The New Yorker Radio Hour - Sybrina Fulton: “Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Anybody’s Son”

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Sybrina Fulton was thrust into the national spotlight just over a decade ago for the worst possible reason: her son, Trayvon Martin – an unarmed teenage boy returning from the store – was shot.  Her son’s body was tested for drugs and alcohol, but not the self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense and was acquitted.  “Trayvon Martin could have been anybody’s son at seventeen,” Fulton tells David Remnick. He was an affectionate "mama’s boy” who wound up inspiring a landmark civil rights movement: Black Lives Matter. BLM became a cultural touchstone and a political lightning rod, but all its efforts can’t make Fulton whole again. “I think I’m going to be recovering from his death the rest of my life,” she says. “It’s so unnatural to bury a child,” she says. Fulton became an activist and founded Circle of Mothers, which hosts a gathering for mothers who have lost children or other family members to gun violence. Plus, the poet Nicole Sealey, whose “erasure” of the Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report turns a damning account of police killing – that of Michael Brown – into a work of lyric poetry, imagining a different future buried in the present. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's been a decade since a slogan, a hashtag, made its way around the world. And unlike most hashtags, this one stuck. Three words, Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter doesn't sound like a radical proposition. In fact, it should be self-evident. But those words became a rallying cry, then an organization, and then a movement that rivaled the civil rights era of 50 years earlier.

The phrase Black Lives Matter first appeared in a Facebook post after an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot and his killer walked free. After George Zimmerman was acquitted, I think there was a real sense. I mean, I can speak for myself and other black folks that I know. not just that justice had not been served, but that that verdict essentially said to black people across this country that our lives don't matter. That we can be holding a skittles in an iced tea

and still be killed. That we can be sitting in our cars and gas stations listening to loud music and be killed. That we can be knocking on someone's door and asking for help and be shot. Alicia Garza was one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, and we spoke in 2016.

And at its height, in the worldwide protests that followed George Floyd's murder, Black Lives Matter also became a lightning rod for all kinds of backlash, including a newly energized white supremacy movement.

And this week, we're looking at Black Lives Matter in its 10th year. So let's start at the beginning. Breaking overnight, the verdict is in. We the jury find George Zimmerman, not guilty. Protests break out after the high-stakes trial

that gripped the country. Sabrina, it has been 11 years since your youngest son, Trayvon Martin, was killed in Sanford, Florida. When people don't know what happened in 2012, how do you go about telling them? Oftentimes I do, you know, start from the beginning and tell people who I am and how I became a speaker and how I became an activist and a writer. of those things. Sabrina Fulton is Trayvon Martin's mother. A lot of people know, you know, my youngest son, but I have two boys. I have one in heaven and I have one on earth.

So, you know, a lot of people think that there are triggers, but I guess it just feels natural to me to talk about my son, just like any other parent. And so I tell them about Trayvon Martin was 17 years old. He was unarmed, and you had a vigilantee that was 28 years old. that followed him, chased him, profiled him, and ultimately shot and killed him. Trayvon was unarmed and he was 17, and he thought as a 17-year-old. What do you mean he thought as a 17-year-old? He was actually on the telephone call with a young lady, one of his friends that was here in Miami,

and he was not paying attention, you know. He's just like another kid, not paying attention. and not being aware of his surroundings, something parents tell you all the time. You know, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. But he had candy and he had a drink and he was coming from the store, headed back to where him and his dad were staying at the time. And somebody took it upon themselves as a neighborhood, watch captain, a wannabe police officer, but he decides that he wants to follow Trayvon to find out where he's going,

or who he is, you know. And I just want to say that we have to be careful for all our kids because Trayvon Martin could have been anybody's son at 17. Tell me a little bit about Trayvon himself. Tell me about his name. Tell me what he was like.

Where did he get his name from? He got his name from his dad because his dad name was Tracy, but he didn't want to name him Tracy. So he came up with Trayvon, and I agreed. And tell me what he was like as a kid. He was very affectionate. He was definitely a mama's boy.

He liked to eat chips and popcorn and candy. He just was a big kid. He loved airplanes. But what he didn't know if he wanted to fix the plane or did he want to fly the plane? How long did it take for you to recover from the initial shock of his death? And in that same year, you and your family founded the Trayvon Martin Foundation. I think I'm going to be recovering from his death the rest of my life because it's so unnatural to bury a child. It's the worst pain ever because I've lost family members, but this is the first child that I've lost.

