Sunday, March 25, 2012

Congregants wear hoodies, remember Trayvon Martin

 

Congregants bow their heads in prayer during a service at Middle Collegiate Church in New York, Sunday, March 25, 2012. Church-goers were invited to wear hoodies to services to show their support for justice in the case of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was wearing a hoodie on the night he was killed by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida.

 

Wearing hooded sweatshirts similar to the one that Trayvon Martin wore on the night he was killed, many preachers and worshippers echoed calls for justice Sunday in the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida last month.

The one-month anniversary of Martin's death is Monday. He was shot while wearing a "hoodie" as he walked home on a rainy night in a gated community. The neighborhood watch volunteer who shot him, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, is the son of a white father and Hispanic mother, and the demands to charge him in Martin's slaying have grown ever louder. He had called police to report the hooded figure as suspicious; the 17-year-old Martin was carrying a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea, talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone.

In African-American and other religious centers from Florida to Atlanta, New York and Chicago, messages from pulpits couldn't help but touch on a seemingly avoidable tragedy that continues to be rife with more questions than answers. But while the call continued for the arrest of Zimmerman, there were also pleas to use the incident to spark a larger movement.

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