real stories. real people.

WHAT I DO: Write about race, ethnicity, and other topics for The Associated Press.

WHAT I DON'T DO: Opinions. I'm a reporter, not a columnist. My job is to illuminate the thoughts and lives of other people.

BUT: Of course I do have opinions, which inevitably affect what I write.

SO: I constantly seek out perspectives different than my own. 

I'M ALSO A: Novelist. Magazine founder. Lifelong Baha'i. 

In Trayvon Martin Case,
History's Ghosts Linger

By JESSE WASHINGTON
AP National Writer
June 15, 2013

Focus on the details, and the cases seem very different. One was killed by virulent white racists, the other by a part-Hispanic neighborhood watchman who insists he faced a vicious attack. One was weighted down and dumped in a river; in the other case, police were called by the shooter himself.

Six decades and myriad details separate the deaths of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, two black teenagers felled by violence. Yet in the way America reacted to Martin's death _ and the issues that echoed afterward _ his case has created a national racial conversation in the much same manner as the saga of Till, infamously murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white woman.

Plenty of people do not see the Martin case as about race at all. But for others who study America's racial past and present, each killing is a defining moment for its era -- a fraught microcosm of what we are, and what we are trying to become. (read more)

www.jessewashington.com * AP National Writer/Race and Ethnicity * delivering fresh words daily since 1987 * Copyright Jesse Washington 2011 to Infinity. All Rights Reserved, Son!