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It’s been more than a decade since the death of Trayvon Martin, but to many, including myself, it feels like yesterday. I was 16. I remember hearing about his death on CNN, hearing he was only one year older than me, and feeling absolutely chilled to my core.
I remember his picture flashing across my TV screen, looking into his big brown eyes, and seeing my own younger brothers within him.
It was one of the earliest historical events that I can remember that really sucked me into the world of politics and activism. As a Black child living in one of the whitest parts of suburban Virginia, I was certainly not naive to the existence of racism. But the outcry from the Black community that followed Martin’s death, that collective pain and passion, made me believe that we had the power to do something about it.
And I certainly wasn’t the only one who believed this. In 2012, Jelani Cobb was asked to write about Martin’s death, which was just starting to make national headlines. Years later, he’s still hearing the echoes of that moment.
“At the time, I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor. But I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger,” says Cobb, now dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The years that followed Martin’s death would be an absolute roller coaster. The Black Lives Matter movement. The death of George Floyd. The rise of the MAGA movement. The election and reelection of Donald Trump.
I think my colleague More To The Story host Al Letson, put it best: “When I look at America, I often think of it as a pendulum. As soon as political power swings in one direction, gravity sends it flying the opposite way.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Letson and Cobb trace the tumultuous throughline from Martin to the rise of white nationalism and reexamine former President Barack Obama’s legacy in the age of Trump.
Check out the full episode.
—Arianna Coghill
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