By Kevin Foley
The Trayvon Martin tragedy in Sanford, Fla., has sparked a firestorm of debate in Barack Obama’s “post-racial” America.
The details are sketchy because the police failed to conduct a thorough investigation of Martin’s February 26 shooting. They do say George Zimmerman, a cop wannabe and self- appointed and armed neighborhood watchman, called a police dispatcher to complain about a shady character hanging around his apartment community.
When he began following the “suspect” the dispatcher told him not to, recordings reveal. Next, screams for help were heard on another police recording and then gun shots.
The episode brought to mind a novel I published in 2008, “Where Law Ends,” a title that also seems fitting for the Trayvon Martin case. I tell the fictionalized story of the infamous (or famous, depending on your point of view) Montana Vigilantes who conducted a vicious reign of terror in a remote corner of the American frontier in 1863.
Like Zimmerman, the vigilantes of old were self-appointed. They considered themselves their community’s upstanding citizens whose duty it was to maintain law and order even though a sheriff had been duly elected for that purpose.
So the vigilantes kept a sharp eye out for disreputable characters. When they spotted one, they might banish the “offender” but more often than not, they threw a stout rope over a tree limb and strung their victim up.
Thomas Dimsdale, an English schoolmaster who had migrated to the region, became the chronicler of the vigilantes’ rampage. He wrote a first person account in which he cast the vigilantes as heroes.
It’s laughably implausible.
For example, one of the vigilantes’ victims was a hapless camp cook named Red Yeager whom Dimsdale claims thanked his tormenters for hanging him before he died. So absurd was his account, in fact, that I decided to take my novel in a completely different direction than the one I had originally intended.
It wasn’t crime the Montana Vigilantes were worried about when they policed Virginia City and Bannock, although that was their excuse. It was the presence of foreigners, drunkards, suspected criminals and “undesirables” attracted to the wild gold mining camps of the region.
Along comes George Zimmerman 150 years later in the truest vigilante tradition, one of life’s losers who called the local police nearly 50 times in 2011 to report suspicious goings on and people. My late father, who lived in a Florida apartment community for years, referred to such folks as “condo commandos.”
You know the sort, people with too much time on their hands and runaway imaginations.
Trayvon Martin was a high school student who apparently got into some trouble at school. It happens to a lot of kids. It happened to me. He was minding his own business, walking to his home after buying candy, wearing a hooded sweatshirt because it was raining, not that any of this should matter.
What made Trayvon suspicious was that he was “WWB,” walking while black.
As he talked on his cell phone to his girl friend, he noticed he was being stalked by the hulking form of George Zimmerman. There was some kind of confrontation, maybe a tussle. Then Trayvon was dead, shot through and through.
In the aftermath, the far right media rushed to create its own narrative of events, portraying Trayvon as a thuggish punk and Zimmerman as a solid citizen trying to defend his home and family.
What I find striking is how this telling of the Trayvon story is nearly identical to Dimsdale’s account of the murderous Montana Vigilantes.
Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter and the rest are attempting to justify Zimmerman’s homicidal act with racial profiling of their own suggesting that, with a wink and nod, you’ll understand why Trayvon Martin had to die.
It’s comforting to think that in the second decade of the 21st century we’ve come a long way since the bombing of an Alabama church that killed three little African American girls, the lynching of 13-year-old Emmett Till, and the murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi.
But we now have to add the killing of another 17-year-old black boy to the list and re-set our moral compasses.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |