Introduction xv
on August 28, 1955, because he flirted with a white woman. A white mob
lynched Mack Charles Parker in Poplarville, Mississippi, on April 25, 1959:
Parker, a 23-year-old truck driver, had been accused of raping a pregnant
white woman while her four-year-old daughter was in the vicinity. Al-
though Parker had pled not guilty to the charges, he was indicted and set to
go to trial. But three days prior to his trial some 8 to 10 whites dragged him
out of his jail cell, shot him twice in the chest, weighed his body down with
chains, and threw him into a river. Parker’s waterlogged body was found in
the river 10 days later. Residents of Poplarville reportedly knew the names
of Parker’s killers, but no one was ever brought to justice in the case.
The Trayvon Martin murder case even echoes the June 21, 1964, mur-
ders of civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mi-
chael Schwerner—who were 21, 20, and 24 years old, respectively, at the
time. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi by
20 members of the local Ku Klux Klan who were furious that the three had
come to their state to take part in organizing during 1964’s “Freedom Sum-
mer” campaign, designed to help ensure voting rights for African Ameri-
cans. The Klan worked with a local Neshoba County sheriff to have the
three young men stopped while they were driving down a highway: Chaney,
Goodman, and Schwerner were abducted by the Klan members, beaten,
shot, and murdered. Their bodies were buried so deep in an earthen dam
that the 44-day search for their bodies made national news. Trayvon Mar-
tin’s murder echoes the long history of black lynchings in the United States:
Martin’s murder based on his “appearance” as a potential criminal follows
the tradition of black people being under suspicion of organizing an insur-
rection, or raping white women, or not following local customs (i.e., flirting
with a white woman, promoting civil rights, or walking in a gated commu-
nity without prior approval from a self-styled security guard). A white per-
son’s fear about who Trayvon Martin and Mack Parker and James Earl
Chaney and Emmett Till were led to their murders.
African American–Latino Relations in the 21st Century: When Worlds
Collide looks at the far-reaching imprint the Trayvon Martin shooting has
had on the idea of relations between blacks and Latinos in the United States
and in other parts of the world. From my journalistic standpoint, the “Afri-
can American world” and the “Latinx world” often collide; because the two
communities are often side by side, they have formed a complex set of re-
lationships. Although there are occasional conflicts, there is a general com-
monality among the groups—particularly as both continue to be confronted
by white supremacist racism. The murder of Trayvon Martin is but one of
many instances that show how people of African descent—in the United
States and in Latin America—are viewed and treated by the societies they
