The verdict in the George Zimmerman trial should not be a surprise to anyone. These types of outcomes in trials for the murder of Black Americans are an entrenched aspect of American history. You have to remember that George Zimmerman was initially allowed to go free. It was only after pressure from civil rights groups that he was even charged.
I would say that if the American public knew our history, they would have expected this outcome.. The following is an excerpt from an article “Carnival of Death” By Mark Gado
…..The actual process of lynching was morbid and incredibly violent. Lynching does not necessarily mean hanging. It often included humiliation, torture, burning, dismemberment and castration. Victims were beaten and whipped, many times in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Coal tar was frequently used to douse the unfortunate victim prior to setting him afire.
Onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities. Pieces of the corpse were taken by onlookers as souvenirs of the event [5]. Such was the case when James Irwin was lynched on January 31, 1930. Irwin was accused of the murder of a white girl in the town of Ocilla, Georgia. Taken into custody by a rampaging mob, his fingers and toes were cut off, his teeth pulled out by pliers and finally he was castrated. It still wasn’t enough. Irwin was then burned alive in front of hundreds of onlookers (Brundage, p. 42). No one was ever punished for this barbaric killing. Black victims were hacked to death, dragged behind cars [6], burned, beaten, whipped, sometimes shot thousands of times, mutilated; the savagery was astonishing. How could ordinary people participate in such brutality?
The answer lies in the psychological processes of persuasion and propaganda. For generations, whites in the South regarded blacks as inferiors, both intellectually and biologically. Of course, this may have been a necessary process in order for whites to justify the enslavement of others. These imbedded feelings were visible on every level of society, even in the most trivial circumstances. In the South, a black man was expected to remove his hat when speaking with a white. A black was always addressed by his first name or some derogatory term and he had almost no legal rights. States like Mississippi and Tennessee effected legislation that specifically omitted or targeted African Americans, depending on their purpose. All this had a demoralizing effect on blacks and made them seem less than human to white society. And worse, this condescension seemed to be officially endorsed by the state. It was easy to mistreat blacks if it could be agreed upon that African Americans were vastly different than whites and not deserving of the same respect. This was a result of a disorganized, yet powerful, campaign of propaganda carried on by white plantation owners and others who had an economic stake in the retention of cheap black labor. It was to their advantage to keep African Americans in their “place”. In many photos of lynchings at the turn of the century, onlookers and members of the mob can be seen smiling and grinning for the camera. They demonstrate no fear of prosecution or reprisal. They had none. For no white man was ever punished for a lynching until 1915. By then, there had been thousands of lynchings in the South alone with certainly hundreds of thousands of spectators. Some lynchings were even announced in the newspaper….END
So the results of the trail and the outcome is not new. On the various talk shows during and after the trail, there has been analysis of the evidence, the testimony, and the tactics used by both lawyers; Was Zimmerman’s head on the grass rather than on the sidewalk, Would the fact that the jury was made up of White women who were Mothers make a difference? I feel none of this mattered. Race trumped all of that.
Part of the problem also is the fact that Blacks don’t have a media source to get up to the minute news and analysis from our perspective. It is always the major media or their paid black pundits who ask the guiding questions and filter the news for us to arrive at the conclusions that support this corrupt system.
Many will point to the fact that so many Blacks kill each other. If you look at our history in America, (some of it articulated in the narrative above) the countless crimes perpetrated against Blacks by White Americans with the blessing and support of the US government on all levels, created the self hatred the plagues the African American community today.
While America may be responsible for this mess we find ourselves in, we cannot wait for them to fix it. Blacks must learn their history, establish and support media outlets and Black businesses. That is the only way to assure our continued existence.
Tim Moore
UINTV.NET