Although he certainly did not intend to, the drugged and despondent 17-year-old who wandered through a failing Florida subdivision on a rainy February night ten years ago Saturday launched a new phase in the American civil rights movement.
This was to be the Jacobin phase, the phase in which traditional civil rights standards such as equality before the law and innocent until proven guilty yielded to mob rule and race-based outcomes.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin would not live to see this transition. The 28-year-old man who shot and killed Trayvon, George Zimmerman, has lived in the shadows of Jacobin justice every day of the last ten years, always with an eye out for assassins like the one who nearly killed him in 2015.
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