SYMBOLIC HOODIES
In New York, demonstrators recreated the “Million Hoodie March” of last year, when people wore hooded sweatshirts in the style worn by Martin the night of his death, when Zimmerman called police to report a suspicious looking person in his gated neighborhood and defied a police admonishment not to follow him.
The coast-to-coast series of events also saw a crowd gather in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles. Participants carried lit candles and many of them also wore hoodies, said organizer Najee Ali, who spoke at the gathering in Los Angeles.
“Trayvon was everyone’s son. He belonged to all of us,” Ali said in a phone interview.
Martin was on his way home to the house of his father’s girlfriend, and the hoodie became a symbol of what critics considered racial profiling.
“We are all Trayvon Martin,” demonstrators chanted at Tuesday’s vigil.
James Flood, 33, a black bartender and screenwriter, said he was constantly the victim of racial profiling and wanted better for his 11-year-old son.
“My skin color cannot change no matter how much money I make. I still get profiled,” Flood said. “It has to stop.”
Zimmerman, 29, who was released on bail, remained out of sight on the anniversary.
Thrust into the national spotlight, Martin’s grieving parents, Fulton and father Tracy Martin, have become national advocates for stricter gun control laws and critics of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.
The law, passed in 2005, allows people to use lethal force in self defense if they are in fear of serious bodily harm. More than 20 states have since passed similar laws.
Police cited that law in initially declining to arrest Zimmerman, which sparked celebrity protests and popular demonstrations across the country, turning the case into an international story.
Zimmerman’s attorney plans to invoke the Stand Your Ground law at an April 29 hearing at which a Florida judge could determine if the law applied to Zimmerman, possibly granting him immunity and averting a criminal trial.
Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Cynthia Osterman and Lisa Shumaker)
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