Trayvon Martin and the Forgotten Dead

by John Perazzo

Spearheaded by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the massive, escalating protests over Trayvon Martin’s February 26th death in Florida—protests featuring desperate pleas to “stop the killing of our children”—continue to rivet the nation’s collective attention. By contrast, the death of 63-year-old Tommie Lee Caldwell a few weeks earlier created no such stir. One morning this past December, Caldwell, an African American who was caring for his terminally ill wife, was stabbed and then shot in the back of the head by an intruder inside his Detroit home. If you’re like most people, you’ve never heard of Mr. Caldwell prior to this moment. His murderer was black—not a “white Hispanic” like George Zimmerman—so the guardians of “civil rights,” like Jackson and Sharpton, were spared the trouble, at least in that instance, of having to gin up a national referendum on America’s unyielding, ubiquitous racism.

The “civil rights” crowd was likewise silent two months ago when a 19-year-old African American named Joshua Brown—angered over a dispute with a black Detroit woman named Almanda Talton—shot and killed the woman’s 12-year old daughter, Kade’jah Davis, a sixth-grade honor student. No doubt, that youngster’s name is unfamiliar to you as well. Neither is it likely that you’ve heard of Eyanna Flonory or her 2-year-old son Amani, both of whom were murdered, along with two other black victims, by a pair of black gunmen in Boston. Nor is it conceivable that many readers could name any of the ten people who were killed (or the forty who were wounded) by gang violence in Chicago during the recent St. Patrick’s Day weekend—or, for that matter, the two who were killed (in addition to the twelve who were wounded) by a spray of gunfire in south Florida just this past Friday.