In Black communities across the nation, his surname is often absent. Simply saying “Trayvon” is enough to elicit a knowing nod of recognition, trauma, grief and sadness.
In the time since his death, I have often been reminded of this grief in conversation with a student, friend or family member. The word “Trayvon” in Black communities has become a one-word poem that evokes a bittersweet kinship around both the painful, premature loss of another Black life and the hope in the collective response designed to ensure that his life matters still.
“This is just accountability, but it can never be justice because I can never get George back,” Floyd’s brother, Philonise Floyd, said Thursday. He’s right. And that feeling of being alienated from justice forever is exactly what sparked so many of us when Trayvon Martin was killed. It’s why that moment triggered action.
Opal Tometi, a Brooklyn-based immigration activist who also knew Garza, rounded out the trio of Black women activists who would help to popularize, promote, and organize around the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The movement would take off the next summer in the aftermath of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — and would surge again, this time around the world, after Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The end of the Voting Rights Act, as previously constituted from 1965-2013, concluded an era of (conflicted) national consensus on racial justice in American history. Members of the Black Lives Matter movement saw this coming in a way. They anticipated the old rules — ones forged in the crucible of civil rights demonstrations and the protests of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., the late Rep. John Lewis, and others — no longer applied in the same way. The loss of bipartisan support for the fundamental right to vote reflected, in transparent legal and legislative strokes, the absence of justice for Black people that BLM activists decried at the grassroots level.
Trayvon Martin died in a country that would re-elect Barack Obama but proved unable to hold anyone accountable for the lost life of a Black teenager in Florida visiting his father. Obama’s attempt, both before the Zimmerman acquittal and after, to proclaim that Martin represented a kind of fictional kin to him and by virtue of this, not only the current occupant of the White House but also the entire American family, strained to reconcile the best parts of the nation’s history with its most grotesque.
And in the decade since, the failure of accountability — and the somber realization that even accountability will never feel like true justice — has only intensified. In 2012 who could have imagined the election of President Donald Trump, the proliferating threat of White supremacist and White nationalist groups, and the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the nation’s capital? Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, the seeds to our current toxic era of polarization and political disinformation can be found in the political ferment of a decade ago, when the death of an innocent Black teenager in Florida became a touchstone for two alternate, conflicting and antagonistic visions of America.
Proponents of what might be called the Stand Your Ground Generation offered no empathy for Martin, his grieving parents or the communities across the nation who viewed his loss as a tragic reminder of their own disposability.
The Trayvon Martin Generation interpreted these same events much differently. Trayvon became, for a new generation of multiracial activists, the canary in the coal mine. What good was having a Black president, they pondered, if electing one could not achieve justice for the least of these? This generation argued and grappled with their elders and with White-led institutions, insisting all Black lives should matter and that, in the process of guaranteeing this, we could finally achieve the country America always dreamed (and in their estimation bragged and lied) about being.
The recent verdicts against police accused of killing Black people exemplify one kind of hard-won progress since the death of Trayvon Martin, as does the elevation of previously marginalized Black voices to the upper echelons of American power. Racial progress continues its unsteady, sometimes vertiginous, movement alongside of the politics of backlash and intolerance. ‘
But none of this — the political and racial reckoning of 2020 and the backlash against this awakening –would have been possible without Trayvon Martin, who deserved so much more. He will always be a cherished symbol of a history that we cannot, no matter how hard we try, run away from. It’s been 10 years, but we still must confront it together.
