The eighth grade STEAM participants at Linden SDA have completed a mini photo project they titled “Trayvon Lives On”, honoring the death and life of the 17-year-old murdered at the hands of an “overzealous” neighborhood watch member, George Zimmerman. According to Ajeya Watson, “Till this day, I will never understand how an unarmed seventeen year old with Skittles and an Arizona can be seen as suspicious or dangerous to the point where he would need to be killed. I believe Trayvon was simply murdered because he was a black boy wearing a hoodie in a white neighborhood.”
Ajani Semple writes, “Trayvon was an ordinary child, the son of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin and was already a junior in high school until that day that his life was snatched away…as a young black man on my way to high school, this is a hard subject to embrace because the man who killed Trayvon is still living a fairly normal life and even ended up auctioning the murder weapon and selling it for $250,000.”
The eighth graders exercised a mini photo shoot in memory and respect for not only Trayvon Martin’s life, but the lives of other innocent black women and men that were taken at the hands of racial profiling or police brutality. Trayvon has become not only a symbol of innocence snuffed out but one of hope, that the people who have come to know his name, Linden SDA journalists now included, will stand up for equality and justice for all.
Rest in power.
-Ms. Semple
DIVAS (Digital Interactive Visual Arts Sciences) for Social Justice aims to bridge the digital divide by combining media literacy and cultural awareness along with a vast understanding of technology to encourage young women in under served communities to pursue careers in computer science and new media.
