Voices: RIP Trayvon Martin, One Year Later

It rained in Sanford, Fla., on Tuesday, just like it did exactly a year ago when Trayvon Martin died there.

The shooting death of an unarmed black 17-year-old at the hands of a part-white, part-Peruvian neighborhood watch volunteer in a gated community catapulted the central Florida city into headlines around the world and launched heated discussions about race and guns and Florida’s “stand your ground” law.

George Zimmerman, 29, faces second-degree murder charges in the case after invoking that law, which allows the use of deadly force in some life-threatening situations.

Despite the damp conditions Tuesday, a crowd amassed outside Sanford’s Goldsboro Welcome Center and the Goldsboro Historical Museum by midmorning. Museum curator Francis Oliver said she opened the welcome center a few hours early to accommodate the score or so of people who gathered to get a glimpse at the items memorializing the slain teenager.

There are crosses and flags, dolls and pictures of the teenager, Oliver said of the items showcased at the permanent memorial made from the items that initially cropped up outside the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the gated community where Trayvon was fatally shot.

- Marisa Gerber, Los Angeles Times

It has been a full year since Jahvaris Fulton’s little brother was shot and killed. Yet the loss hasn’t completely registered.

“I know he died but it still doesn’t feel that way,” Fulton told MSNBC.com on Monday. “It’s like he just went away and hasn’t come back yet.”

But reminders of his brother’s death appear almost daily. When Fulton cracks open his textbook for his American Studies class at Florida International University on Tuesdays and Thursdays, his brother’s photograph and story are listed under a chapter on Civil Rights.

Strangers stop him in the mall or the supermarket, while others just stare with an odd familiarity, asking with their eyes, “Where do I know you from?” There are weekly meetings with lawyers and supporters and countless quiet, private moments with his family.

- Trymaine Lee, MSNBC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that among 10- to 24-year-olds, homicide is the leading cause of death for African Americans, and other reports show that more than 90 percent of the violence is from other blacks, mostly from guns. The statistics are heartbreaking, but the public faces behind the data extolling what the youths might have become are cause for collective tears and mass action.

A Children’s Defense Fund report, using CDC data, shows that though African Americans represent just 15 percent of the nation’s youths, they constitute 45 percent of child gun deaths in 2008 and 2009. In Chicago, nearly 700 children were shot in 2011. Between March 2011 and March 2012, 107 Chicago youths under age 20 were killed by gun violence.  Iraq and Afghanistan had become safer for our children and teens than our cities.

“There is more child and teen deaths in 32 years between 1979 and 2010 than in Vietnam, Korean, Afghanistan and Iraq war combined.” the report found.

Behind the numbers, there are the lives, the birthday parties, the graduations that won’t happen. The hoped for grandchildren becomes just a fleeting thought. The aftershock of the loss of one’s child becomes a wound that keeps on bleeding long after the balloons and teddy bears on streets to commemorate the slayings are blown away or blemished by dirt or rain.

- Barbara Reynolds, The Root DC Live

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