Trayvon Martin's Death — Collage of people wearing hoodies in solidarity with Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin's Death

2012eventclassic

Published October 3, 2026

The February 2012 shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida was ignored for weeks until an online petition by Martin's parents went viral in March. The story then became one of the defining social media stories of the early 2010s, spawning the Million Hoodie March, the #WeAreTrayvonMartin hashtag, and the Skittles-and-iced-tea protest image.

protest memes hashtag memes social justice memes race and identity memes 2012 memes

Overview

The shooting of Trayvon Martin generated a cluster of linked internet campaigns rather than a single meme format. The symbols that recurred across posts were the hoodie Martin was wearing, the bag of Skittles he had just bought, and the can of Arizona Iced Tea he was carrying when he was killed1. These items showed up in protest photography, Tumblr single-topic blogs, hashtag chains like #WeAreTrayvonMartin and #MillionHoodies, and later in offensive imitations6.

The campaign ran on a format of personal identification: participants photographed themselves in hoodies and posted the images to Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, often with text explaining a time they had been racially profiled2. The Change.org petition started by Martin's parents was the center of gravity. It gathered 2.2 million signatures by late March 2012, which Change.org told the Los Angeles Times was the biggest petition the site had ever seen, with up to 1,000 signatures arriving per minute3.

A second thread of activity ran on 4chan's /pol/ board, which treated the case as a target for trolling. A user calling themselves "Klanklannon" claimed to have hacked Martin's email and social media and posted the credentials to Stormfront6. The following year, /pol/ users dialed into a Skype witness testimony during Zimmerman's trial after a prosecutor's username was shown on live TV6.

Origin & Background

Platform
Change.org (petition) / Twitter (viral spread)
Creator
Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton
Date
2012

On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, in Sanford, Florida. Martin was unarmed and had just walked back from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea7. Zimmerman called the police to report Martin as a suspicious person, was told not to follow him, followed him anyway, and shot him during a physical confrontation that Zimmerman later described as self-defense. He was taken into custody that evening but was not charged6.

For nearly two weeks the case drew little attention. Martin's parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton, launched a Change.org petition on March 8, 2012 asking Florida's 4th District State's Attorney Angela Corey to investigate and prosecute Zimmerman7. That petition is what pulled the case into national coverage. By March 21 ABC News reported it was the fastest-growing petition in Change.org's history, with 800 signatures per minute2.

How It Spread

The hashtag #TrayvonMartin went into wide circulation on March 19, 2012 after Mike Tyson, Anderson Cooper, Spike Lee, Michael Moore and Nancy Grace all posted about the case6. The same day, digital strategist Daniel Maree published a blog post and a YouTube video calling on people to wear hoodies and march on the United Nations in New York on March 218. Several hundred people showed up to that first Million Hoodie March, and copycat rallies ran in Philadelphia on March 23 and in Los Angeles and Iowa on March 266.

Two big flashpoints followed. On March 22, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera tweeted that Martin's hoodie was "as much responsible for [his] death as George Zimmerman" and then repeated the claim on Fox & Friends the next morning4. The response produced the single-topic Tumblr "Geraldo in a Hoodie," a Buzzfeed piece pointing out that Fox News was selling a hooded sweatshirt in its online store, and the quiet disappearance of that sweatshirt from the shop within hours5. On March 23, LeBron James posted a photo of the Miami Heat with their hoods up on Twitter, which pushed the hashtag's volume to its peak the next day9. Pew Research later found that 28% of tweets between March 17 and March 28 contained messages of outrage or calls for justice6.

The case kept producing viral moments after that first wave. On March 23 Spike Lee retweeted an address claimed to be Zimmerman's that actually belonged to an unrelated elderly couple named David and Elaine McClain, who were forced to leave their home after receiving a bag of Skittles in the mail; Lee publicly apologized on March 286. On March 29 Gawker broke the story that a self-described white supremacist calling themselves "Klanklannon" had hacked Martin's email and posted the credentials to Stormfront10. In April 2012 the "Trayvoning" photo fad surfaced, in which people posed on the ground with Skittles and an iced tea; Clutch Magazine's "Trayvoning: This Trend Has to Stop" piece on May 17 kicked off wider coverage and the shutdown of the associated Facebook pages6. Zimmerman was acquitted on July 13, 2013, which triggered a new round of protests, the Bob Seay "I am not Trayvon Martin" Facebook post that spawned the "We Are Not Trayvon Martin" Tumblr, and the Juror B37 book-deal backlash that collapsed within a day6.

Timeline

2016-05-11

Zimmerman lists the gun used to kill Martin on GunBroker.com for a starting bid of $5,000; the auction is pulled a day later.

How to Use This Meme

Participation in the online campaigns typically meant one of three gestures: signing the Change.org petition, posting a photo of yourself in a hoodie to Twitter or Tumblr with the hashtag #MillionHoodies or #WeAreTrayvonMartin, or sharing a short statement about personal experience with racial profiling to blogs like "I Am Trayvon Martin" and later "We Are Not Trayvon Martin"1. Attending a Million Hoodie March in person, which started in Manhattan on March 21, 2012 and spread to Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Iowa within a week, was the offline version of the same gesture6.

Frequently Asked Questions