Martin grew up in an on-and-off-again fatherless home. By 2012 he was trending toward inclusion in Obama’s statistics. Obama had little good to say about the Tracy Martins of the world. “They have abandoned their responsibilities,” said Obama of the fathers who had left their homes, “acting like boys instead of men.”3

  In most quarters, Obama’s talk was well received. “He kept it real all of those other so called black leaders never touched this subject about fatherless homes reason why one jesse jackson was one of those fathers,” wrote one woman, punctuation be damned, in the comment section of a YouTube posting of the speech.

  Jesse Jackson was indeed one of those fathers. As late as 2012, Karin Stanford was still hectoring him for child support for Ashley, their celebrated love child. He took Obama’s comments as a personal and professional insult. A few weeks later, awaiting a remote interview with Fox News, Jackson made his feelings known on a hot mic. “I want to cut his nuts out,” Jackson whispered. “Barack, he is talking down to black people.” This was all most people were allowed to hear, but there was more. Almost universally, the media edited out the participial phrase that followed—“telling niggers how to behave.”4 Sharpton, of course, heard the slur and made sure others did too. “I think this certainly does not reflect the Reverend Jackson that we all know and love,” said Sharpton, meaning not a word of what he said.5 More important, Obama heard it all, and he got the message.

  Suzanne Goldenberg, reporting for Britain’s left-leaning Guardian, did a better job than most in the American media of assessing the political ramifications of Jackson’s remarks, not so much for Jackson as for Obama. She cited Jackson’s various apologies and his plea that Obama “represents the redemption of our country,” but her headline caught the dynamic behind the dust-up: “Jackson gaffe turns focus on Obama’s move to the right.” Goldenberg raised the question that many on the left had been asking, “What has happened to Obama since he won the Democratic nomination?”6

  As she noted correctly, Obama’s focus on individual responsibility upset those on the left who “hold government policies to account for the impoverishment of African-American families,” Jackson being chief among them. Although Goldenberg did not go into detail, she raised a secondary issue that most in the America media chose not to explore, specifically, “Obama’s place in the African-American community.”7 In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama related his own quest to discover “a workable meaning for his life as a black American.”8 This did not come easy to him. When he left his white mother and grandparents behind in Hawaii for college in Los Angeles, he knew no more about African-American culture than what he had seen on TV. He described himself accurately as “a would-be black man.”9 For all of his seeming gaffes, Jackson had hit Obama where he was most vulnerable—his shaky hold on authenticity. Obama never felt secure in his identity as an African-American.

  Jesse Jackson had no such issues. He may have oversold his contribution, but he did walk the walk, including the legendary 1965 Selma to Montgomery march. By contrast, when candidate Obama spoke in Selma in 2007, in order to connect with the civil rights legacy he concocted a story about his parents being so inspired by the march that “they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.” For an added touch of “authenticity” he delivered the story in a preacher-like cadence. Said Obama in conclusion, “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”10 He wasn’t. In reality, by the time of the march, Obama’s father had long since abandoned the family. While Jackson and other protestors were confronting angry white state troopers in Alabama, the three year-old Obama was collecting seashells with his white grandfather in Waikiki.

  This fantasy worked well enough on liberal white America, but Obama could not fool himself, and he certainly could not fool the old bulls and their allies. After Jackson punched back, Obama never again made as hard-hitting a jab at the heart of the problem afflicting black America as he did in his Father’s Day 2008 speech. Four years later that Father’s Day speech still had currency in black activist circles. As each March day passed in 2012, and one black leader after another stirred the Trayvon stew, Obama’s continued silence provoked the activists to lash out. The clever among them knew Obama’s stress point. “Obama is perfectly willing to give a sermon to black men on Father’s Day about what they need to be doing,” wrote Yvette Carnell, a blogger and former Capitol Hill staffer, “but totally incapable of advocating for a black boy who was murdered in the street while carrying only Skittles and iced tea.”11

  What piqued Carnell and many others was Obama’s response to the controversy involving a white feminist by the name of Sandra Fluke. Broadcaster Rush Limbaugh insulted Fluke on February 29, three days after Martin’s death. Two days later, Obama called Fluke on his own initiative to console her. However, nearly four weeks after the killing of Martin, there was no consolation for his family and no public acknowledgment of his death.

