Sybrina Fulton: “Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Anybody’s Son”
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. 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 Skittles and a nice 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. Justice for Trayvon! 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 and all 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 vigilante 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 to

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's 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...

He was very affectionate. He was definitely a mama's boy. He liked to eat chips and popcorn and candy. And 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, uh, 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, uh,

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 every day.

I'm still Trayvon Martin's mom. I'm still Javaris Fulton's 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 presence 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 warrant.

And Reverend Sharpton was the last person we interviewed 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 just say a few words and thank the people. So we thought maybe, okay, a few people would be out there 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 were 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 unarmed, was on the ground, deceased.

The person that was standing over him with a loaded gun was able to go home 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'd had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. Yes, absolutely.

But my main message 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 subcommittee 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 Doctrine, meaning you can protect yourself and your own household. But nobody really heard about the Stand Your Ground law. Sabrina, at around the same time that Black Lives Matter started, you founded something called Circle of Mothers, which is a nonprofit organization that

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 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, grandmothers.

It's nothing like losing a child. You know, they think it is even 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, Afeni 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 summer of 2020 and George Floyd and an uprising in many cities around this country, many cities and 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 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's so many others that were not held accountable

Sabrina Fulton is the mother of Trayvon Martin, and her group 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.

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've been talking in this program about the decade since Black Lives Matter 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. There 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 Seeley 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, An 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 lyrical narratives, lyrical 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. Well, 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 imagined that you were doing this from word to word, that you were taking, you know, two S's, an E-S 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, you know. 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, in trying to find the lyric repetition, you know, assonance alliteration, these things would drive the poem because there was no story that, well, there are, there are stories, but not any that are inspiring. Yeah.

And there are no images, no surreal images. So, so yeah, I had to really create these things and, and, 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 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 forces that lie behind the report, which I think is so powerful because it isn't a...

And 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 that's one of the goals for this work. Yeah.

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 it.

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 captive-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, An Erasure, was published this summer. You can find some of the poems at newyorker.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 Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decke. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund. Music in this hour was composed and performed by Gray Reverend.