Press Release: Local community activists to rally for justice for Trayvon Martin at Justice Center in Cleveland, Ohio at noon on Monday, July 15, alleged killer of Martin George Zimmerman is on trial, jury in second day of deliberations

Trayvon Martin, left, and his killer George Zimmerman

By Kathy Wray Coleman, Editor, Cleveland Urban News. Com and The Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Blog.Com, Ohio's No 1 and No 2 online Black newspapers (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com) and (www.clevelandurbannews.com). Kathy Wray Coleman is a former biology teacher and a 20-year investigative Black journalist with more than a decade of those years under current Call and Post Associate Publisher and Editor Constance Harper, with nationally known boxing promoter Don King as the print newspaper's publisher.

Cleveland, Ohio-Cleveland area community activists will rally at noon on Monday, July 15 in front of the Justice Center on Lakeside Ave. in downtown Cleveland for justice for Trayvon Martin, whose killer George Zimmerman is on trial for second degree murder after stalking and gunning down the unarmed Black teen last year in a  gated community in a Sandford, FL suburb. (For more information on the rally contact Al Porter at 216-704-5036).

"We want justice for Trayvon," said community activist Al Porter, vice president of Black on Black Crime Inc. "As the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Closing arguments in the month long trial ended Friday and an all female jury composed of five White women and a woman deemed half Black and half Hispanic is in its second day of deliberations.

An over anxious neighborhood watchman, Zimmerman, 29 and White, shot the 17-year-old Martin to death following a confrontation he initiated even after police dispatchers directed him to back off and to stop following the teen, who was passing through the neighborhood on the way to his father's girlfriend's house, trial testimony revealed.

The girlfriend resides in the upper middle class, predominantly White neighborhood on the outskirts of Sandford, a city that sits 20 miles northeast of Orlando that is roughly 57 percent White and 30 percent Black.   

Zimmerman did not testify and his lawyers argued at trial that it was self defense under the Florida stand your ground law.

Renowned Civil Rights activists such as the Rev. Al Sharpton and National NAACP President Ben Jealous have spearheaded national protests around the celebrated tragedy, sparking community outcries that forced law enforcement authorities to finally charge Zimmerman with Martin's murder. 

Sharpton and Jealous said at the time that the failure to initially charge Zimmerman was racially motivated.