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A billboard advertising a line of bulletproof vests for young boys has appeared near the Florida capital in Tallahassee. Chilling, controversial and undeniably eye-catching, the ad is part of the “Vest or Vote” campaign mounted by The Dream Defenders. The Florida-based social justice organization is rallying residents to vote in Florida’s midterm election Nov. 4. According to a report on Jacksonville’s CBS 47 Action News, the group hopes to elect candidates who will repeal the state's controversial stand-your-ground law. According to The BRPR Group, the Miami-based advertising agency behind the campaign, the billboard was modeled after youth clothing ads like...

In a week that saw the capital city remove a mural that paid tribute to Ferguson, Mo. teenager Michael Brown, who was gunned down by a police officer while unarmed, a forum will be held to discuss the 18-year-old’s last words, in addition to other murder victims. Playing off the Seven Last Words of Jesus, the Shiloh Baptist Church will hold an event Friday to dissect the last words of seven murder victims, including Brown, Amadou Diallo, Shantel Davis, Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Renisha McBride. Preachers assigned to discussing each victim’s last words, include Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson...

According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the term “racism” was in 1933, but the practice of racism was well learned by that time. In the United States, slaves were brought to this land by Europeans who thought that the skin color and customs of the African captives made them less than equal to the “civilized” White settlers. That belief system permeated the treatment of Blacks in this country for hundreds of years, and in many ways, has yet to cease. The term is defined by Merriam-Webster as, “a belief that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a...

Editor's note: This column originally appeared in the October issue of Townhall Magazine.Over the past few months we’ve heard an awful lot about the police shooting of “unarmed” teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Before his death, Brown was caught on video in a strong-arm robbery of a convenience store. The video shows Brown was “unarmed” and used his personal strength to push away and assault a store clerk who tried to stop him from stealing a $50 pack of cigars. When Officer Darren Wilson stopped Brown and a friend in the middle of the road, an altercation allegedly occurred....

I’m not a psychiatrist, I haven’t sat down and interviewed George Zimmerman or the cop who shot Michael Brown, I don’t know what their motives are, I don’t know what kind of people they are, what kind of childhood traumas they have experienced. But I don’t think it’s nuts that in a certain way, when that cop killed Michael Brown, and when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, they were killing Barack Obama.

EATONVILLE -- Rev. Al Sharpton spoke to the congregation at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville, invoking Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis as he urged members to vote in the upcoming election. “How do we answer Stand Your Ground in Florida? How do we answer our outrage over Trayvon Martin? How do we answer the things that we consider abusive and disrespectful and offensive? We go to the polls!" Sharpton said Tuesday. "They should not say, in the light of all that we’ve seen in Florida, that we were missing in action when we had an opportunity to do...

George Zimmerman may already be destitute and homeless due to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a Federal Justice Department investigation into whether or not Zimmerman committed civil rights violations has the potential to put him behind bars. In a related report by The Inquisitr, Robert Zimmerman is planning a Zimmerman family reality TV show and a line of self-defense products called Brand Z. A producer named Beth Marshall is working on a series of plays as a tribute to Trayvon Martin, and she claims Martin would be still be alive today if he was white like her own son. The...

We want to believe in justice for all, but when guns are in white privileged hands, blind justice remains impossible to expect.“I think it’s a vindication for justice.” Angela Corey said that. This is the same Angela Corey whose office failed, not so long ago, to secure a guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. But there was the Florida state attorney on Wednesday afternoon, having secured a guilty verdict – delivered by a mostly white-male jury in about five hours – that condemned Michael Dunn to a minimum of 25 years...

Few people thought they would, right? Holder’s teased friendly audiences from time to time with vague promises that “justice” would be done but even he’s been at pains to note that civil-rights cases are hard to win. I think that, ever since the Rodney King trials, the public has a hazy sense that if a state prosecutor can’t get a conviction in a racially charged case that’s gotten national attention, the feds will swoop in and file their own charges as a fallback option. It’s not a matter of law, it’s a matter of politics: If people are sufficiently...

The Justice Department is not expected to bring civil rights charges against George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, according to three law enforcement officials, despite allegations that the killing was racially motivated. The federal investigation of Zimmerman was opened two years ago by the department’s civil rights division, but officials said there is insufficient evidence to bring federal charges. The investigation technically remains open, but it is all but certain the department will close it. …

Winston Churchill once said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you stood up for something in your life.” Is no instance is this quote more applicable than the tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder, who stepped down on Thursday after leading the Department of Justice for six years and in, turn, became a prime target for Republicans intent on destroying everything that both he and the Obama Administration stood for. Despite constant attacks, as well as deliberate misinformation by Republicans, Holder stood strong and for six years became a champion for civil rights, gay rights, and voting rights. Holder himself...

