Speaking Bitterness in Sanford, Florida

Downtown Sanford appears to be the model of an ideal Florida vacation town. Cobblestone streets, well-maintained Victorian homes, plenty of little shops and restaurants, a picturesque waterfront complete with marinas where sailboats and yachts dock. The kind of place where some well-off people may enjoy going for golf and sailing vacations.

But the reality of life for the 16,000 of Sanford's 53,000 residents who are African-American is quite different from a postcard fantasy. People told us of being stopped by police while walking through their own neighborhoods, of being harassed when they go into stores, of youth routinely brutalized.

This is nothing unusual in America, and certainly not in Florida. Florida has a long, ugly history of lynchings and murders of Black people by the police and racist vigilantes. During the era of Jim Crow segregation, Florida had the highest rate of Black people lynched by vigilantes in the country—nearly seven times that of North Carolina, and double the rate in Georgia. Today, Black people are about 14 percent of the population of Florida, but 54 percent of its prison population.

To many people in Sanford and throughout Florida who are protesting the murder of Trayvon Martin, his murder at the hands of a trigger-happy racist vigilante is an unbearable outrage, and it also concentrates something all too many of them have experienced themselves, or through their loved ones and neighbors; it is the continuation of an ugly history many of the older folks know a lot about, and many of the younger ones are learning.

On March 26, downtown Sanford was filled with thousands of protesters, overwhelmingly Black and largely young, who have had enough. Enough of the brutality. Enough of the murder. Enough of the lies and coverups. People demand Justice for Trayvon, and the arrest and trial of his killer, George Zimmerman. People want to see this fight through until justice is won. People think no one else should have to go through what Trayvon and his parents have gone through.

And, while there are many different understandings of how justice can be won, there are some basic things many people expressed to us. Trayvon Martin was killed unjustly because he was Black. They won't stop until Zimmerman is arrested and put on trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

People we spoke to are furious. They also are struggling to come to grips with and understand how a killing so blatant could go unpunished and the killer remain free. Everyone had listened to the audiotapes of the police dispatcher telling Zimmerman not to pursue Trayvon. People thought it could have been "any of us" who was shot down on the street—anyone Black, especially if they are young and male.

One young woman, a recent college graduate from South Florida, said, "This is very backwards. I don't understand it, and on my end, it hurts. It doesn't make sense that you let the man go who committed the crime and do a drug test on the boy that's lying there dead. It's backwards. We want justice. We want to be able to breathe correctly, and let the jury decide, but we want this man to be in jail.

"It could have been anybody. A lot of kids walk from stores. I think this is very much a stereotype. Like he [Zimmerman] said on the tape, 'Oh yeah, this guy's definitely up to no good.' How? Why? What made you say that? Nothing, all right!"

Her younger brother, who is taking a course in world history in high school and had studied the Nazi persecution of Jews, said, "This [the murder of Trayvon and the police coverup] could be like what they were doing to people in Germany, for all we know."

Many people, both youth and older people, told of how they had been harassed and beaten by the police. A small crew of youth who had been part of organizing walkouts at the high schools in Miami were eager to get their stories out—speaking over each other, telling of their anger, their sorrow, how they had gotten on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube to call on people to walk out demanding Justice for Trayvon.

One of the youths spoke of the Miami high school walkouts. "Yeah, I did the walkout. I led the walkout. I had my big poster. What did it feel like? It felt like a sense of clarity. But at the same time I wasn't getting no sense of justice. We went on a long ass walk. And it's gonna happen again. Cuz I'm fixing to walk until my feet bleed."

Another youth recounted how he heard of Trayvon's death. "Me, well I heard it from them. We all be on this one block, chilling, playing football. I came on the block one night just seeing what they was up to. And they went, hey, man, Tray dead. Naw, naw, not our Tray, not the one I was just chilling with the other night. Not the one I went dancing with. So I went like, what's up, this ain't for real bro. I'm like, why you not all crying and stuff. And they said we already shedded our tears bro. Right now we just trying to regroup."

Another added, "Yeah, I'm trying to regroup. But my mind lost, my soul lost. This is some crazy shit."

A third youth said, "This shit happen all the time. Yeah, all the time in the neighborhood, when the police just stop us. They slam us for no reason and shit. Say we got weed and shit. That shit's fucked up. How they going slam us for? They some sorry fucks."

The first youth jumped back in: "Yeah, I think all them cops are some sorry ass police. They just let Zimmerman go when they know he shot Tray. Come on now, make an arrest. If one of us kill somebody and say it was self-defense? We would have went to jail. We would have been behind in the police car. I'd be in them cuffs right now. It's not fair. Everybody knows it. Zimmerman's racist and the police are racist."

