THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY ★^1143end of racial inequality was premature. In 2012, Trayvon Martin, a black teen-
ager walking through a Florida neighborhood to visit his father, was accosted
by George Zimmerman, a white member of the “neighborhood watch.” An
altercation followed in which Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. Subse-
quently, a jury acquitted Zimmerman of all charges related to the incident. In
2014, Eric Garner, a forty- four- year- old black man selling cigarettes on the street
in Staten Island, a borough of New York City, died after being wrestled to the
ground and choked by police. Although “choke holds” were illegal, a grand jury
declined to bring charges. In ensuing months other such incidents followed
including the shooting death by a Cleveland police officer of a twelve- year- old
black child who was playing with a toy pistol in a park, the death of a twenty-
five- year- old black man in Baltimore while in a police van after being arrested
for carrying a small knife (legal in Maryland), and the fatal shooting in the
back of a black man who ran from police after a traffic stop in North Charleston,
South Carolina. In Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, Michael Brown,
an unarmed black eighteen- year- old, was shot in disputed circumstances by
a white police officer, whom a grand jury subsequently cleared of potential
charges. In Baltimore and North Charleston, by contrast, local district attorneys
moved to indict the police implicated in these cities’ deaths.
This cascade of events spurred the emergence of a national movement,
Black Lives Matter, which demanded that police practices be changed and
What were the major challenges of Obama’s first term?Heavily armed police confront a resident of Ferguson, Missouri, during demonstrations there.