Hundreds of local residents gathered at Miami’s Bethel Apostolic Temple last Saturday for what was billed as a “community program of peace, justice and prayer” to support Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, whose son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford Florida in February 2012. The event was organized as the second degree murder trial of George Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer, is set to begin June 10th.
Zimmerman is claiming self-defense, saying he shot Martin after the 17-year-old attacked him inside a gated community where Martin was staying with his father.
Pastor Arthur Jackson III, Fulton’s pastor at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Miami Gardens, where the teen’s funeral was held last year, presided over Saturday’s event alongside Bishop Victor T. Curry, who leads one of the largest predominantly black congregations in South Florida, and who also heads the National Action Network chapter in Miami. Two of the attorneys for the family, Ben Crump and Natalie Jackson, were also on hand.
Case drew religious leaders from the start
From the first protests over the shooting last spring, the shooting and its aftermath attracted religious leaders.
NAN, and its president, Rev. Al Sharpton (who also hosts and MSNBC weekly show and a syndicated radio show) organized the first and largest protests in Sanford, nearly two weeks after the shooting. They were joined by local Sanford pastors, none of whom knew the Miami family, but who became the core of a local movement to push for Zimmerman’s arrest, drawing on decades of conflict between Sanford’s police force and the city’s African-American community. When national civil rights leaders including Sharpton, and the NAACP’s Benjamin Todd Jealous came to Sanford, they organized vigils in local black churches in Sanford’s historic Goldsboro district.
Now that the trial is imminent, Martin’s family and their supporters have turned to prayer again.
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article courtesy of TheBelleReport.net