And it's just, it's something that's severe that if you have not experienced, this, you wouldn't understand. You wouldn't understand losing a person that you carry for nine months. And now that person is walking, your heart is walking outside your body, literally. And now your heart has been killed. And now you have to continue to function. You have to continue to move forward. You have to continue to be trusting God. You have to continue to be positive and try to live your life. And it's hard. It's a struggle. It's a struggle. It's a struggle every day. I'm still Trayvon Martin's mom. I'm still Javari's full tense mom. It doesn't matter how old they are. I'm always going to be mom. At what point did it become obvious to you that Trayvon's name

would become this, it just took on a hugely important and resonant present. in the world. And a year later, Black Lives Matter was first posted on social media. I think when we went to New York, we was at Union Square. They had something called the Million Hoodie March. And we had just finished doing like a whole set of interviews with different people about what had happened. We was trying to get an arrest. And Reverend Sharpton was the last person we interview with and he said you know they're doing a million hoodie rally and since you guys are in town in new york you should stop over and um and and just say a few words and think the people so we thought maybe okay a few people would be out there and and we was just going to go out there i was already sick

i'm not used to new york weather i'm used to florida weather of course and we went out there When we got out the vehicles, it was like packed with people. Like it was thousands of people. And we were like, what's going on? And they were like, this is the Million Hoodie rally. And what I found out later is that organization got this together in like about two to three days. Because there was so many people out there, I'm not going to say they didn't know who he was. They definitely knew who he was, but they had never met him.

It resonated with a lot of people. A lot of people felt they didn't quite feel what we were feeling, but it hurt. One thing I think about now as we are talking about this, my son, who was 17 years old, who was on arm, was on the ground, deceased. The person that was standing over him with a loaded gun was able to go home into it and get in his bed. He went to the police station and then he went home. My son

went to the morgue. They did a drug and alcohol testing on my son, but they never did drug and alcohol testing and a background check on the person who stood over him with the loaded gun. It seems twisted. It looks like

you would do drug and alcohol testing on the person who shot the gun, not the person who received a bullet. So that right there shows you that United States has a problem with color, number one, because had my son shot someone, they definitely would have did a background check on him. They definitely would have did a drug and alcohol testing on him, and he would have been behind bars that night. He was so resonant that I think I remember President Obama saying, if I had had a son,

he would look like Trayvon Martin. Yes. But my main message is, is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. And, you know, I think they are right to expect that all of us, as Americans, are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we're going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. The next year, in 2013,

you testified in front of a Senate sub. committee to demand changes to what's called the stand-your-ground laws. What did you know about the law before Trayvon was killed? What did Trayvon know, if anything? And what do you know now? I had no clue what stand-your-ground was. It was through our attorneys that told us, I think most people had not heard about stand-your-ground. They knew about the castle document, meaning you can protect yourself in your own household. But nobody really heard about the staying your ground law. Sabrina, at around the same time that Black Lives Matter started,

you founded something called Circle of Mothers, which is a non-profit organization that hosts retreats for grieving mothers. Yes. I got up in the middle of the night, and I got a paper, and I got a pen, and I just started writing because it was as if I had all. already been to the circle of mothers. I can't even explain it. I got on the phone and I started sending

text messages out and I told them, listen, you all have to meet with me so I can tell you this idea that I had. People were telling me about their dogs, their grandmother, their great-grandmother, a mother-father. It's nothing like

losing a child. You know, they think it's even. And they think, you know, and I don't want to take away from someone's loved one, but by the same token is not the same thing. The only person that reached out to me that I felt really understood what I was going through was Tupac Shakur's mother, Afini Shakur, she was my first keynote speaker. And I'll never forget it. I'll never forget it.

I'm going to take it to my grave because I felt like nobody understood. Eight years after your son died, came the son. summer of 2020 and George Floyd and an uprising in many cities around this country, many cities in towns, and people thought things would get markedly better. Have they? To a certain extent, yes. I have seen police officers now being arrested and actually being convicted and going to jail. Even with George Floyd, we didn't have a lot of faith. that officer was going to be held accountable for his actions, you know, and we can't have that. I mean, right before our eyes.

So I was, you know, not happy, but I felt like it's about time they did something about it. He had a trial. He had a jury, and he was convicted, and he's in jail. Okay, that one was held accountable. But there are so many others that. were not held accountable. Sabrina Fulton is the mother of Trayvon Martin and her group's circle of mothers

hosts an annual retreat for mothers who've lost children to gun violence. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've been talking in this program about the decade since Black Lives Manor

was launched as a movement online. There is growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African-American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. But there are conflicting reports about what led up to the shooting. NBC's John Yang has the details.

One of the police killings that became a huge national story in the years before George Floyd's death happened in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. An officer shot an unarmed teenager Michael Brown after a petty theft report, and the officer was never charged. Eventually, the Department of Justice investigated, producing a 100-page report.

