June 5: National Day of Justice for Trayvon Martin
5pm Oscar Grant Plaza (14th and Broadway, Oakland)
Bay Area Demonstration and Speak-Out
7pm 71st and International, East Oakland
Neighborhood Speak-Out
June 4, 2012 – Oakland, CA – Exactly one hundred days after Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, protests are being organized in cities, schools, and communities around the country demanding “Justice for Trayvon!”
Organizers are calling for people to act everywhere on June 5: wear hoodies, spread the message of “We are All Trayvon,” and take a stand with the message of ‘No More!’.
While Zimmerman has been arrested and indicted, and this week was taken into custody after his bond was revoked, and some believe that the court system will now bring justice, organizers of this national day of action are insisting on the importance of determined and visible protest against this killing and the related criminalization and mass incarceration of a generation of Black and Latino youth.
Carl Dix, revolutionary communist and an initiator of the “Stop Mass Incarceration Network”, stated in Sanford, Florida: “Whether or not people act on June 5 matters. Right now the mouthpieces of the system are telling us that protest has done its part now that Zimmerman has been indicted and that it’s time to get out of the streets and let the courts work. The truth is that the system was working when it let Zimmerman walk free the night he murdered Trayvon and when it drug tested Trayvon’s dead body but didn’t drug test his killer. And it’s still working as story after story turns up in the media portraying Zimmerman as the victim and dragging Trayvon’s reputation thru the mud.”
Joey Johnson has just returned to the Bay Area after traveling through the South from Atlanta to Sanford, FL as part of the BAsics bus tour, states: “What happened to Trayvon Martin is a horror. It is also a concentration of so much of what happens to Black and Latino youth in a country that has racism and oppression woven into its very fabric. Now is the time for people of conscience to step forward and demand justice.”
