Smithsonian museum director interested in acquiring Trayvon Martin's hoodie
Sift everything. Sift the weeks of testimony, the theatrics, the recriminations, the tears. Sift the months of noisy commentary — the relentless, pounding, grating noise.
One image remains, clinging there to our consciousness. Sturdy, permanent, enduring, a distillation — a takeaway.
In the moment that the hoodie — Trayvon Martin’s hoodie — appeared in Courtroom 5D in Seminole County, Fla., it was as if the air sluiced out the door. There was a breathless, aching stillness.
Prosecutors displayed the dark gray sweatshirt that Martin wore on the last night of his life in an enormous, rectangular, thickly three-dimensional frame. The hoodie lay suspended between clear plastic sheets with its arms spread wide inside a cross-shaped cutout, set starkly apart from the brilliant white of the matting. It might easily have been mistaken for a religious relic, even as it became a singularly evocative entry in a long inventory of indelible courtroom artifacts from O.J. Simpson’s ill-fitting gloves to Lorena Bobbitt’s emasculating kitchen knife. Prosecutors lifted the framed hoodie awkwardly, teetering toward the jury.
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Smithsonian interest
“I would like to see it preserved,” the Rev. Al Sharpton proclaimed into a cellphone on his way to a White House meeting about voting rights with President Obama.
Sharpton, more than any other person, might be responsible for bringing the Martin killing to trial. He organized the huge rally in Sanford that brought such pressure on Florida officials that the governor eventually appointed a special prosecutor to take on the case.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-will-become-of-trayvons-hoodie-the-latest-piece-of-iconic-trial-evidence/2013/07/30/0882de30-f951-11e2-afc1-c850c6ee5af8_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost