Although she could have ended the trial by coming forward, Brittany Diamond Eugene saw fit to join the chorus of disbelief at trial’s end. “Zimmerman Was Found Not Guilty. Wtf,” tweeted Diamond on the evening of July 13, 2013, followed by “My Heart Goes Out To Trayvon Martin's Family. I Can Imagine How Their Feeling.” The media had so misled their audiences that Diamond, who knew more than anyone, was but one of millions worldwide registering shock at an all but inevitable outcome. Predictably, in the middle of that night Diamond awoke and at 3:23 a.m. tweeted, “I want some Krispy Kreme doughnuts.”
The verdict could not have come soon enough for George Zimmerman. “I was not necessarily surprised. I was elated. I had a resurgence of faith in the justice system, especially the jury system,” George told me. The elation did not last long. Within minutes, the very same activists and media who had demanded “just an arrest” vied with each other to denounce the outcome of that trial. It turned out their agenda was much bigger than “just an arrest” as they so often had insisted early on.
“George Zimmerman skirted justice with an all-white jury of his peers which consisted of all women,” announced the Left-leaning UK Guardian. The Guardian was not alone in referring to the jury that acquitted George as “all white.” Jesse Jackson reinforced this theme upon hearing of the verdict, complaining there was “not one black on the jury.” Said Jackson, whose opinion on the trial was shared by nearly 90 percent of African Americans, “Something about it was stacked from the very beginning.”
In Rest in Power, a low-boil stew of racial propaganda, Sybrina said of the jurors, “[N]one of them were black.” She preferred to describe the jurors as “five middle-class white women and one Hispanic woman.” In fact, the Hispanic woman was a Puerto Rican of obvious African descent.
In similar spirit, Sybrina referred to George only as white, never as Hispanic, never as Peruvian. Nor did Sybrina ever make any reference in her race-saturated book to the Afro-Peruvian roots of George’s mother Gladys. The fact that African Americans made up only 10 percent of the Seminole County jury pool impressed neither Sybrina nor any of the race hustlers who yearned for a loaded, OJ-style jury. Only a guilty verdict would have satisfied their mob definition of “justice.”
Sybrina’s attorney Benjamin Crump, who played a major role in the dubious case, cheapened black history with his blasphemous assertion, “Trayvon Martin will forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all.” He was one of many to make the spurious allusion to the fourteen-year-old Till lynched in the Jim Crow South forty years before Trayvon was born.
Not one to mince words, Al Sharpton called the verdict an “atrocity.” Sharpton blamed the all-female jurors. “What this jury has done,” he said, “is establish a precedent that when you are young and fit a certain profile, you can be committing no crime...and be killed and someone can claim self-defense.”
State Attorney Angela Corey proved to be as mendacious as Sharpton. In a post-verdict interview on HLN, Corey described Trayvon as “prey” and “an unarmed teen just walking home.” Said Corey of Trayvon with unintended irony, “He never had a fighting chance.” Asked for a one-word description of George Zimmerman, she huffed, “murderer.” When asked for his one-word description of Rachel, Bernie de la Rionda said with a straight a face as he could muster, “truthful.” In revisiting this clip, I spontaneously burst out laughing and could not stop for some time.
As Sybrina noted proudly in her book, the useful idiots in the entertainment world joined the mindless rush to pile on. In Ireland, Bruce Springsteen sang a song in Trayvon’s honor. Justin Timberlake dedicated a song to Trayvon in Yankee Stadium. Stevie Wonder promised to boycott Florida unless the state repealed its Stand Your Ground law, which wasn’t used by Zimmerman for his defense and had nothing to do with the trial. Beyoncé sang about her love for Trayvon in Nashville, then joined Jay-Z for a vigil in New York.
Much as communists welcomed the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, hardcore leftist activists, black and white, welcomed the not-guilty verdict in 2013. What good would Zimmerman have done them in prison? For the last century, the reigning strategy has been to exploit black discontent to enhance Leftist power. By the late 1960s, however, the demand for racial injustice had outstripped the supply. The election of a black man as President in 2008 threatened that supply and the activists’ very future. They feared they were about to go “out of business.” In January 2009, the month of Obama’s inauguration, 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. For the Left, this could not stand.