Will America ever erase the colour line?
By Ogaga Ifowodo A YEAR to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the benediction of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, America reached for a brush, dipped it in white paint and freshened the racial colour line of which King’s predecessor, W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke so eloquently 60 years earlier in The Souls of Black Folk. I am speaking of the murder on February 26, 2012 of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American boy by George Zimmerman, a White-Hispanic American. [caption id="attachment_411397" align="alignleft" width="217"] Martin Luther King Jr[/caption] Martin had crossed the colour line by his sheer presence in Zimmerman’s gated community. Thus, though warned by the police not to follow Martin, Zimmerman would sooner damn the consequences, if any, than let a Black boy “get away” with the “crime.” An all-White jury acquitted Zimmerman. Martin’s murder echoes the slaughter of the 14-year-old Emmet Till in the apt...