  The pressure was mounting, and the language was intensifying. The head of the Congressional Black Caucus, a seeming moderate from Missouri named Emanuel Cleaver, struck the tone expected of a prominent black politician. In a formal statement, Cleaver argued that the Zimmerman case set a “horrific precedent of vigilante justice” and accused the Sanford Police Department of “a blatant disregard for justice.” In urging the Department of Justice to investigate. Cleaver insisted that Martin’s “only crime seems to be the color of his skin.”12

  Obama had to say something. On the morning of March 23, in the White House Rose Garden, he introduced Dartmouth president Jim Kim as next head of the World Bank. He then took just one question, almost assuredly prearranged, and it addressed Martin’s death. “Obviously this is a tragedy,” said Obama solemnly. “I can only imagine what these parents are going through. When I think about this boy I think about my own kids and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together, federal, state and local to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”13

  Had the president stopped here, he would have said enough to appease at least the media, if not the hard core among the activists. He would have won no honors for political courage, but as he knew, courage led in another direction altogether. By that time, the White House had access to all the information the Sanford Police Department did. The courageous step for Obama would have been to defend the Sanford Police Department and to demand an end to the media lynching of George Zimmerman. As an African-American, he had more latitude to do that than a white politician would have. He chose not to. Concluded Obama after some meaningless temporizing: “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon—if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”14 Obama would not have known that Zimmerman openly supported him for president, but even if he had, that support would not have mattered more to him than Zimmerman’s support for Sherman Ware mattered to Ware’s sister or the Sanford NAACP. There were larger stakes involved.

  Back at the Treehouse, the Treepers sensed the potency of Obama’s remarks immediately. Within hours Sundance posted a piece calling Obama’s intervention “staggeringly selfish opportunistic exploitation.” He added, “Oh man, we are gonna be hearing about this story for weeks from every possible nuanced organization that relies on racism and special interest exploitation to provide their cause celeb.” In her response Wee-Weed neatly summarized the crux of Treehouse thinking: “I think Mr. ‘The Police Acted Stupidly’ has just stuck a size 11-1/2 in his mouth.”15

  WeeWeed was referring, of course, to Obama’s instinctive denunciation of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police for arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates in July 2009. Gates, a Harvard professor, had just returned to his house from an overseas trip. When the front door failed to open, he and his driver forced it open. A neighbor saw them do it and, not knowing Gates, called 9-1-1. When Sgt. James Crowley arrived and asked Gates to step outside, the professor exploded, accusing the officer of targeting him because “I’m a black man in America?” Gates continued to abuse and threaten Crowley, and after two warnings, Crowley arrested him on a disorderly conduct charge. Under pressure, the local district attorney dropped the charges, but Crowley refused to apologize, and the police brass backed him up.16

  At a press conference six days after Gates was arrested, a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times asked Obama what the incident said about race relations in America. Although admitting he did not know all the facts, Obama had confidence enough in America’s “long history” of racial injustice to announce, “The Cambridge police acted stupidly.”17 Obama knew less about Crowley than he did about the incident itself. Like Zimmerman, Crowley defied the racist stereotype. He was not only a model officer, but also an Obama supporter. A black police commissioner had personally selected him to teach recruits about the pitfalls of racial profiling.18 As these facts and others emerged, Obama was forced into an awkward “beer summit” to pacify the nation’s police and the people who believe in them.

  There would be no beer summit for George Zimmerman. Unlike Crowley, he had no allies with clout. Besides, too much was at stake in an election year in America’s most vital battleground state for Obama to apologize or equivocate. He had just lent his imprimatur to the BGI narrative, and he would have to stand by it.

  As Obama must have anticipated, few dared to criticize him. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was the exception. Still in the running for the Republican presidential nomination, Gingrich called Obama’s message “disgraceful” and scolded the president for “trying to turn [Martin’s death] into a racial issue.” Gingrich elaborated, “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him?”19 But Gingrich got little support from other Republicans and almost none from the media, including the conservative media. The National Review took the lead in misinforming the right. Heather Mac Donald called the shooting “a grossly disproportionate response to a fistfight, even leaving aside the fact that Zimmerman had initiated the encounter.”20 Robert VerBruggen insisted that “[s]upporters of pro-self-defense policies should roundly condemn Zimmerman’s actions, and Florida should change its laws to prevent this incident from repeating itself.”21 And National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in the New York Post, headlined his piece “Shocker! Sharpton is right for once.”22 Sharpton, of course, was not right. For all his boldness, Gingrich, too, missed the larger point. Martin’s death had already been turned into a racial issue. That train had long since left the track. Now, with Obama fully on board, there was no way it could ever return to the station.

  Zimmerman’s friend Mark Osterman later identified that March 23 day as the low point in a long, depressing month. Said Osterman, “George was more hurt than angry about the negative reactions across the country.”23 Now with a ten-thousand-dollar bounty on his head and the president siding openly with the Martins, Zimmerman felt that he could no longer put the Ostermans; his wife, Shellie; and the Ostermans’ ten-year-old daughter at risk by staying in Seminole County. Late that afternoon, he loaded a few necessities and his dog, Oso, into his truck, kissed his wife good-bye, and headed north to stay with relatives in the Washington, D.C. area. He felt freer with every mile he drove. That feeling did not last long.24

  13

  REMOVING THE SCALES

  DURING THE MONTH OF MARCH 2012, as the story gained momentum, the editors of the Miami Herald thought it might be worthwhile to look into Trayvon Martin’s background. Of course, all of the media should have been doing this, but no editor or producer other than those at the Herald made more than the most cursory inquiries into the why or how of Martin’s evolution from the smiley innocence of his ubiquitous preteen photos into an eager and competent brawler.