One of the youths, a bit younger than the others, had been quiet but now spoke up. "This go deep. From my ancestors and them, from when Martin Luther King was alive, protesting. You feel me? This shit deep, it go way back. What's it gonna take to end it? I don't know. But it's gonna take a lot of manpower."

A woman who had moved to Sanford from New Jersey told me how she is still adjusting to life in the South, and thought the outpourings for Trayvon could shake lose some deeply embedded "traditions" of accepting "the way things are."

She said, "This is a rude awakening to people in a whole different stamp. A whole previous stamp. This is something new here…. I think the biggest thing is because the police told Zimmerman not to follow Trayvon. If the police is on the phone with you telling you not to pursue him, why would you? That's the biggest thing, it's as if he was out to get Trayvon. If the police had not said that to him, this would still be going on but not with so much anger.

"From here, well I'm not sure how far we're going to get from here, but people need to just stop stereotyping and just see each other as a person and in general respect young Black men and stop thinking that they're automatically criminals. I think that would be a much better place to live."

A man in his 60s who had lived in Florida his whole life but had seen some of the world when he was drafted into the military said, "I've been around long enough to see some change, but not always for the better. I live right over there [pointing to a community near the rally site], and I've been harassed walking through my own neighborhood. I've worked all my life and own my own business, and they gotta harass me like I'm some kind of thug?

"Zimmerman was a wannabe cop, and they got that shoot-first mentality. But they got this all on tape. How he gonna say that boy attacked him when everyone heard the tape? I don't know where this is gonna go. This is new for Sanford. What I do know is that Zimmerman needs to be locked up.

"Everybody's got some kind of protocol they're supposed to follow. What protocol were those cops following? They say this is just the 'Stand Your Ground' law. You think if I shot some white kid walking down my street they'd say I was just standing my ground? I'd be in jail, we all know that. Actually, I'd probably be dead. But it seem like more of this is coming to light than they want. Zimmerman had a big ass gun. A gun meant to kill people. They got a whole system set up to protect this kind of shit. But a lot of shit has come out into the open they don't intend to be out in the open. And people don't like it."

There were not many white people at Sanford's march and rally—and this is something that needs to change. But the ones we spoke to felt strongly that the whole situation around Trayvon's murder needs to be protested until Zimmerman is in jail and the cops who let him go are punished.

One man had driven up from Occupy Orlando with two of his friends, one Black and one Latino. He carried a sign reading "Shame on the Sanford Police." He said, "I know what it feels like. I have long hair, a beard down to my chest, I've been beaten, I've been maced, I've had ribs broken. I've suffered from the police and been treated like I'm some kind of scumbag just because of how I look. I'm not Black and I haven't faced that, but I know how these police act if they see someone they decide is 'suspicious.' They have an attitude they can do what they want. And that's why I'm here... This goes on in every city. Every city. Maybe it's a little more prevalent here. But I think it's like this in just about every city and police station in this country."

I also spoke to a man in his 70s who had retired to Florida after a lifetime of work in the Houston area. He said the murder of Trayvon Martin reminded him of an incident in Pasadena, Texas, when a white property owner had shot and killed two Mexican immigrants. He said, "This is the same basic thing. The guy went out…defied five commands to stand down…and killed two Hispanics in cold blood. And a plainclothes cop was sitting right across the street in his car. That guy got tried and got let off. But, you know, 'he was defending his property.' Any law that gives somebody the excuse to murder should be abolished."

This man said he had driven five hours to be at the rally, and explained why it was so important to him. "In the early '60s I was in the military, and I couldn't participate in the Freedom Rides, which I wanted to, because I was empathetic toward the Black people and their plight. The abuse they took in the '60s was purely horrendous. I couldn't do it then, but this is an opportunity to voice my support. This is pure injustice. It's got to stop. We can't let laws stand on the books which give somebody an excuse to murder."

Several young women from Florida A&M University in Tallahassee who had organized and participated in protests on their campus were there. They were wrestling with some deep questions, and one said she had "come alive" in the protests at FAMU.

One of the women said, "It seems like we as a society should have gotten beyond this point. But somehow we haven't. That young man's life is gone, and I can't imagine how his parents feel. He's gone. People just jump to conclusions about somebody because of how he dresses and his skin. You'd think we'd be past that.…

"I like to read, and my favorite is Zora Neale Hurston. She was from Florida not far from here, and wrote a lot about it. It seems so different, the way people lived back then. But in some ways it doesn't seem different. You'd think more would have changed by now. What is it going to take to really change things? But also to change people's attitudes? I really don't know. I know we can't go on like this. Young people like Trayvon can't keep getting killed for no reason. I'm ready to look at anything to try to figure this out and come up with some answers."

She left with a copy of BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian in her hand.

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