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Trayvon Martin’s Death Extends Sanford’s Sordid Legacy h/t TomMaguire
(Mother Jones) – The founder wanted to ship blacks to the Congo. Baseball’s Jackie Robinson was run off. Now a slain 17-year-old is the Florida town’s latest racial calamity.
In some sense, it’s history you could recount from many places in America: It could be Miami, where Trayvon Martin came up, and where rioters scorched the streets in the 1980s over black motorists killed by police. It could be Prince Edward County, Virginia, near where George Zimmerman grew up, and where the county board of supervisors once abolished public education rather than comply with integration. Or it could be southern Wisconsin, where not long ago a noose and racial threats turned up on a college campus, and where earlier this month another gun owner killed a black man allegedly in self-defense.
But when it comes to a history of fear, racism, and violence, Sanford, Florida, has a particularly fraught past, one that traces right up to the night a month ago when an unarmed black kid was shot dead on one of its streets, and his killer went free.
Long before the live oaks and Spanish moss gave way to interstate highways and box stores, Sanford began as a citrus town in the 1870s, conceived by a New England tycoon. Henry Shelton Sanford, who had ingratiated himself to Abraham Lincoln and served as Lincoln’s ambassador to Belgium for eight years, had the town built by Swedish laborers. Though the citrus empire he dreamed of didn’t exactly flourish, Sanford proved instrumental to promoting trade with the Belgian-controlled territory of Congo–which included his vision of promoting Congo as a place to ship America’s freed blacks. The African locale, he said, represented an outlet “for the enterprise and ambition of our colored people in more congenial fields than politics.” A Congo peopled with African Americans could be “the ground to draw the gathering electricity from that black cloud spreading over the Southern states.”
The back-to-Congo movement never took off, but Sanford’s Florida hamlet did. In 1911, it absorbed the town of Goldsboro, an autonomous black community. The merger was hostile, according to local historian Francis Oliver. “[Sanford] never paid restitution to the people who lost their jobs and asked for money because they…no longer [had] jobs,” she said. “The mayor didn’t have a job, City Council people didn’t have a job, the postmistress didn’t have a job, the jailers didn’t have a job, the marshal didn’t have a job.”
That sense of alienation hung in the air for decades …
The investigation into the murder of Trayvon Martin would have been so much easier if the skin colors of both were reversed. In such a case where motive and evidence are lacking, a severe beating if the suspect during interrogation often leads to a surprise oral and written confession. Negotiating the electric chair or hanging is an option given by the Florida detectives. The special prosecutor of the Trayvon Martin case is Angela Corey, she was fired while working under her predecessor State Attorney Harry Shorstein, a tough Vietnam veteran who prosecuted the Brenton Butler case.
More below the fold …
Brenton Butler case spotlights interrogations
JACKSONVILLE, FL. – The case against Butler, on the surface, looked strong. His confession was both oral and in writing and was witnessed by at least two homicide detectives. But testimony at trial that Butler was beaten into confessing, including a photo of Butler with a bruised face, was among the key factors that swayed the jury toward acquittal, juror Amanda Eddy said. By the time the trial was over, Eddy and her 11 fellow jurors were convinced of his innocence — so convinced they took less than an hour to acquit him.
False confessions are more common than people think, particularly when juvenile or mentally handicapped suspects are involved, said Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley who is familiar with Butler’s case and has testified in two other Jacksonville trials. He said beatings are rare these days. Instead, he said, suspects are given a break or a way to avoid the death penalty if they agree to the interrogator’s version of the crime.
“For someone who’s scared or desperate, that can lead an innocent person to confess because they want to save their lives,” Ofshe said. “One of the problems, especially in high-profile cases, is police … are under such pressure to perform. That’s very often when all the stops come out and the worst forms of combat are displayed.”
Butler, at the time a 15-year-old Englewood High School student who set out that Sunday morning to submit a job application at Blockbuster video, said in an affidavit that detective Michael Glover, son of Sheriff Nat Glover, threatened him with the electric chair, punched him and threatened his parents. Another detective, Duane Darnell, punched him in the eye and threatened to shoot him, Butler testified. His family notified the city Feb. 4 of their intent to sue and yesterday filed an internal affairs complaint alleging 46 procedural violations.
Attorney Robert J. Slama, representing the family of Brenton Butler with attorney Thomas Fallis, holds the signed statement given to police the night of Butler’s arrest that admitted the murder of Georgia tourist Mary Ann Stephens, even though he did not commit the crime.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
