Similarities Between Murder And Trayvon Martin's Murder

When news of Trayvon Martin’s murder began to make headlines, there were those who began to compare his death to that of Emmett Till, who had been murdered sixty years before. There are a lot of similarities between the two boys’ murders: they both left home to visit family, they both went to the store to retrieve snacks, they were both harmless and unarmed, they were both killed by grown men who had other options than to murder them, and their murderers were acquitted. A huge similarity that is not often mentioned though is the advocacy of both Emmett’s mother and Trayvon’s parents after their deaths. It is because of their parents speaking up and out about what happened to their sons that the Civil Rights Movement took place in the 1950s

It was not until Tracy Martin got the attention of Benjamin Crump, an attorney who takes on cases like Trayvon’s that the media took an interest in Trayvon’s story and the lack of arrest, putting the Stanford police station in a tough spot (Fulton & Martin 2017). On March 22, 2012, a petition to have Zimmerman arrested started by Trayvon’s parents surpassed 1.3 million people. Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder on April 11, 2012. Zimmerman pleaded not guilty on April 23, 2012 and surrendered himself to authorities on June 3, 2012. A month later, on July 6, 2012 Zimmerman was released from jail after he posted $100,000 of his bond. (CNN).
The trial against Zimmerman began on the June 24, 2013. The jury was consisted of all females and on July 13, 2013, after 16 hours of deliberation, the jury reached their verdict and they had found Zimmerman not guilty (CNN). The acquittal of George Zimmerman outraged the nation and started the Black Lives Matter Movement. Black Lives Matter (BLM) has been described as the new Civil Rights Movement. In response to BLM Sybrina Fulton says, “I could never have imagined that my son would become, in death, a symbol for injustice” (Fulton & Martin