Trayvon Martin’s Death Still Fuels a Movement Five Years Later

 

by Trymaine Lee 

Exactly a month after Trayvon Martin was killed, his family gathered in a muggy back room at the civic center in Sanford, Florida. The city council was preparing for its first public meeting since the boy's death, and his family and their supporters wanted to pressure city leaders to step up and arrest the man who had fatally shot Martin.

Outside of the civic center a crowd of thousands began to swell, chanting so loudly that at times it felt like a train was rumbling in the near distance. For weeks, momentum had been building around the call for justice for Martin, the 17-year-old whose life was taken by George Zimmerman, then a neighborhood watch volunteer.

But inside the room that evening, away from the cameras, away from the hounding media and the emotional protests whipping up just yards away, there was an intimacy — a rare quiet moment amid the profound anger that was beginning to spill from that small Florida city to cities all across America.

"We can't stop," Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father said at the time. "If we stop, the world will stop. We've got to keep fighting."

In Martin's death, a movement was born. 

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Source: NBC News