Freedom Rider: Obama’s Final Insult to Trayvon Martin

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Holder whines that the bar is set “too high” for him to do his job.”

Michael Brown’s family and the people of Ferguson, Missouri had better prepare themselves. At some point in the near future the Obama justice department will announce that there will be no federal prosecution of his killer. It isn’t hard to make this prediction. Trayvon Martin’s parents were just informed that the federal government won’t lift a finger to bring their son’s murderer to justice.

It is particularly galling to watch Attorney General Eric Holder leave office being lionized as a civil rights champion when he has done absolutely nothing to punish the 21st century lynch mobs and slave patrollers. Holder whines that the bar is set “too high” for him to do his job. “I think some serious consideration needs to be given to the standard of proof that has to be met before federal involvement is appropriate, and that’s something that I am going to be talking about before I leave office.”

If Holder is going to keep uttering nonsense and lies he should have cleaned out his desk already. When he and the president don’t want any standard of proof there just isn’t any. That was the case in 2011 when they sent a drone to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen year old son. Rarely is the law as unambiguous as in Gerald Ford’s 1976 executive order: "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." That bar would seem to be pretty high but because President Obama said it didn’t exist, it was ignored.

"He is like an abusive husband who still gets lots of love.”

The standard of proof is as high as a president needs it to be. Or at least that is the case when enough political pressure is applied. Bill Clinton proved as much when his justice department successfully prosecuted Lemrick Nelson for murdering Yankel Rosenbaum. In 1991 a black child was struck and killed by a Hasidic Jewish motorist in Brooklyn, New York. A fight erupted in the ensuing protests and Nelson stabbed Rosenbaum to death. He was acquitted but the pressure on the Clinton administration was enormous and unrelenting and Nelson was charged and found guilty of a civil rights violation in 1997. That conviction was overturned on appeal and this time it was the Bush administration who prosecuted Nelson and found him guilty in 2003.

That is what happens when presidents are determined. If they want to break the law and kill people they will do that. If they are pushed to take on federal civil rights prosecutions they’ll do that too. If, like Obama, they do nothing, it is obviously because they just don’t care.

It is always easy for politicians to take the path of least resistance if they aren’t being pressured and putting pressure on Obama is still anathema. He is like an abusive husband who still gets lots of love. He can make jokes about black people feeding their children fast food for breakfast or admonish black men for being bad fathers but he gets love in return from the people he despises. It is an awfully vicious cycle and people like the late Trayvon Martin pay the price.

“In the end no action is ever taken that brings justice to black people.”

Barack Obama is president precisely because he tells white people what they want to hear and they don’t want to hear much about race murder. Black people are still besotted at the sight of a black president and high level cabinet officials and still demand nothing. Despite the Black Lives Matter movement there has not been a sustained demand for federal prosecutions. The president will meet with Ferguson protesters or send the attorney general to talk about being profiled or call on King Rat Al Sharpton to lead a march but in the end no action is ever taken that brings justice to black people.

And of course Obama is no fool. The day after Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton were told there would be no justice for their child they were invited to a White House reception recognizing Black History Month. February 26th was the third anniversary of their son’s death and they marked the occasion by watching the president feign concern for their grief and tell more lies about black people.

The president had this to say about the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march: “What happened in Selma is quintessentially an American experience, not just an African-American experience. It reminds us that the history of America doesn’t belong to one group or another. It belongs to all of us.”

Not true. The Selma march is quintessentially a black experience. It defined a moment for black people and it didn’t have the same meaning for any other group. The same is true for Trayvon Martin’s murder and the acquittal of the perpetrator. It means more to black people than to anyone else but the will to call out the first black president is still lacking. The slaps in the face to Trayvon’s family and to all black people won’t stop until January 21, 2017. That is the day Obama leaves office and it can’t come too soon.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

More Stories