Trayvon Martin: A Short Story

Improved Essays
“Live your life to the fullest because you’ll never know when it will be your time to go”. I know that’s cliché but recently I’ve been thinking about my life and how blessed I am. It’s important that we begin to cherish every moment. The recent police shootings have really been weighing in on my heart. Throughout this week, I’ve thought about Sean Bell and how he was killed the night before his wedding. I thought about Oscar Grant and how he was shot while handcuffed in Fruitvale Station. I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be Trayvon Martin in those last moments of his life. I can’t even imagine seeing my father shot in front me as a child or having a child taken away from me while playing in the park with a BB gun. I wondered what

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    The case of “Trayvon Martin vs. George Zimmerman” is the court case that encouraged me to pursue my career in law. The case was about a seventeen year old African American male named Trayvon Martin who was fatally shot while walking home. A man named George Zimmerman was claimed to be the shooter who shot and killed Martin. According to the news story Martin was walking home from the local Seven Eleven when Zimmerman encountered him. When asked about the situation Zimmerman claimed that he was unfamiliar with seeing Martin in the neighborhood and said Martin looked suspicious.…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    JAIMINKUMAR PAREKH 7792906 ASSIGNMENT; CRIME ANALYSIS CASE ANALYSIS OF ZIMMERMAN VERSUS MARTIN USING SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES Sociological theories helps to understand relationships between individual and the society. “Sociological theories are defined as the statements of how and why particular facts are related.... used to analyze and explain objects of social study and facilitate organizing sociological knowledge”,(sociological perspective, 2013). The 2013 case Zimmerman versus Martin is a noteworthy occasion that shapes and characterizes human culture.…

    • 1895 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this article there are many references to the different areas of rhetorical analysis, but I think pathos the use of emotions forms most of the article. First, the author starts out by building a picture of a young teenage boy “Emmett Till”, he describes him as a boy with “cherubic features” and a “boyish grin”. By using his audience’s emotions, he is saying how someone who reminds us of an angel can do something, which resulted in his untimely death. He continues to use emotions as the article continues, building anger and outrage in his readers by saying how could a child be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and be taken to an isolated area where he was beaten, shot and killed, and then his body was thrown into a river, with the hope that it would never being found. All of this was done just because he supposedly whistled at a white woman outside a small grocery store,…

    • 548 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Gorge Zimmerman a neighborhood watchman on February 26, 2012 decided 19 year old Trayvon Martin; a young unarmed African American boy, wearing a hoody was a threat and subsequently shot him. Regardless of what political orientation or race one is, there is only one reason Zimmerman considered Martin a threat, because of his race .Race matters because it is the skeleton which certain beliefs, attitudes, opinions, assumptions, and biased conclusions are shaped. The failure for Zimmerman to be acquitted for the murder of Trayvon martin highlights the failure of democracy towards African Americans, and explicitly shows why black lives matter should be a priority. Shortly, after the Zimmerman verdict was the emergence of the black lives matter movement,…

    • 972 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Keith Beauchamp’s documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Till,” the dark past of a Mississippi town is brought back to the light of the public. The film discusses the seemingly harmless event which ultimately lead to fourteen year old Emmett Till’s brutal torture and death through the eyes of those who were close to the boy and his family. These events which are relieved by family members and eyewitness’s of that day, along with those to follow, are told to lead up to the unimaginably heartbreaking ruling of non-guilty for this young man’s two killers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The filmmaker formats the piece as such, as well as uses the emotional testimonies of family members and friends, to support the claim that these men were guilty in the first degree of kidnapping, torture, and murder. It can be concluded that Keith Beauchamp is successful in arguing his claim because of the excellent use of pathos in the testimonies of the family, logos in the claims…

    • 879 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Analysis of Media Representations of Juvenile Delinquency or Juvenile Justice System In the article Trayvon and the Myth of the ‘Juvenile Superpredator’, Steve Drizin discusses the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman in relation to the myth of the juvenile superpredator coined by John Dilulio. As we discussed in class, while this supposed new breed of criminals never surfaced, the myth that they would has changed how society sees certain adolescents. Drizin speaks on the fact that by 2001, the Surgeon General of the United States stated there was no evidence of these superpredators. However, George Zimmerman would have been in his mid-teens during the height of the myth and therefore at least had heard of it.…

