Trayvon Martin was visiting his father in Sanford, Florida, when the 17-year-old Black teen was fatally shot Feb. 26, 2012, during a confrontation with George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. Zimmerman claimed self-defense and was later acquitted during a jury trial. Martin was unarmed. His death fueled the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement just a couple years later.
An update on what has happened to the people involved in that tragedy over the past decade:
Martin’s name is now mentioned in the same breath as others whose violent deaths have refocused attention on race and justice in the U.S. over the past decade: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Martin’s death and subsequent protests lit the spark that eventually grew to become the social justice movement Black Lives Matter. His legacy is compared to that of Emmett Till, the Chicago teen whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 stoked the civil rights movement.
