How Trayvon Martin’s killing inspired a generation of Black journalists and activists

In 2012, Jamal Jordan was studying theater at Kenyon College in rural Ohio, “the whitest place in the world,” as he describes it, when the course of his life was altered by the slaying of a Black teenager about 1,000 miles away.

When he learned of the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Jordan, then 21, began reading more news stories, wanting to understand what went wrong. But nothing satiated what he was looking for. American newsrooms, lacking racial diversity, had not explored the frustrations or fears Black boys felt about facing a similar confrontation as Martin did with neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, Jordan said. About to graduate, he wondered why he had studied theater — clearly journalism lacked a perspective he could offer.

“The whole world seemed to fall apart,” said Jordan, a 31-year-old who has written for the New York Times, NBC News, and Vice. “I didn’t think anyone was really getting it in the way I was trying to understand it. And I think that was when I first saw, ‘I could have some impact here.’ ”

For some young Black people entering adulthood, 17-year-old Martin’s death on Feb. 26, 2012, provoked questions about how they are perceived and ideas about how they could make a difference. Martin has been called his generation’s Emmett Till, a teenager killed in a disturbing slaying that galvanized the nation during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Black journalists such as Jordan felt moved to bring diverse voices to their newsrooms, while others drawn to activism began to demand changes to gun laws and in the national conversation about race.

Advocacy stemming from Martin’s death transformed into seeking racial justice on other pressing issues such as climate change and gun violence. Since July 13, 2013, when a jury acquitted Zimmerman, activists seeking to expose long-standing racial inequality have shared a simple affirmation: “Black Lives Matter.”

That rallying cry has echoed in the wake of other deaths such as the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which triggered conversations about chokeholds and no-knock warrants. People said they couldn’t breathe, repeating Floyd’s last words, and ran, as Ahmaud Arbery had before he was murdered.

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Carrying skittles or wearing a hooded sweatshirt, as Martin had when he was killed, became a symbol that the teen could have been any young Black man. As President Barack Obama put it at the time, Martin could have been his son.

The momentum of the movement has built over the years, as younger people continue to become radicalized by the shocking imagery of policy brutality, argues Rachel Grant, a journalism professor at the University of Florida who researches social justice movements.

“Since Trayvon, we’ve seen Mike Brown, we’ve seen Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, and the names continue,” she says. “The names have continued in the last 10 years, and we haven’t necessarily seen a stop or a change.”

Grant, who says she herself felt drawn to activism in the wake of Martin’s death, said the grind of protesting and storytelling is exhausting for young Black people, who have had their childhoods taken as they are seen as adults. Martin, for instance, was treated like a criminal by Zimmerman’s supporters, who complained that a year-old photo of the teenager was outdated and misleading.

“There are all these tropes in which Black people have to prove their innocence, that we can’t be victims when someone inflicts pain or violence on us,” Grant said. “Thinking about that trial, in my own life, awakened those things.”

While the media has documented instances of violence against Black communities, it has clumsily reported, if at all, on the racism behind those attacks, Grant said. For instance, 10 days after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., half of the articles about the racial unrest taking place mentioned the word “race,” according to an analysis by Race Forward, a racial justice nonprofit.

Edna Burton, a 21-year-old hairstylist in Columbus, remembers hearing about Martin’s killing in her salon, feeling such disbelief that she wondered if she had perhaps been too sheltered. She felt certain Zimmerman would be convicted. On the day of the jury’s decision, she had taken her 2-year-old son to the circus, and as they rode home, the news came on the radio and the family’s jolly chitchat went silent.

“I felt like it opened my eyes to what really goes on, what are really the possibilities,” she said, “because the way I look at it, Trayvon could have been anyone. He could have been my nephew, my brother, my friend.”

Martin’s case drew Burton to protest for the first time. She explained to her son, now 12, that he had to be cautious of his surroundings. Sometimes, she tells him, you need to swallow your pride and look weak to stay safe.

“I tell him that his ultimate goal is to make it home at night,” she said.

Crystal Gomes knows her mother, who was 5 when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, must have had that same conversation with her, the one countless Black parents have with their children about how they are perceived by White people. But Gomes, 19 when Martin was killed, said those words must have gone in one ear and out the other. She had a White boyfriend, White friends and attended a private Christian school. She had grown up in an entirely different world from her mother, she thought.

“I had to reevaluate that,” she said.

After watching the Martin case unfold, Gomes, who works for a real estate company, found herself discussing the Black experience with White friends. At a bachelorette trip for a friend’s wedding, she explained to one White woman why using the N-word is problematic after a video circulated of rapper Kendrick Lamar chastising a White fan for not self-censoring while singing his song, “M.A.A.D City,” onstage.

“It’s a way I can feel I can contribute,” Gomes said. “There are a lot of Black people who are not going to engage in those conversations because it’s exhausting having to essentially educate your oppressor.”

She also increasingly consumed information about systemic racism, from reading about the unethical medical experiments performed on Black men in Tuskegee to watching documentaries about the criminalization of Black bodies. At first, she said she didn’t seek out sources like that.

“I wouldn’t be on this deeply profound journey of self-discovery if it weren’t for the death of Trayvon Martin,” she said.

At the thought of the decade of learning that’s passed since Martin died, Gomes tears up. Choking on her words, she recalls the feeling of emptiness she felt then. Years later, images of other Black people killed in confrontations with police or armed White people haunt her.

“I’m tired, and I’m hurt,” she said.

After Jordan graduated, he moved to New York, inching his way toward a gig in journalism via a job as a production assistant. Years later, in the summer of the Pulse gay nightclub shooting in Orlando, Jordan felt an urge to focus on the lives of the victims, rather than making it into a “story of blood and gore,” like Martin’s was, he said.

He watched other Black journalists be pigeonholed into covering some of the most traumatizing story lines. Major newsrooms, he noticed, consistently failed to hire and empower these reporters cutting their teeth on the difficult subjects.

Years after Martin’s story had launched him toward a path working in journalism, Jordan shifted gears, writing a book about the love and relationships of LGBTQ+ people of color. He left his job as a digital storytelling editor at the Times and began teaching at Stanford University.

“I was like, I’m not doing this anymore,” he said. “I’m covering happy things.”