  Information on Martin bled slowly into the mainstream, in no small part because Team Trayvon had promptly sealed young Mr. Martin’s school records. As often as not, the news that the media did report was either incomplete or inaccurate. The initial Reuters piece of March 7, for instance, had Martin visiting his father and “stepmother” for no cited reason. On March 9, NBC Miami added some clarification. Tracy Martin claimed that his son had been suspended from Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High for a week for an unspecified cause, and he had come to Sanford “to disconnect and get his priorities straight.”1 In fact, Martin had been suspended for two weeks, not one, but the family refused to say why Martin was suspended, only that he “had violated some type of school policy.”2

  On March 17, the Orlando Sentinel apparently thought it necessary to solidify Martin’s reputation. Now, his suspension was back to five days, and it was due to “tardiness.” The Sentinel talked to Michelle Kypriss, Martin’s English teacher, who assured Sentinel readers that Martin, a junior, was “an A and B student who majored in cheerfulness.”3 Martin, the Sentinel continued, was studying to be an engineer, with a particular interest in aviation. This interest was piqued by a plane ride he had taken two years earlier. That trip may have taken Martin to the ski slopes, where earlier photos shown on TV news had pictured him. He was, from the looks of things, not a deprived child. His parents, a truck driver and public housing official, respectively, earned more than a hundred thousand dollars a year between them.

  On March 22 the Herald let it be known that Martin “had nonviolent behavioral issues in school” and confirmed that he had indeed been suspended for ten days. “He was not suspended for something dealing with violence or anything like that,” said Tracy Martin. “It wasn’t a crime he committed, but he was in an unauthorized area [on school property].” The article insisted, however, that the college-bound Martin was “a typical teen” and reinforced his status as a son of the middle class. It was not every black teen in Florida, after all, who had been to a Broadway musical and regularly went horseback riding with his mom.4

  Understandably, Martin’s extended family hung on to the sanitized version of the young man’s life. By all accounts, up until the last two years of his life, Martin had been a typical teen. In an interview with Esquire’s John Richardson, Martin’s aunt Miriam summed up the family’s understanding of their nephew and son: “First thing you need to know about Trayvon, she says, is he loved his dad.” As Tracy told the story, the then nine-year-old Trayvon dragged him from what could easily have been a fatal apartment fire. Trayvon reportedly got along with everyone. He was always smiling. He loved to eat. He loved football. He loved Nickelodeon. He loved his uncle Ronald, a quadriplegic, and helped him out. Ronald was the one who got him interested in planes. And he knew God. “He understood that man could not create the earth and the clouds and the water,” said Miriam. She and her husband, Stephen Martin, a former Marine and Tracy’s brother, were positive influences on young Martin’s life, and, as Miriam noted, “he spent as much time at their house as he did anywhere else.”5 And therein lay the crux of the problem. In the last years of his young life, Martin was being shuttled between one house and another—his mother’s, his father’s, his uncle’s, his father’s girlfriend’s.

  The reason Trayvon ended up in limbo those last two years of his life was because he lost the one place he called home, the house where he had spent 90 percent of his time from age three until the age of fifteen, the home of Alicia Stanley, Tracy Martin’s second wife and Trayvon’s stepmother. When Tracy left Alicia for Brandy Green, Trayvon was fifteen. That was the time when Trayvon began to wander off track and there was no one readily available to redirect him. In his Esquire piece, Richardson did not so much as mention Stanley. Almost no one in the media did. “I’m here with you to let people know that I exist,” Stanley would tell CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “And I would not sit back anymore and take the lies that’s out there being told. I’m the one that went to them football games. I’m the one that was there when he was sick.”6

  At the time of Trayvon’s death, Martin was still married to Stanley, and yet, as Stanley told Cooper, Team Trayvon edited her life out of the narrative. “He hasn’t told me why he stopped communicating with me and telling me anything that was going on,” she said of Tracy Martin, “so everything that I was finding out, I was finding out on the TV or through friends. And I would call him and ask him why he’s not calling me, and he said, well, I was busy, you know, stuff like that.” Team Trayvon’s relentless propaganda campaign worked much better with just one grieving mom and dad representing the fallen son. Alicia Stanley ceased to exist. So did Brandy Green. The presence of either would have muddied the visual. At the time of his death, everyone claimed to know Trayvon, but no one really did, not even Alicia Stanley. She thought it impossible Trayvon would start a fight. “He’s not what the media make him out to be,” Stanley told Cooper, “this thug.”7

  A Facebook exchange between Tracy Martin and Miriam from October 27, 2010, when Trayvon was just fifteen, spoke to the warning signs of a young life that had suddenly become unmoored:

  TRACY:

  I need time to myself 2day!!!!!! my son think imma damn fool! this is the part i hate in our father to son relationship! when you start telling lies about nothing you gone walk you ass into an ass cuttin! be honest with your old boy [meaning, the father] and you wont have to get yelled at like a negro in the streets!