The ongoing legacy of Black Lives Matter

Staff writer Cameron Pugh was 11 years old when Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012.

It wasn’t the first moment he became conscious of race. Cameron had long been used to being the only Black student in his private school classrooms in southern Florida.

But Trayvon’s story brought a new kind of gravity to Cameron’s understanding of race in America. Here was another young Black person, a 17-year-old heading back from the convenience store, who had been deemed a threat, shot, and killed by a neighborhood watchman.

“That moment was very personally important to me,” says Cameron, adding that Trayvon was killed in Sanford, Florida, just two hours from where he grew up.

So when the Monitor asked staff to pitch stories about the ongoing legacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, Cameron immediately thought of Trayvon.

“Black Lives Matter became such a global phenomenon in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered,” Cameron says. “But really, it started in Sanford with Trayvon.”

In recent months, the Monitor has published several stories exploring the evolution of Black Lives Matter. In May, Story Hinckley brought readers to Kansas City, Missouri, where residents have struggled to address the lingering effects of past redlining. In July, Ken Makin introduced readers to the work of Valerie Castile, a mother carrying forward the legacy of her slain son, Philando Castile. Cameron’s story from Sanford, featured in this week’s Humanity Behind the Headlines section, is the latest installment.

When he started looking into how the Sanford community, police, and government have responded since Trayvon’s killing, Cameron wasn’t quite sure what he was going to find. The systemic inequities that the Black Lives Matter movement has railed against have persisted for a long time. And protest movements tend to be good at making a spectacle, but often struggle to find traction in practical terms.

But in Sanford, Cameron found a community making “genuine changes and genuine strides toward trying to make things feel more equal for residents,” he says.

He was particularly struck by the way the community reacted to the thousands of demonstrators who descended on the city right after Trayvon’s death. “They didn’t have any arrests and they didn’t see any violence, which is not true in other places where this happened,” he says.

The difference?

“They didn’t view the protesters as adversaries,” Cameron says. “They were welcome.”

That’s not to say the community did everything activists demanded. At one point, there was a call to paint the words Black Lives Matter on a street. The city declined. The mayor told Cameron that he and others felt it was important to do something more tangible and more permanent. The decision rankled some. But soon, officials convened a committee and started to work toward concrete change.

“I really think the effort matters almost as much as the end result,” says Cameron. “Even if they’re not completely there yet, the feeling that they’re listening and they’re trying – I think that matters a lot.”