Mayor Kevin Johnson will convene a two-day forum of the U.S. Conference of Mayors this weekend in Sacramento that will include a session discussing the response to the violence in Ferguson, Mo. The attorney representing the family of Michael Brown, the young man killed by police in Ferguson in August, will be part of the panel discussion. Attorney Benjamin Crump also represents the family of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager shot in 2012 by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla....

I was stunned by the anger and sarcasm Harry J. Mallory directed toward a dead teenager, Trayvon Martin, in the Sept. 17 letters. It was over the top and then some (“Cartoon comparing Putin to Zimmerman case went too far”). His reasoning seems pretty easy to understand: Trayvon was black; blacks are thugs; so all George Zimmerman did was create a “dead thug.” Sadly, this sort of (racism) seems pretty common among the far right these days. Here’s what I remember: Trayvon Martin was simply walking home. George Zimmerman targeted him because he was black. Zimmerman followed Trayvon, even after...

ith a smile on his face, George Zimmerman spent Saturday afternoon posing for photos, sharing hugs and shaking hands with gun enthusiasts at a firearms expo in Lake Mary.. "It's so odd to me," said Zimmerman, about the celebrity treatment he receives in public. "[But] it is appreciated." In his first interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Zimmerman described life after his acquittal last year in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The former Neighborhood Watch volunteer shot the unarmed black teen in Sanford on Feb. 26, 2012. Now life for the 30-year-old is completely different. He's always moving. He's...

The explosive wave of reactions to the fatal shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri hasn’t lost its momentum just yet. Black student leaders have come together in support of racial equality with the formation of a multi-university group, the Black Ivy Coalition. The coalition dedicated to social change is comprised of members from all eight Ivy League institutions, with plans to gain student memberships from colleges across the nation, and was officiated with the release of a statement summarizing their motivations and ambitions (see full text below). Their tagline? “It is now time for our generation to...

Rapper Snoop Dogg and the League of Young Voters came together to host a panel about police brutality and the chaotic events that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri, after 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot. In addition to Snoop Dogg, the panel also welcomed Michael Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr.; Jordan Davis’ mother, Lucia McBath; attorney Benjamin Crump and Chuck Creekmur of AllHipHop. The panel, titled No Guns Allowed: Fallout From Ferguson, took place during the BET Hip-Hop Awards weekend in Atlanta. The group of panelists discussed what the African-American community needs to do to help solve issues of racism and...

Rather than waiting until specifics about the Michael Brown case are known — such as autopsy results, detailed officer reports, toxicology or other details regarding his death — some Ferguson residents, Brown supporters and various hangers-on decided to act. Learning nothing from the Trayvon Martin case, people took to the street with demands for “justice” and homemade protest signs. They were aided by a media seemingly excited about exploiting the narrative that Brown’s death was at the hands of a brutal and possibly racist cop in a militarized police force that cares little about black residents. Ensuing nights after the...

Taught by attorney for the Martin family.A JD student at the University of Miami School of Law–and a long-time fan of “The Law of Self Defense”–contacted me recently to share a notice he’d received from the school. It seems for the Fall 2014 semester they will be offering a “short course” (good for one credit) with a focus on the Trayvon Martin case, entitled “Legal Advocacy, Media and the Pursuit of Social Justice.” The first note of interest is that the course is being “taught” by none other than Jasmine Rand, an attorney with the firm of Crump & Park....

The mother of a teen slain at a Jacksonville gas station after he and his friends refused to turn down their music will be among the panelists at a seminar in Orlando about the controversial Stand Your Ground law. Jordan Davis' mother, Lucia McBath, will be among the experts examining whether there is racial disparity in the application or enforcement of Stand Your Ground laws. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is hosting the forum, which takes place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 17 in the grand ballroom of the Rosen Centre Hotel on International Drive. The forum...

America is pushing forward in a post-racial society, blind to skin color. That's the conventional wisdom. But the research of Jennifer Eberhardt, the Bay Area's newest and only recipient of the famed MacArthur fellowship, the "genius grants," has proved otherwise. She has found that skin color prejudices the perceptions of jurors, police officers and even the ordinary student who volunteers in research at Stanford University. Black people, especially those with very dark skin and kinky hair, are more likely to be linked to crime, handed stiffer punishments or even sentenced to death than lighter-appearing individuals, according to her research. Eberhardt...