More than a year after the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, many legal, social and cultural questions raised by the case are still being discussed across the country. The Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations will analyze a number of these questions during the 10^th annual CSRRR Spring Lecture, which will bring together experts from nine different departments at UF along with keynote speaker, New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow.

“At Close Range: The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” is March 20 at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in the Chesterfield Smith Ceremonial Classroom, HOL 180. The panel presentations will be from 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. and Blow’s keynote lecture will be from noon – 1:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public and law school parking restrictions will be lifted in the green lots.

The panels will look at a wide variety of issues raised by the case, from a multitude of academic perspectives.  Some of the featured panels include “Jim Crow Riding High: The 21^st Century Assault on African-American Voting Rights in Florida,” “Half-Baked: Weed, Race and the Demonization of Trayvon Martin,” and “Racial Profiling, Security and Human Rights.”

“The Trayvon Martin case is a social touchstone precisely because it serves up topics we’re uncomfortable talking about in public, including race, crime, policing, interracial crime, use of deadly force, black crime victims, Southern race relations, media representations of race, and gun control,” said Katheryn Russell-Brown, director of the CSRRR and Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law. “The case offers an important opportunity for us to learn about, discuss and debate these myriad and overlapping issues. Our spring lecture event will contribute to the national discussion of the case and emphasize policy recommendations.”

The departments of political science; health services; philosophy; sociology, criminology and law; journalism and communications; history; English; anthropology, and African-American studies will all be represented. The academic papers, which comprise the basis for the panel discussions, will be compiled for the first installment in a new series in collaboration with UF Law’s Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center. The panel agendas and abstracts for the papers can be seen in the Collections of the UF Law Scholarship Repository at, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/csrrr_events/10thspringlecture/panels/. For more information regarding the spring lecture, please visit the CSRRR homepage, http://www.law.ufl.edu/academics/centers/csrrr.

The University of Florida Levin College of Law’s CSRRR is committed to fostering communities of dialogue on race. The center creates and supports programs designed to enhance race-related curriculum development for faculty, staff and students in collegiate and professional schools. Of the five U.S. law schools with race centers, the CSRRR is uniquely focused on curriculum development.

About Charles Blow

After graduating cum laude from Grambling State University, keynote speaker Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. The Louisiana native went on to become the paper’s design director for news before leaving in 2006 to become the art director of National Geographic Magazine.

Blow often appears on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, Starting Point and AC360. He has also appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and Hardball with Chris Matthews, Fox News’ Fox and Friends, the BBC and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous radio programs.

The University of Florida Levin College of Law co-sponsored a visit from Les Payne, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, to UF's Pugh Hall on April 11. (Photo by Nicole Safker)

By Nicole Safker (2L)

Thirty-five years ago, a group of black students in Soweto, a large settlement outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, left their classrooms and gathered in the streets to protest yet another oppressive government directive. During this time, the apartheid government was requiring half of all school subjects be taught in Afrikaans, a language viewed as the native tongue of the oppressors.

Black students – who had already been forced out of Johannesburg and into Soweto to live in substandard conditions – finally had enough. By the end of the overwhelmingly peaceful student demonstrations, more than 500 black schoolchildren had been killed by white government soldiers.

Les Payne, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, caught wind of the uprising and knew he had to be there to bring home the stories of the students and their struggle.

One problem: Les was black. As a black man, he essentially had the same rights as the protesting students themselves under the apartheid regime, which were limited.

On April 11, faculty and other members of the community gathered in the Pugh Hall Auditorium on the main campus of the University of Florida to listen to Payne detail his experience covering the Soweto Uprising as an “honorary white person,” a status the government gave him so he could speak to and interview government officials and otherwise move freely about the country.

During apartheid, blacks, who made up 87 percent of the South Africa population, were given 13 percent of the worst land in South Africa. The tiny minority of white European descendants who held power enjoyed free reign and all the spoils of the country.

Payne, through favors and good luck, made it through the visa process and was allowed into South Africa. When he got there, he met resistance despite his government status being “white.”

Payne described the events of the uprising and the public outcry that resulted from his coverage of the events. White South Africans asked, “Should we be killing children simply because they don’t want to learn our language?” and “The answer from the police was yes, and they continued firing,” Payne said. Those around the world looked on in disbelief.

In addition to the stories and photos he sent home to Newsday, Payne also embarked on a project to help those in Soweto whose children and other loved ones were missing and also calculate an actual figure of how many were killed during the uprising. Since the government forbade the hospitals to keep accurate records of shootings related to the uprising – many government-inflicted bullet wounds were recorded as “abscesses” during this time – Payne and a colleague visited Sowetan morticians and later government offices to peruse death records under a pretense. Through his extensive search, he had calculated that more than 600 people were killed by the apartheid regime and published the victims’ names he found in a local newspaper.

He said his motivation for covering the events was not to win another Pulitzer Prize; but that it was most important for him to help the “families in Soweto – parents searching for their children.”

Payne is traveling around the country speaking to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising. Over the course of his long career, Payne served as Newsday’s associate editor, local and national reporter and foreign correspondent and columnist. He also served as Newsday’s New York Editor and under his editorship his news staffs won every major journalism award, including six Pulitzer prices and a bevy of other honors and distinctions.

Payne’s visit to UF was co-sponsored by the Levin College of Law, the UF Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations, UF Center for African Studies, UF College of Journalism and Communications and the Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere.