NEW YORK (AP) — Trayvon Martin’s final night began with a convenience store run, a quick trip for candy and something to drink. It ended in a confrontation with a neighborhood watch volunteer, a shot fired, the 17-year-old dead on the street.
It might have been expected to end there -- the violent deaths of Black teenagers have rarely drawn even fleeting attention.
But the killing of this baby-faced, hoodie-wearing, unarmed youth at the hands of a stranger still reverberates 10 years later -- in protest, in partisanship, in racial reckoning and reactionary response, in social justice and social media.
“It was the thing that broke everybody, all at the same time,” said Nailah Summers-Polite, co-director of Dream Defenders, an organization founded in Florida during the protests following Martin’s death.
“We’re the Trayvon Martin generation, we are the people who were moved into action because of it.”
It happened on Feb. 26, 2012. Martin was visiting his father in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, a suburb of Orlando. Walking on the way back from the store, he was eyed by George Zimmerman, then 28, a member of the community’s neighborhood watch.
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