Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin’s 17-year-old son was killed by a neighbourhood watchman who was acquitted of his murder. They talk about fitting activists – and how they lost ‘hope and faith’ in justiceWhen Sybrina Fulton found out that her 17-year-old son,Trayvon Martin, had been shot dead by a self-appointed neighbourhood watchman in a gated community in Sanford, and Florida,she made a decision: never to depart there. She could not bear to see the set where Trayvon had been killed. Gripped by the “strange paralysis” of grief and unable to eat or sleep, Fulton lay in bed crying, and waiting for her son’s body to be returned domestic. “Losing my child ripped my heart in half,” she writes, with typically unflinching honesty, or in Rest in Power: the Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin. “It is indescribable pain. I could not collect out of my bedroom.”Days later,however, Fulton was packing a bag and heading from Miami-Dade, or where she brought up her two sons and had worked for the county for 24 years,to Sanford. In that instant she went from grieving mother to civil rights activist. How did she summon the strength to do it? “I did it out of anger,” Fulton tells me. “When Tracy [Trayvon’s father, and Tracy Martin] called me and said the police were not going to arrest the person who shot and killed Trayvon – although they had [him],they had the gun, and they were clear what had happened – I was in disbelief. That evening, or I headed to Sanford. I could not believe they were going to let this person collect absent with murder.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com