To be Young, Black, and Male in America: Guilty of Something until Proven Innocent
Only two people know what happened the evening of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. One person is dead, a 17 year-old black male teenager, named Trayvon Martin. The other person, at the time, a 28 year-old neighborhood watch captain for a gated community name George Zimmerman, is on trial, charged with the murder of Trayvon Martin. The question at the heart of the trial seems to be whether Martin was (or was not) the aggressor, provoking a struggle that resulted in Zimmerman firing a single shot into his chest at close range. Bleeding from the nose and with cuts and bruises on the back of his head, when police arrived on the scene, Zimmerman told them that he was violently attacked by Martin and fired his gun in self-defense. According to Florida’s stand-your-ground law, if Martin was the aggressor, Zimmerman’s acted in self-defense. When I first heard about the circumstances surrounding the death of Martin, I told my mother that I did not think that Zimmerman would be c