This post has been updated.
The city manager of Sanford, Florida, said moving a makeshift memorial to slain Miami teen Trayvon Martin was done at the request of residents near the townhomes where the shooting took place. “the citizens living in the area had become concerned that this incident was defining their neighborhood,” Norton Bonaparte said. The “incident” – the killing of Trayvon Martin on February 26th, led to weeks of protests, and ultimately to the prosecution of the man who shot Martin, and the firing of the city’s police chief.
The decision to move the memorial was accompanied by a brief statement emailed to the media Monday.
“In an effort to protect and preserve the remaining Trayvon Martin curbside memorial items, and after communicating with representatives of Trayvon Martin’s family,” the statement read, “Sanford City Manager, Norton Bonaparte announced that the curbside memorial site items placed outside the entrance of the Retreat at Twin Lakes Subdivision in Sanford have been taken to the Sanford Museum as of 2:30 pm today by city staff. All the items retrieved have been carefully handled and inventoried.”
However, representatives for Martin’s family, and leaders of Sanford’s African-American community, say key parts of that statement are not true.
Natalie Jackson, an attorney for Martin’s parents, said the family’s attorneys were contacted, but that they referred the city official back to community leaders. And Francis Oliver, who runs the black history museum in Sanford’s Goldsboro neighborhood, says the city initially asked to move the memorial there — even though Martin was killed in a mixed-race neighborhood in the city, across from an elementary school.
According to Oliver, the Retreat at Twin Lakes homeowner’s association had been pushing to have the makeshift memorial, comprised of a cross surrounded by cards, stuffed animals and flowers, moved almost from the moment she and other members of Sanford’s black community began to erect it. “They have been calling the city, they have been calling lawyers and different people,” Oliver told TheGrio.
Bonaparte said the removal of the memorial was not at the request of the homeowner’s association specifically, and he said the decision was made after “there were several email and phone call communications over a month’s time between Mr. Benjamin Crump,” the Martin family’s attorney, “and a city staff person explaining what the city was planning on doing with the items.”
Reached by telephone, Kent Taylor, who works for the management company representing the Retreat at Twin Lakes homeowner’s association, declined to comment.
Oliver said she was contacted about three weeks ago by a city official, Andrew Thomas, who asked if the group of black civic leaders and ministers called the Concerned Citizens of Sanford, would mind moving the memorial to the Goldsboro museum, located on 13th Street, the dividing line between Sanford proper, and its oldest black neighborhood. “I said [Trayvon Martin] didn’t die on 13th Street. He didn’t die in the black community.”
Oliver said she spoke with Sanford’s lone black commissioner, Velma Williams, who also agreed the memorial should stay where it was.
According to an attorney for the Martin family, Thomas later contacted Ben Crump, the lead attorney representing Martin’s parents, who told Thomas that since the Martin family doesn’t live in Sanford, they were leaving all decisions about the memorial to the city’s black community. Crump suggested that Thomas contact Ms. Oliver. She says that never happened, and that neither the community leaders, nor the Martin family, gave the consent described in the city release.
According to Oliver’s husband, Lowman, who is a member of the Concerned Citizens group, City Manager Norton Bonaparte announced the memorial had been moved at his direction at a Monday commission meeting, saying the rationale was the “protection and preservation” of the small structure. Black leaders are dubious, however, and scheduled a meeting with city officials Tuesday morning to protest the move.
And black leaders point to the commissioner whose district the Retreat townhomes are located in: Patty Mahany, who has already drawn the ire of the black community for her staunch support of recently fired police chief Bill Lee. But Ms. Mahany said the decision on what to do with the memorial rested with the city, not the commission.
Still, Mahany said that over the last several months, she has received more than 100 phonecalls from local homeowners demanding that the memorial be moved. She said some people even threatened to “make it disappear in the middle of the night” if the city did not take action.
“We’ve had complaints about it since it went up,” Mahany told TheGrio. “For a long time we ignored those. I had several people that thought it as a safety hazard. People would come to see it and they would park their cars in the street. It was literally across the street from the school.”
Oliver said her organization had the memorial reviewed by an “engineering team,” who deemed it non-obtrusive to street or pedestrian traffic. But Mahany said that while she had no personal opinion on whether the memorial should stay or go, she did feel that over time, the fading, weather-beaten appearance the memorial turned it into an eyesore.
“The city just had to make a decision,” Mahany said. “It was quite shabby, and I’m not sure if you’re gonna memorialize somebody it should be done in a more formal, nicer fashion, with an appropriate marker or something. This was a bunch of wet stuffed animals, faded flowers, dead flowers, really … it was certainly at this point not attractive at all. How long do you leave something like that out there? I don’t know the answer. Fortunately that’s not a commission policy, it’s a city policy.”
Oliver, for her part, voiced a concern reflecting the continuing divide in Sanford over Martin’s death, and what some in the black community see as the vilification of the dead teen by some white residents.
“Why are they putting [the memorial] in the Sanford Museum?” Oliver said. “Number one, they don’t have any other blacks in the Sanford museum, and we got memorials all over the city of Sanford. Why do they want to move this one?” Oliver stated that some in Sanford have disparaged Martin as a “thug,” adding, “why would you want to put a thug in your museum? It just doesn’t add up. They didn’t leave a cross, they didn’t leave nothing. The main objective was to move it and it’s moved. And the city of Sanford is the one that moved it.”
Bonaparte said of Sanford’s black community leaders that the city’s principle concern was with the Martin family. But following his meeting with some of those community leaders, Bonaparte seemed to leave the final disposition of the memorial up in the air.
“I heard the concerns expressed by the attendees,” Bonaparte said through a spokesman. “At this time there is no final determination of the memorial site items.”
Follow Joy-Ann Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport