SANFORD, FL—On Saturday, July 13, 2013, barely a week past U.S. independence day celebrations, a jury and court in Sanford, Florida found 29-year-old George Zimmerman not guilty of 2nd degree murder and not guilty of manslaughter.
In so reaching this verdict, 17-year-old Trayvon Benjamin Martin was found guilty of committing his own murder by the six jurors, all white women except for one.
In a subsequent post-trial interview with the lone non-white juror, known as Juror #29, she emphatically stated that “George Zimmerman got away with murder.”
Juror #29 also stated that she was more or less forced/coerced into agreeing to the not guilty verdict.
Immediately following the verdict, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama loudly proclaimed, “The jury has spoken.”
This verdict, validating and encouraging colonial violence against Africans, brought forth by a jury and court of Zimmerman’s peers is what U.S. white power has always meant to the colonized African population inside U.S. borders—a continued state of terrorist oppression.
The case of Florida vs. Zimmerman arose from the murder of Trayvon Martin on a rainy February 26th, 2012 night in the small Florida town of Sanford, just outside of Orlando.
Trayvon had left his home and walked to a nearby convenience store where he purchased a can of iced tea and a bag of candy (Skittles).
On his return trip home he was spotted by Zimmerman, a white nationalist vigilante who had cloaked himself in the legality of a so-called Neighborhood Watch Patrolman. Zimmerman was on the prowl for a victim.
Serving as the lone, self-appointed Neighborhood Watch man in this working class gated community, Zimmerman had previously called 911 on at least 20 other occasions to report on African youth in the neighborhood whom he had deemed “suspicious suspects.”
Not one time had he found or called in a “suspicious white suspect.” Neither had any of these “suspected suspects” committed a crime.
After initially racial profiling Trayvon, Zimmerman then stalked and hunted Trayvon down, put a 9mm pistol to his chest and fired a round straight through Martin’s heart, killing him almost instantly.
Zimmerman had already been on the phone with a 911 operator who explicitly instructed him not to follow or chase Trayvon who he kept referring to as “the suspect.”
In fact, Zimmerman had said to the 911 operator that this was one “fucking punk” who would not get away. He had said “they always get away.”
He was true to his word. After slaying Trayvon, he then recalled 911 for the police to come to the scene.
From that point on, this case was the State of Florida and George Zimmerman vs. Trayvon Martin and African people in the U.S.
A tremendous tale of self-defense citing the Florida law of “Stand Your Ground” began to be concocted. The entire State apparatus, including the Sanford police and the state attorney’s office united with Zimmerman’s fabrication and even helped him create the narrative of what had happened on that fateful night.
He was questioned, consoled, congratulated, and put back on the streets as a hero in the white community. At that point, a grand jury indictment of Zimmerman had been ruled out of the question.
It was only through the persistent crying out for justice by Trayvon’s parents, Tracy Martin and Sabrina Fulton, which mobilized tens of thousands of people in the streets demanding justice that a reluctant prosecution was put forth 45 days following the murder.
By this time, the white power constituents of Zimmerman had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars his way for his defense.
The trial—the State of Florida and George Zimmerman vs. Trayvon Martin and African people
The cameras in the court room showing Zimmerman giving prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda a friendly pat on the shoulder as he walked past him spoke volumes as to the complicity of the State working to set Zimmerman free and affirm white power.
But the States’ sham prosecution revealed itself in many other ways throughout the trial.
In the first place, the ruling that the prosecution couldn’t even say in opening statements that Zimmerman racially profiled Trayvon set the “trial” on a solid foundation in the world of fantasy. It ensured that the truth would not be an issue in Judge Debra Nelson’s courtroom.
With Judge Nelson leading the pack, it became quite obvious that white women are just as willing and capable of lynching African men as are white men.
This was a trial in which all manner of prosecutorial misconduct occurred. One of the most obvious was the prosecutor’s introduction of a made-for-TV movie Zimmerman’s defense team created for his defense to show his tale about the events surrounding the murder—a video the judge said the defense couldn’t even use during the trial.
With the prosecutor putting forward Zimmerman’s story for him, there is no need for Zimmerman to even take the stand in his own defense. The prosecution and the court took the stand for him.
And although “race” was not to be an issue in the so-called trial, everybody involved in the charade acted like the use of black dummies by the defense and prosecution was not out of the ordinary. To quote Malcolm X, “This thing beat anything Hollywood could do.”
In most criminal trials in this country, prosecutors can match resources or outspend any defendant. This did not happen with the prosecution of Zimmerman.
