Just got off the phone with the Rev. Jasmin Sculark at Shiloh Baptist Church in York.
Over 100 church members dressed in hoodies Sunday to honor Trayvon Martin, she said. The service was built around an anti-violence theme.
The West Locust Street church is mostly African-American, Sculark said, but she told the congregation that the Martin case isn’t about race.
“My emphasis yesterday … is that we don’t just get passionate about Trayvon Martin. We get passionate about any kind of killing,” she said. “I also talked about the fact that we don’t want to demonize George Zimmerman because all of us have been guilty of judging people based on their appearance… We’re asking for justice, but we’re saying that this is not about black against white. This is about right and wrong.”
Zimmerman is a white neighborhood watch volunteer accused of shooting Martin on Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla. Rallies are planned around the country today.
Sculark concluded the service by inviting the young people in the congregation to the alter for a group prayer. She said the young and the old in the pews wore hoodies as a tribute to Martin.
“I even had these little babies in hoodies,” she said.
Check back to this space as I will be posting photos as soon as I get them from Shiloh Baptist.
A lot of the recent information has not lent itself to a corroboration of the Zimmerman story. However given that this information has been filtered through a media that has routinely skewered the facts (digitally manipulated photo’s, a video that looked edited, a failure to report Trayvon’s posing as a thug online, outing a 13 year old they believed to be a witness for Zimmerman, calling Zimmerman a “white” and so on) I don’t feel comfortable abandoning belief that he might be a victim in all this. But yeah . . . on the surface it is not looking very good for him.