicides, and had built a reputation as a fearless prosecutor. Soon, we would meet her, a medium-built, middle-aged woman with a friendly smile. She told us from the beginning that she was sorry for our loss and would do her best to bring justice for our family. And now she was handling our case.

  “This is good,” I whispered to Crump.

  It was maybe the second victory we’d managed to win—the first being getting the tapes released—in our almost monthlong fight for justice.

  “Wow,” said Crump, expressing what all of us felt as we left the governor and his team. But we were under no illusions about what had happened. This was only happening because of the media.

  That same day, March 22, the governor announced that he was creating a task force to investigate how to make sure a tragedy like this does not happen in the future. The task force would “thoroughly review Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law and any other laws, rules, regulations, or programs that relate to public safety and citizen protection,” according to the governor’s news release that day. He would ask Florida Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll to lead the task force, and conduct public hearings and recommend actions—legislation and otherwise—to both protect our citizens and safeguard our rights.

  We knew that the Stand Your Ground law would loom large in our fight for justice—and, if the shooter was ever arrested, it could be the law that could lead a jury to let him go free. But the law is unfairly applied by some. Could Trayvon have used Stand Your Ground if he shot the killer? Would he have walked free? I’m sure it would not have been applied had it been Trayvon that did the shooting.

  In the research I’d done, I discovered that advocates for Stand Your Ground laws included the powerful National Rifle Association and the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council. It was first pushed, in part, as a measure to help women suffering from domestic violence, to give them legal protection in cases where they defended themselves. But a report by the Tampa Bay Times that analyzed 237 Stand Your Ground cases in Florida between 2005 and 2013 found that only 33 were related to domestic disputes. In most cases it was men who claimed the law in defense.

  We kept hearing that Stand Your Ground was a bad law, because it was not applied fairly. It was a law that gave someone the right to do bodily harm to a person, even shoot a person dead, and say that the shooting was justified because he felt threatened. That’s how it was explained to us in the beginning. Our attorneys told us that Stand Your Ground would be used during the trial. But two months before the trial started, we were told that Stand Your Ground would not be used as a defense—although the law would be much discussed outside of the court.

  A review of the Stand Your Ground law not only sounded good, it sounded essential for our case.

  I almost had to pinch myself. It seemed too good to be true. And it was—nothing really came of that task force.

  But we couldn’t stop now.

  From there, we drove straight to Fort Mellon Park, a big, green lakeside park with playgrounds, tennis courts, picnic tables, and fountains. When we arrived I saw a mini-skyline of thirty-foot satellite antennas rising from a caravan of news vans. Police and news helicopters hovered overhead. The crowd would later be estimated at eight thousand people, but it definitely felt like more than that—they were bused in from Central Florida and Georgia, and some came from as far away as Las Vegas. They lined the streets, waving signs and screaming for justice and crowding in front of the stage where folding chairs and a lectern had been set up for us to speak.

  Reverend Sharpton was waiting for us at the park. We had met him before, of course, on his show, but seeing him at a rally was really seeing him in his natural habitat. Seeing him in Sanford, for our son, wearing his beautiful suit and tie, his slick salt-and-pepper hair, vibrating with a righteous anger that always seemed to be on the verge of exploding into words, was an emotional moment.

  We gathered together just before we went onstage. Reverend Sharpton hugged me, like he always would when we met, and gave his usual greeting: “Good evening. I am here for you now and until the end.”

  Shortly before boarding the plane to Florida from New York at six that morning, Reverend Sharpton received word that his mother, Ada Richards Sharpton, had died at eighty-seven. He could have—and most people would have—canceled his appearance at the rally.

  “My mother, Ada Sharpton, passed away in the early hours of this morning,” Reverend Sharpton tweeted just after learning of his mother’s death. “She was my all. I hope God will now give her now, PEACE. I love you, Mom.”

  Then, shortly after that, he tweeted again: “I am on the flight to Florida and will move forward with our plans to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin. My MOM would have wanted me to.”

  He came to our rally mourning his mother, whose funeral he would plan that night after our rally in Sanford. The emotion of that weighed heavily on all of us, but it also proved to us the meaning of true devotion to a cause.

  The rally began and we stood upon a little stage alongside the legends of the civil rights movement, including activist and comedian Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King III, and family members of Rosa Parks, known as “the mother of the freedom movement.” Reverend Sharpton was one of the first to speak, and listening to him I felt a dam breaking inside me, inside all of us—all the grief, sorrow, and emotion that we had been feeling finally given its most eloquent, passionate, loudest voice.

