Lift Us Up, Don't Push Us Out! by Mark R. Warren & David Goodman

Author:Mark R. Warren & David Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

TRAYVON MARTIN AND THE MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES

The murder of Trayvon Martin was a movement-building moment and a turning point for AEJ. We were all together in Chicago at a Free Minds, Free Peoples conference when the verdict came out that the security guard who shot Trayvon, George Zimmerman, was acquitted. Fifty young people were literally stuffed into my hotel suite. They were really scared, they were terrified, they were heartbroken. It was just a lot of emotion in the room.

Meanwhile, Power U, our member group in Miami, and the Dream Defenders staged a dramatic sit-in protest at the state capitol, in Tallahassee. AEJ helped young people from New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and as far as away as California get on buses and planes to join them. AEJ ended up sending almost 150 high school students to stand with the Dream Defenders and Power U. That was a powerful movement-building moment for us when we said, “Y’all are not alone in this struggle.” Young people understood that Trayvon could have been all of them or any one of them.

Soon after, we were in Miami for AEJ’s national convening where a youth leader from Power U said, “I feel some kinda way that if Trayvon hadn’t been suspended, he wouldn’t never got killed that night.” That landed on us like a ton of bricks. The young woman said that a security officer had found Trayvon with a bag that she said smelled like marijuana and he had a screwdriver on him. He was criminalized for this and suspended. This was his third time, and his mom felt like he needed a new start at a new place. That prompted her fateful decision to send Trayvon to live with his father, where he was subsequently shot and killed. Here it was: the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline and the connection to state violence.

The next year, George Carter was killed. George was a fifteen-year-old black student active as a youth leader in Rethink New Orleans, an AEJ member. George was killed on his way to school at seven in the morning in an overgrown field that hadn’t been cut. After Hurricane Katrina, the school administration had closed the school in his neighborhood, so George and a whole bunch of other young folks had to get up at the crack of dawn and catch a bus to the other side of New Orleans to go to school, and he was killed in an act of intercommunal violence. The New Orleans police put out a story in the newspaper that he was killed because he was part of a gang that was robbing a store, that he might have been killed because he was involved in a corner-store robbery.

We said, “God, even in our death, we are criminalized.” It confirmed for us that it doesn’t matter if you’re a good black kid or a troubled black kid. This is a state of war that’s happening. This doesn’t happen to white kids. The murder of a white boy would have been seen as a tragedy.

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