    • 845 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Trayvon Martin Story

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages

    As Americans we are bold, brave and unwilling to be pushed around. Our nation is a symbol of our story and how our determination made us the greatest country on the face of the earth. We are a family and just like every family we have our ups and downs and many times are separated by family disputes. Time after time just as soon as our nation begins to recover as a whole from one dramatic event, we open ourselves to be consumed by sectionalism and riots over events like the Fruitvale station shooting, the crisis in Ferguson and one of the most popular and still most debated events to this day the Trayvon Martin shooting.” Trayvon Martin a Seventeen year old boy was gunned down on the night of February 26, 2012 in Sanford Florida while walking…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Emmett Till Story

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The era of 1950s reached its summit in the tensions in the acrimonious relationships of African-Americans and whites. The story of Emmett Till is one of them. While some consider the gruesome and painful story of the murder a spark that started the Civil Rights movement, it is not known by many- overlooked or written in meagre details by in textbooks as insignificant. The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, both which started a hundred days after the murder, are well-known; it is possible that the gory details and deep substance to it may have made the editors of textbooks shy away. Indeed, the details are hard to swallow.…

    • 436 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the United states society lacks the rights to life, liberty , and pursuit of happiness ; however due to harmful laws that have been gently crafted by. Modern day laws take away our rights by allowing abortions, sentencing prisoners to death, and prohibiting ones purist of happiness over all we no longer posse our rights Abortions are bad because we are taking away a defenseless child's life without his , or her consent even thought they are not considered an American citizen. Every day 125,000 babies are murdered by doctors the very ones that are here to heal us. Tara Culp-Ressler states that 47,000 women die due to unsafe abortions.…

    • 542 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    According to Conley, he describes race as a group of people who share a set of characteristics, typically, but not always, physical ones and are said to share a common bloodline. The discrimination against someone’s race is racism. Racism is said to be the belief that members of separate races possess different and unequal traits. One of the most famous racism stories happening right now is the shooting of Michael Brown. The shooting occurred on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.…

    • 779 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Emmett Till, A Teenage Civil Rights Symbol Civil rights has been a controversial topic for 60 years and running, unfortunately, thanks to one of the pioneers in civil acts, fourteen year old Emmett Till. Age, and gender are no excuse to show mercy when it comes to the discrimination that African Americans had to face. Even since it was involuntary, Till became a major symbol for what African Americans needed to end in their society. The things that a white family afflicted on this boy, do not speak for all Caucasian people, but shows some of the acrimony between the two races. Young Emmett Till was an extreme example of the segregation between black and white as well as the truth and a lie.…

    • 755 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Injustice of Trayvon Martin It’s what you see everywhere, it’s what you’ll hear anywhere: it’s racism. In the 2010s, racism was still prevalent despite how far the United States had come from slavery. On February 26, 2012, a white neighborhood watchman shot and killed and unarmed 17-year-old. George Zimmerman, the watchman, claimed self-defense against the black teenager; he was never arrested.…

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Brock Turner Case Study

    • 1677 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Brock Turner is a Stanford athlete, a victim of college drinking culture, but also a sex offender. In any case of duplicity, the perpetrator can be defined in one way, but also the opposite depending on what lens is adopted. In the case of Turner, what is true from every perspective is on a Saturday night, January 17th, 2015, Brock Turner was found on top of a half-naked girl behind a dumpster by two graduate students (Stack). He did not rape her, but he was convicted of sexual assault on three felony accounts and sentenced to 6 months of prison and 3 years of probation (Stack). According to Turner and his father, he was a victim of college drinking culture.…

    • 1677 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Alternative actions could’ve been made, and there wouldn’t be an issue to resolve today; not just legally, but emotionally. The parents of Mr. Brown, Michael Sr. and Lesley McSpadden, lost a son that was scheduled to start classes at Vatterott College exactly two days after his death. He played football, and was referred to as a gentle giant. He was loved and looked up to, so his death only called for voices to be heard. Protests contained demonstrations of how it was said that Michael reacted to the officer upon the chase.…

    • 1011 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Eric Garner Case Study

    • 1005 Words
    • 4 Pages

    To begin with, the case I decided to write about is the Eric Garner case which I feel strongly about. This incident took place in Staten Island, New York on July 17th 2014. It all started when the police officers approached Mr. Garner about selling untaxed cigarettes and tried making an arrest. Eric Garner then tried to explain to the law enforcement officers that he hasn’t done anything. As the officer tried to make an arrest with resistance from the victim, he then wrapped his arm around the 43 year old’s neck.…

    • 1005 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays