Stephen Henderson saw disconcerting news from Sanford, Fla., this weekend and sat at his keypad Sunday morning to do what writers do.
"George Zimmerman deserves no respite. No peace," the Free Press editorial page editor says in an impassioned, deeply personal online column.
My job is typically to make policy sense of news events. But here, I’m at a loss. As a parent, as an African American, I can’t get much past thinking Zimmerman has earned every day of the hell his life should be from here on out.
Injustice? I hope it visits with him often.
Stephen Henderson has a 9-year-old son who's "a little brown-skinned boy who sometimes wears a hoodie."
Saturday night's acquittal of Zimmerman in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin hits close to home for the Detroit editor, as it does for countless parents.
Henderson is unsure how to explain the murder trial verdict to his 9-year-old son -- "a little brown-skinned boy who sometimes wears a hoodie and who someday might be walking home from the store with a pack of Skittles."
The Zimmerman verdict is an awful reminder that the urban violence we see in places like Detroit has its roots in a transcendent axiom that dates back further than the nation’s founding: that black life is cheap, no matter where or how it’s taken. . . .
Zimmerman just proved that even in 2012, if you get out of your car to chase and kill a black teen who was committing no crime, you will not be called to answer for it. Any 17-year-old should be able to walk home from the store and not get shot. The Florida jury denied that basic right for Martin, and millions of other American kids.
Our justice system is the world’s greatest, but it depends on our own individual sense of right and wrong to deliver fairness or rectitude. We aren’t there yet.
