A Murdered Child
Trayvon Martin, minor child.
He was only walking home. Did not Trayvon have the civil right to be free—free to pursue life, liberty and happiness; to not be profiled, accosted and murdered only minutes from his front door, in America?
If Trayvon’s civil rights were not violated here, there is no such thing as civil rights violations.
The spirit of Trayvon Martin cries out for justice. America, and its professed ideals and sense of what is right, however unrealized by all, cry out for justice. The hearts and souls, of all who have likewise suffered, those whose names we will never know, cry out for justice.
A minor child was stalked by a stranger who saw only his color, confronted and murdered him. He died never knowing who was snuffing out his life. What must he have thought and felt? What fear must have pierced his soul?
In our recent history of child murders, kidnappings, child assault and abuse, when has the killer been the recipient of such understanding and mercy, and the victim criminalized?
The screams heard on that 911 tape were death screams—the screams of someone facing death at the end of a gun. They were Trayvon Martin’s screams. No one—especially an adult man with a 9mm Glock, with a round chambered, and knowing Police are coming, screams for help. What help could the killer have been seeking? He had his finger on the trigger of his “help.”
The Emancipation Proclamation—even the Bill of Rights drip, not from spilled ink but from spilled blood that has yet to dry, even to this day. Are we, as the “unprivileged,” the “assumed guilty until proved innocent” merely children of a lesser God?