U of’T expert explores the George Zimmerman verdict

On July 13, in a case watched around the world, an American jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter charges in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. After the verdict, protests ranging from peaceful to violent broke out across almost every major American city. U of'T News asked Bissell-Hyde-Associates Chair of American Studies Rick Halpern, a professor of History and the dean and vice-principal (Academic) at the University of Toronto Scarborough, about the case and race relations in America. What sort of impact could this case have on race relations in America? It's hard to say, seeing how it's only been a week since the verdict came down. I can say that the history of race relations in the United States is regularly punctuated for 200 plus years with critical legal and judicial decisions that have decisively reshaped racial politics - cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, or Dred Scott v. Sandford, which upheld segregation in the late 19th century under the legal fiction of "separate but equal," come immediately to mind. But these were Supreme Court decisions that dealt with legal principle, not the lower courts weighing in, so it is really to early to tell. We're seeing public protests across America.