  “Twenty-six days ago this young man, Trayvon Martin, did nothing criminal, did nothing unethical, went to the store,” he said. “He came back and lost his life. Trayvon could have been any one of us. Trayvon represents a reckless disregard for our lives….WE come to tell you tonight, ‘Enough is enough.’ We are tired of going to jail for nothing and others going home for something. Zimmerman should have been arrested that night. Zimmerman had probable cause that night. You cannot defend yourself against a pack of Skittles and iced tea. Don’t talk to us like we’re stupid. Don’t talk to us like we’re ignorant. We love our children like you love yours. Lock him up….”

  The crowed erupted in cheers.

  “Some people say to me in the media, they say, ‘Reverend, seems like a lot of people are angry. Are you afraid of violence?’ I say, ‘No. I’m afraid of the violence you already have!’ Violence is killing Trayvon. Don’t act like we are the ones who are violent!…We didn’t shoot nobody!

  “Don’t let them trick you,” he continued. “They gonna send provocateurs in, talking bad. They are working for the other side. The Trayvon side, we’re gonna win this….

  “Just you gathering, just what you’ve done on a grassroots level, we’ve seen today: the governor put a new prosecutor in. We met with the justice department. The chief said he did a temporary leave. No. We want permanent justice! But though it is good what the governor did…we don’t just want good. We want to see Zimmerman in handcuffs behind his back charged with the death of this young man, Trayvon Martin….”

  The crowd hung on his words.

  I could feel the emotion of the crowd welling up, along with my own.

 
; As the cheers grew louder and louder, Reverend Sharpton went on.

  He mentioned Tracy and me, as well as his own personal grief. “I got a call at two o’clock this morning from my sister that my mother had died,” he said. “One mind said, ‘Don’t come tonight,’ but another mind said that my mother would be ashamed of me if I didn’t have the strength to stand up for this man and this woman and their son. My mother didn’t raise me to duck a fight; she raised me to stand up and fight.”

  On Tuesday, he added, he would fly to Alabama. “To bury my mother,” he said. “It’ll be painful but not as painful as it is for a man and a woman to bury their son. Sons are supposed to bury their mothers. Mothers are not supposed to bury their sons.”

  Then he mentioned us again. “If they can bear the pain to stand up for us, then we can take the pain to stand up with them. They have woke America up. And they have shown something that this world needs to see. And that is we love our children, like everyone else loves their children. We may not have as much as others have, but we have each other, and we are not going to let anyone take our children from us.”

  Now we were like family, united in the grief of loss: our son, his mother.

  I was, of course, teary-eyed by then. And now I had to speak.

  “May we welcome to the platform, welcome to the microphone, the parents of Trayvon,” said Reverend Sharpton. “Those that have fought the fight, let us hear from them and give them our love.”

  Tracy and I came forward, both of us teary-eyed now at what the reverend had said and sad for the loss of his mother. I had gained strength from what Reverend Sharpton had said, and his decision to come to Sanford on this mournful day. Tracy and I thanked the thousands of supporters that showed up for the rally. We told them we loved them and, once again, said that for us, justice meant nothing short of an arrest, followed by a trial and a conviction for the murder of our son.

  When I stepped up to the microphone, my voice was still trembling. Just a few weeks ago I was an average mother grieving the loss of a child. Now I was speaking to eight thousand people. I did what I have always done in times of trouble and uncertainty. I took a deep breath, said a short silent prayer, and turned to scripture.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” I began, looking out at that sea of people. “Proverbs, the third verse, the fifth and sixth chapters, tells me, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.’ I stand before you today not knowing how I’m talking right now, because my heart hurts for my son. Trayvon is my son. Trayvon is your son. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for all of your support….We want justice for Trayvon.”

  The crowd cheered, and with that, I left the podium.

  When Tracy finished his comments, syndicated radio and television host Michael Baisden spoke. He had been with us practically from the beginning, one of the first public figures to share our story with his audience on his program, The Michael Baisden Show.

  “Unarmed 17-year-old boy shot by neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, FL outside of Orlando,” Baisden tweeted shortly after Trayvon’s death, which was surely the first time many had heard my son’s name, and provided a link to a local news story. Baisden then took up Trayvon’s death as his personal cause on his radio program, demanding an arrest.

  “Sybrina Fulton was right: it’s about what’s wrong,” he said. “And what happened here was wrong. How do you have a black child, or any child, lying in the dirt and nobody even takes a statement from the man who shot him? That ain’t right! Tell me that ain’t right!”

  “That ain’t right!” the crowd screamed, raising fists and protest signs high into the Florida night sky.

  “Don’t even knock on a single door to find out if this child belonged to anybody,” Baisden said. “That ain’t right!”