For every paid “expert witness” put on by the defense, the State will surely have its own. A high powered, high paid coroner out of New York City was brought in for the defense with the State having nothing to counter.
The same can be said about the defense having the resources to make a Hollywood movie telling their story. This reluctant prosecution surely had resources to make a movie showing murder but chose not to do so. The entire trial was a farce.
The law and “George Zimmerman got away with murder!” – juror #29
Juror #29 (the lone non-white juror) in her interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts also said that in her heart she knew that George Zimmerman was guilty of murder, but in the end, other jurors, for all practical purposes, bullied the acquittal verdict out of her.
Juror #29 said that jurors were arguing that the State had to prove that Zimmerman left home with the intent to murder Trayvon. So if prosecutors did not prove that without “reasonable doubt,” then the law says that he must be found not guilty.
In the first place, U.S. law is nothing but the codified opinion of the white ruling class. Whatever maintains the status quo colonialism is made into law and supported and enforced by the police and the courts.
That is why Obama’s statement about the “jury has spoken” is so absurd as if we are to accept our oppression just because he says so. He says this is a “nation of laws.”
In a sort of irony, in 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled in Dred Scott vs. Sanford that Africans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That was the law, the court had spoken. Slavery was lawful and legal.
In fact, it was the law and the U.S. Constitution that Taney was upholding in writing the decision for the majority of the slave-owning justices.
The jury had also spoken in 1955 when those responsible for lynching and mutilating 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi were found not guilty by an all white jury of their peers. This was despite African witnesses pointing them out in the courtroom.
The same is true with the Ku Klux Klan murderers of four little African girls murdered in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. The jury spoke: not guilty!
The jury spoke in the 1973 police murder of 10-year-old Clifford Glover in New York; in the murder of 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in 2010 in Detroit; in the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991. This list is too numerous to name here, but nonetheless the juries keep speaking.
Then there are those like our brothers and sisters of MOVE who never got to make it to a courtroom. The first black mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode— Obama’s class ally—ordered a bomb dropped on their home resulting in the murders of 13 men, women, and children on May 13, 1985.
The ones who did make it to a courtroom also heard the jury speak: guilty!
So U.S. law is a law that serves the interest of the rulers, the interests of colonialism and white power. It does not serve the interest of the African working class.
In fact out of the entire African population in the United States it has only been the African petty bourgeoisie that talks about the law and how the jury had no choice.
In the eyes of the African working class, most of us are clear that “George Zimmerman got away with murder.”
There was also Juror #37, a white woman who was interviewed by TV personality Anderson Cooper. This juror, who says she feels sorry for the murderer Zimmerman, laid bare her racist colonial worldview when she spoke on the “inadequacies” of Rachel Jeantel (Trayvon’s friend who he was on the phone within seconds of his murder). Juror #37 did not think Rachel was intelligent enough to be in the same forum with white folks.
Rachel’s intelligence runs circles around Jury #37’s. Rachel was astute enough to know that she was being forced to participate in a no-win situation and she wanted no parts of the set-up.
Lessons to be learned
We should learn numerous lessons from this Justice for Trayvon Movement. The first thing we must do is to reject the leadership of the African petty bourgeoisie like the two preachers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
There was much ado about how civil and sophisticated Sabrina Fulton and Tracy Martin were during the trial and how they continued to call for peace and calm during the whole process.
That was Jackson and Sharpton influencing them to remain silent while sitting through a most contemptible process without a single person being held in contempt of that judicial farce. That court did not deserve any respect whatsoever.
In fact, the courts have lynched more Africans than the Klan could ever imagine.
That is why the revolutionary sector of our movement must be in place to lead the mass spontaneous movements when they arise.
We must teach our people how to serve and get on juries with the recognition that it is the court system itself that is guilty every time. We must create law that serves our best interests.
Justice for Trayvon Martin will be won in the streets, not in a courtroom. It is revolutionary organizations like the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement that must step up and lead these mass movements.
Now the NAACP’s Ben Jealous along with the other neocolonialist stooges of white power capitalism are telling us to take our case to Eric Holder and the U.S. Justice Department.
We must not be misled. You can’t go to a thief to make a claim against another thief that stole from you and expect a ruling against thievery.
It is the revolutionary organizations that should define every aspect of our struggle for social justice, reparations, and freedom. Jesse, Al and the black petty bourgeoisie can’t do it.
Justice for Trayvon!
No Confidence in the U.S. Judicial System!
Build the Court of Black Justice!
Reparations Now!
