They are joining the Trayvon Martin crusade by the hour now.
It feels like an echo from another era — when there was racial injustice in the headlines, when federal troops were dispatched to comb Southern swamps to look for blacks who had vanished.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, (D-Fla.) took to the House floor on Wednesday to call for justice for Trayvon Martin. The teen was killed 25 days ago. The shooter, George Zimmerman, has not been charged or arrested.
And when lawyers for the NAACP slid into town with briefcases and addresses of safe houses.
It feels like the not-so-long-ago ’60s, back when getting federal authorities to move quickly was often difficult. But this is a different era, however tragically similar the outcome.
The Trayvon Martin story has multiple layers: a black victim, a Hispanic man who did the shooting in Sanford, Fla. In Washington, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Thomas E. Perez, is Hispanic. The attorney general of the United States, Eric H. Holder Jr., is a black man. The man who occupies the Oval Office, Barack Obama, is an African American.
And yet, even that arc of progress — while admired — hasn’t softened emotions and feelings.
“It reminds you of Emmett Till,” said Bernadette Pruitt, an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Tex., who has written about Southern racial history and can’t stop thinking of Trayvon Martin and his family. “This so-called post-racialism is a figment of our imagination. Race, unfortunately, is still the barometer by which everyone is measured.”
Investigating the killing of the 17-year-old Martin, who was black, by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, is now a top priority for the FBI, senior law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
One focus of the FBI’s inquiry is whether Zimmerman muttered a racial slur seconds before shooting Martin on Feb. 26, as has been alleged. The FBI is trying to determine whether the audiotape of a 911 dispatch call between Sanford police and Zimmerman can be enhanced with sophisticated equipment that has been used in other cases. If it can, the tape will be transferred to the FBI laboratory at Quantico, one official said.
Enhancing the tape could be crucial to determining whether the shooting is considered a “hate crime” under federal hate-crime laws, according to law enforcement officials.
Top Justice officials were scheduled to meet Thursday in Florida with the Martin family and the family’s attorney. And Holder on Friday is scheduled to meet with black ministers at the White House, where the Martin case is expected to come up, according to a government official.
On Wednesday in Sanford, the doors of a black church swung open so those in pain could sit, or stand, and give vent to their hurt. Benjamin Jealous, NAACP president, was in town. He was there to deal with the death of an unarmed teenager on a darkening street. Zimmerman has claimed self-defense. The mourners showed up at Olive Street Baptist Church to pray for justice and talk about their run-ins with Southern law enforcement. Anger seemed to outweigh prayer.
One after another, they filed to the front of the red-carpeted sanctuary to tell their stories.
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