TRAYVON MARTIN'S DEATH IS OUR PROBLEM

What did President Obama hear when he walked to the podium to give his state of the union address to a joint session of Congress in September 2009. The audience was 535 men and women and their guests. The elected senators and representatives represent all of us; they were the best America has to offer. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled from his seat, “You lie”. That invective and the speech Obama gave was what most of us could heard but what did Obama see and hear in the chamber that day. I had no idea until he delivered his beautiful heartfelt speech yesterday about his reaction to the Trayvon Martin killing—the shooting of a young black boy in Sanford Florida. What Obama saw that we didn’t see in that chamber was people following him as he walked in the alleyways of a supermarket, what he heard was the click of door locks as he approached cars on the street, and what he saw were women clutching their purses tightly at the sight of him.

Representative Joe Wilson said all of these things when he yelled those two words from the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Many congressional representatives have repeatedly done and said these things. It is what so-called evangelical Christians say and do when they refused to accept White House invitations for dinner. All of the things they do and say when they condemn, without debate, legislation just because a black man endorses it. They do not represent me and they certainly are not Christians.

Martin Luther King, the Alabama jail house letter, the attack dogs used against children, and civil rights legislation of 1964 were heard and known by all but it took the thud of the body of a dead youth hitting the ground to make the sound American people heard all over the country. It took a simple short speech delivered by a great American to make that sound resonate, to make the problem our problem. 

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