Trayvon Martin shooting 1 year later: Sanford anticipates Zimmerman trial, hopes for closure
theGRIO REPORT - The shooting death of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012 marked a turning point for many black residents of Sanford...
Local resident Traymon Williams, 27, who attended the rallies and church vigils demanding Zimmerman’s arrest last spring, agrees that over the past year, local leaders have sought to “shift the focus from the Trayvon Martin case into more productive ways of uniting the community.” He cites a gun buy-back program launched by the Sanford Police Department, saying it was “the first time that I can ever recall them doing any such thing.”
“The focus has shifted from the Trayvon Martin case to them getting guns off the street, and educating people on Stand your Ground,” Williams said of police, though he is more reticent about the sweeps police are conducting in predominantly black areas of the city. “They’re trying to clamp down on young black males — stopping them from committing crimes; really that’s been the focus.”
Bonaparte counters that, “the police are doing increased visibility in the areas that have experienced the shootings. And they are being proactive in making Sanford a safer community.”
As for race relations, “things haven’t gotten any better,” Williams says. “If anything, I guess people just stay in their own lanes, you know. Blacks staying with blacks and whites staying with whites and-and that’s about it.”
Williams says Martin’s killing is still very fresh in the minds of his peers.
“Everybody [still] talks about Trayvon Martin and the people are still wearing their t-shirts: even if the color has faded out of them, you’ll still see a Trayvon Martin t-shirt,” he said. “I even have one of my own that used to be black and now it’s kind of turning gray. But I still wear it just for, you know, the symbolic purpose of the whole thing.”
Williams, who a year ago said the shooting impacted him all the more because he shares a similar first name with Martin, says people in Sanford are ready to get on with the trial; to “just put it like in our rear view mirrors.”
Still, he worries about what will happen in the city if Zimmerman is acquitted. “Race relations would be shattered probably forever,” he says, adding that a conviction would send a message “that you can’t just go about killing young black males and just get away with it.”
Oliver, meanwhile, says, “the people of Sanford are nervous, period, about the trial.”
“I have people tell me, ‘well he’s gonna get off, he’s gonna get off,’” she says about Zimmerman, though she adds, “we do believe that justice will be served and that the justice that’s deserved [for] Trayvon he’ll get.”
“But,” Oliver adds, “we do believe too, that if that does not happen, I don’t know what’s going to happen to Sanford.”
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