That report covered not only Brown's killing, but a culture of discrimination and corruption in the Ferguson Police Department. It was copious evidence of disproportionate arrests and ticketing of black residents, as well as viciously racist emails shared among officers. And like everyone else, I was following the case. I was disturbed.

I was so many things, angry. Nicole Celie is a poet, and she dealt with the Ferguson report in a way that was entirely unique. While I did not come to the report to erase it, I was just very taken with everything, with the story, with Michael Brown, with the murder. I wanted to understand, to some degree,

how these things could happen and could continually happen. I was just following my spirit. Seeley spoke to the New Yorker's poetry editor, Kevin Young. It's such a great pleasure to talk with you about the Ferguson Report and erasure. And I want to talk a little bit about the process of making the book. What is exactly an erasure? Well, an erasure is a reconsideration of a text.

And so I reimagined the Ferguson report by erasing it. And I erased whole sections, whole blocks of text. And so what is left then is a wholly new creative document. I was reading it, the printed version. And when I found that I was striking through, I was like, oh, this is something that I'm doing. I don't know why I'm doing it. I don't know if it was to try to undo whatever harm, but I just instinctively began to erase and highlighting words that moved me and making various phrases different colors. Maybe I would come back to them, but it was really difficult once I realized what I was doing to,

find kind of the lyrical lyrical leaps and and lyrical narratives, the images. It was difficult to find those things in a document that is so formal and so filled with pure fact. And I think that's why it was so important for me to circle and

highlight letters within words to create the lyric where the lyric was hiding. I love the way you're putting it that it was hiding because I think when I knew that you were doing this and then when I saw the end result the poems, the lifted

poems, I don't think I imagine that you were doing this from word to word, that you were taking two S's and even from a word. And you don't rearrange them. They're all in order that you find them. But, you know, you might find an H here. I'm looking at one of the first poems, an O-R here, an S there. You have nay, which I think was neighborhood and it becomes neighing. So you're finding, you know, these connections that are visual, but also, as you put it, lyrical and sonic. How much was the

sound leading you through this process? The sound was very much leading me through. As I said, I was trying to find lyric where there was none, and so often sound would be the driving force in trying to find the lyric. Repetition, you know, assonance, alliteration, these things would drive the poem because there was no story. Well, there are stories, but not any that are inspiring. And there are no images, no surreal images.

So, yeah, I had to really create these things. And especially one movement, I'm forgetting now the page numbers, but the section with the repetition of force, force, force, force. it wasn't until pages after all these forces that I had read that I realized that there was a repetition within the document of the word force. And so that that repetition too was kind of the engine that drove that movement in the collection. Well, I think I have it here. You say use of force, force of habit of nature, force feed, force down. Force his hand, force in line, full force.

Force in line. Full force. By force. Show of force. Brute force. Blunt force to be reckoned with. Force a smile. As law enforcement turns out, in force, to force.

Open your door. It really highlights the force that. and maybe the force is that lie behind the report, which I think is so powerful because it isn't a, it's a damning report of a time and a place. Even in its initial form, it really lays out case after case, you know, and it's, I wonder if you think people will go back to the report after they come to you. I hope so. you know, that's one of the goals for this work. I think the erasure is just as important as what it has erased. And so I'm thinking now of the initial impulse to erase.

I think I did so partly because I wanted more eyes on the report. I wanted more people to read it to see what was going on in Ferguson. and I'm thinking that Ferguson is not the exception, but the rule that this occurs in any city USA. Horses, hundreds, neighing, part reflex, part reason, part particular urge. At gunpoint, among them you are. Less likely to live into the wild go the capital, of born. Home in the high grass, a barking dog chokes itself against the pull of a tight leash,

its neck extending farther than cries for help, a kind of headlight echoing, increasing in reach. The forecast read, the city read, diminishing to the proportion of, whoever said death comes in threes is an optimist I didn't walk away from the completing of this project knowing more than I did going in I have many more questions wanting to know how for so many years you know these things are allowed to happen and allowed to happen to folks that look like me

there's just so much more I want to say and so much that is left unsaid. And so I think my editors were so, they got a bit angry with me towards the end because I kept changing things. But I kept changing things because, I mean, as you know, Kevin, there's infinite possibilities with an erasure. and I just want to show those possibilities beyond the words, like the possibility for justice. And I don't even know what that looks like. I don't even know what that looks like. Nicole Seeley's book, The Ferguson Report, and Erasure, was published this summer.

You can find some of the poems at New Yorker.com. Seeley spoke with Kevin Young, the poetry editor of The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. I want to thank you for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell,

with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Music in this hour was composed and performed by Grey Reverend.