New Play Explores Life, Legacy of Slain Teen Trayvon Martin

New Play Explores Life, Legacy of Slain Teen Trayvon Martin
BY ASSOCIATED PRESS | THE PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE

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[two_third padding=”0 30px 0 10px”][dropcap]PHILADELPHIA[/dropcap] (AP) — A play debuting at Philadelphia’s New Freedom Theatre will explore Trayvon Martin’s life and the moments before his death.
“The Ballad of Trayvon Martin” was co-written by Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj, a playwright and activist who says he could not shake the 17-year-old’s fatal shooting in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. Maharaj wrote the play six months after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted in Martin’s death in 2013. It includes spoken word and dance.

Maharaj says Martin’s death is on a continuum that includes the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. He says the play is meant to ask the audience how the country moves ahead so that the deaths of young black men are not in vain.[/two_third][one_third_last padding=”0 0px 0 10px”]

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[/otw_shortcode_info_box][mashshare]SHOOTING OF TRAYVON MARTIN
On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, United States, George Zimmerman fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American high school student. Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed race Hispanic man was the neighborhood watch coordinator for the gated community where Martin was temporarily living and where the shooting took place. WIKIPEDIA[/one_third_last]