  “That ain’t right!” the crowd chanted back.

  “We got a black man in the White House, but we can’t get one white man arrested for killing a black child. That ain’t right!”

  “That ain’t right!”

  “You can lock up Michael Vick for killing a dog, and we can’t get justice for a young black boy! That ain’t right!”

  “That ain’t right!”

  —

  The Justice for Trayvon movement was growing stronger by the minute, the hour, and the day.

  At Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in Miami, which Trayvon was attending at the time of his death, between three hundred and four hundred students planned to walk out of classes, demanding an arrest.

  I was traveling at the time, but immediately called the superintendent of Miami schools and told him that my family and I deeply appreciated the support, but we didn’t want kids to miss school. “We don’t want them to get in any trouble, and don’t want anyone to get hurt,” I said.

  At Miami Carol City Senior High School, which Trayvon once attended, the kids marched into the middle of the streets, tying up traffic around the school for blocks—carrying signs and chanting for justice. They also protested at North Miami High School, and many others.

  At Miami Southridge Senior High School in Cutler Bay, Florida, administrators and students came up with an imaginative form of protest: the students fanned out onto the football field and organized themselves in a “TM” formation, for Trayvon Martin, that could be seen, and was photographed, from the air. The photograph was seen in newspapers and other media nationwide.

  The center of the movement, however, seemed to be my living room. At the time of the shooting, I lived in a split-level, three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the suburb of Miami Gardens. It was cozy and clean, and I’d carefully decorated it in a way that reflected my own style back to me; it felt like home, a place for family.

  But that was all gone now. Now it was a meeting place, a headquarters, a nexus for the Justice for Trayvon movement. Reverend Al would later tell us, “Movements are not about what you can project. Movements are about what is right. And if you’ve come together in what is right, God will bless you and the rest will follow.”

  I was happy to give over my home to the Justice for Trayvon movement. But with that came the realization that it would not be a home again for a very long time. Again, as Reverend Al said, “Anybody can be mad for ninety days. They calculate, ‘They’ll be mad a couple weeks and go home.’ You’ve got to learn how to organize when the momentum is going against you. You have to learn how to get in the trenches when they disparage you. You have to learn how to be there when the cameras are not there, when the newspapers ignore you. That’s when you see who you really are….”

  The trenches of our movement ran straight through my home.

  There was constant traffic in and out of the house. People at all hours of the day and night. My living room television, once devoted to my favorite shows, was now feeding us the latest news on our tragedy. I tried not to watch, and when Tracy would come over and watch the news, it would just upset him. All day, every day, commentators would give their opinions about our son and what had happened to him.

  But I wasn’t worried about that. All I cared about was an arrest and finding justice, which meant getting the word out to as many people as possible.

  Then, seemingly out of the blue, came a supporter who would startle us all.

  —

  On March 23, the day after the first big Sanford rally and almost one month after Trayvon’s death, Tracy, Jahvaris, and I were in Tracy’s truck driving down the turnpike between Sanford and Miami, somewhere near Fort Pierce, when our cellphones began ringing in unison: calls, emails, Facebook messages, tweets, everything at once. Jahvaris and I picked up our phones, and everybody was saying the same thing: President Obama is talking about Trayvon! Trayvon’s name is being mentioned in the White House!

  “The White House?” we all said at once.

  Jahvaris pulled up one of hundreds of immediately posted articles on his phone and read it out loud. During a press conference in the Rose Garden, President Obama was asked about Trayvon. Gun violen
ce had become one of the president’s highest domestic priorities, and when he spoke of Trayvon his body language and his tone made it clear our case had affected him as a parent.

  “Mr. President, can I ask you about the current case in Florida?” a reporter asked at that day’s press conference. “Very controversial allegations of lingering racism within our society and of the so-called Stand Your Ground law and the justice in that. Can you comment on the Trayvon Martin case, sir?”

  The president paused a moment before speaking. The press conference was not supposed to be about Trayvon, but that is what it would come to be remembered for. President Obama took a breath.

  “I’m the head of the executive branch, and the attorney general reports to me, so I’ve got to be careful about my statements to make sure that we’re not impairing any investigation that’s taking place right now,” he said. “But obviously, this is a tragedy. I can only imagine what these parents are going through. And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together, federal, state, and local, to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”

  Like the mayor of Sanford, the president was a father. And for a father, or a mother, the Trayvon Martin case was a simple case of right and wrong. I felt that the president was saying, This could happen to anyone.

  He continued: “So I’m glad that not only is the Justice Department looking into it, I understand now that the governor of the state of Florida has formed a task force to investigate what’s taking place. I think all of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened as well as the specifics of the incident.”