The rally, like most across the country, was peaceful.
SPRINGFIELD – Residents joined hundreds of cities across the country to remember Trayvon Martin three days after George Zimmerman, who said he killed the 17-year-old in self defense, was acquitted of murdering the Florida teenager.
About 200 people gathered on the steps of City Hall. They lit candles, gave speeches, sang and chanted. Many displayed signs they had written saying “No justice/ No Peace” and “We are Trayvon.”
Speakers from the Springfield National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Alive with Awareness, Knowledge and Empowerment (AWAKE) and other organizations addressed the crowd. Like most across the country, this one was peaceful even though several police officers stood by.
A second rally is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at the Federal Building on State Street.
“It is a fight for justice,” said Chelan Brown, a community activist for AWAKE. “A young man doing no wrong would be targeted, profiled, stalked, cornered and eventually killed.”
Like many rally participants, she talked about having three young sons including a 15-year-old and their concerns that their own children could have been killed as easily as Martin was.
She also said the issue of racial profiling has been close to her heart ever since the 1999 killing of Benjamin J. Schoolfield, a black, unarmed motorist shot and killed by police. Officers had earlier received a false report that Schoolfield was armed and stole a car.
Kahari Mickens, 17, of Springfield, a recent high school graduate who is heading to Hampshire College in the fall, read a poem he had written about the killing of the teenager who is the same age as he is now.
“Young, black and 17, he looks like me. Smart, athletic and handsome like me,” he said.
The planned rally was interrupted when Shirley Amakel, of Chicopee, an elderly woman, started giving her own emotional opinions of Martin’s death. Organizers invited her to the microphone so the mother of four sons could speak.
“He was shot because he was black,” she said. “He looked like he was up to something because he was black.”
Afterward she encouraged the crowd to sing the old civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome.”
While appropriate to mourn the death of the 17-year-old, State Reps. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera and Benjamin Swan urged people to get more involved. They asked people to join local organizations such as the NAACP, to vote, to go to jury duty, to ensure they and the young men and women of the city are educated.
“Register to vote. We have to change the political complexion of this country. We have to change the political complexion of Springfield,” Swan said.
At the same time Ida Flynn, second vice president of the Springfield NAACP, asked people to go on the national website and sign a petition encouraging federal civil rights to be filed against Zimmerman.
She too urged people to get more involved.
“Young people we need you to join. This fight did not begin with Trayvon Martin,” she said.