Sanford, Fla., residents: ‘We are good people’
Comparisons to 1960s South are unfair, some say questing comment.
“It’s a beautiful city, and we have a lot of good qualities, but if this is the publicity the city needs to straighten things up as far as the law, then so be it,” says Lazarus Mitchell, 30, who coaches in a football athletic league at Fort Mellon Park, the site of one of the largest rallies. Mitchell, who is black, has white and black children on his teams.
Norton Bonaparte, Sanford’s first black city manager, says he understands the anger. He has called on the Justice Department, which is investigating Trayvon’s death, to probe other times when people have raised concerns about police.
Bonaparte, a transplant from Topeka, was on the job for five months when Trayvon was killed. He was smitten with Sanford when he came for a job interview in July.
“I drove down this beautiful waterfront, people were out walking, there were people of all races,” he says. “They were all out enjoying themselves. It seemed idyllic.”
“What happened between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman was tragic, (but) these are two individuals out of a community of 54,000. Let’s put that in perspective,” Bonaparte says.
Economic development director Nicholas Mcray, who is white, says, “It’s obviously a tumultuous time.”
He says the attention brought by the shooting “doesn’t help” efforts to build on the city’s growth in the past decade. The population grew 40% since 2000.
Bonaparte and Mcray point to the rebuilt river walk along the southern edge of Lake Monroe, the refurbished park across the way that hosts 90,000 people every July 4 and the spiffed-up downtown with its brick sidewalks, benches and new facades.
Mcray says more redevelopment is under discussion for the city’s main thoroughfare, French Avenue, a boulevard of check-cashing places, fast food, boarded-up businesses and vacant lots. The housing authority has met with federal officials to figure out how to redevelop land where now-closed housing projects sit in Goldsboro, a black neighborhood with boarded-up houses and storefronts and homes in need of repair.
Mcray says Sanford strives to live up to its slogan, “The Friendly City.” Its website has a map of downtown and places to stay and eat for out-of-town demonstrators.
Kruckemyer and friend Hank Dieckhaus discussed the case last week as they sat outside the Taste of Thyme Café.
Dieckhaus, 64, who is white, moved to Sanford from Philadelphia nine years ago. He says he has attended all the meetings and rallies for Trayvon Martin.
“I wanted to go to show support,” he says. Still, he adds, “This is not 1965. This is not Selma, Ala., or Birmingham. This is Sanford, Fla., 2012, and we’ll get through this.”
SANFORD, Fla. — Thao Boyd, a Vietnamese immigrant in this small city at the center of a national uproar over racial profiling, wants people to know one thing about her community:
“Everybody knows Sanford now, but don’t be scared about Sanford,” says Boyd, 37, who owns a nail salon downtown. “Come visit us whenever you are ready.”
In the 15 years Boyd has lived here, she says, she has never felt discriminated against. What’s more, she says, she can drive the 15 minutes from her house to the salon and know a family on almost every block where she could stop and ask for help if she needed it. “We are good people here,” she says. This city of 54,000, once known for its vast celery fields, is now known as the place where an unarmed 17-year-old black teen was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer.
Trayvon Martin died on Feb. 26. Police did not arrest the shooter, George Zimmerman, 28. Zimmerman is white and Hispanic.
The Orlando Sentinel reported Sunday that two voice identification experts it contacted said the person overheard on a 911 call that night was not Zimmerman, who told police he was screaming for help. Trayvon’s mother says it was her son’s voice.
As activists, celebrities and ordinary folks across the country call for Zimmerman’s arrest, Sanford has been overwhelmed with news trucks, reporters, civil rights leaders including Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and thousands of protesters. Another rally was held Sunday in Miami.
At a meeting with city commissioners March 26, Sharpton warned that Sanford risks becoming the 21st century’s Selma or Birmingham, two Southern cities that became synonymous with racial hate during the 1960s civil rights movement. People here say the comparison is unfair. “Sanford is not a racist town; it’s just not,” says Nancy Kruckemyer, 57, who is white. “Everybody wants justice.”
Some black residents, too, say Sanford is no longer a community with flagrant racial tension. About a third of the city’s residents are black.
Pastor Valarie Houston agrees that the races generally get along fine. She says the tension that exists sits squarely with police.
“The police department is not fair to the African-american community,” she says. She says investigations are weak or non-existent when black people are killed, and the Trayvon Martin case is “just one of many.”
The police department did not return phone calls re-