A man wears a hoodie before the start of a church service in New York, March 25, 2012. (Seth Wenig/AP)
In their Sunday sermons, pastors and church leaders across the country mourned the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old African-American who was killed in Sanford, Fla., last month. Some wore hoodies in Martin's honor. Many church-goers did the same.
In Atlanta, dozens wore hoodies in Martin's memory at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
"They said his name was Trayvon Martin," a hoodie-clad Rev. Raphael Warnock said. "But he looked like Emmett Till," a reference to the 1955 case of a 14-year-old boy who was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. "At least with Emmett Till someone was arrested. And that was in 1955."
Many others called for justice in the case--and for George Zimmerman, the Neighborhood Watch captain who shot Martin, to be arrested.
Rev. Jesse Jackson called Martin a "martyr," and led the congregation at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville, Fla., in a chant: "Stop the violence. Save the children."
"Whether you are wearing a hood or a sheet, nobody has the right to kill anybody," Jackson said. "The danger of focusing on the hoodie is that he wasn't killed because of the hoodie. He was killed because he was black. The issue is not the hoodie--it's race, registration and civil rights."
Jackson also compared Martin's death to Till, as well as those of slain civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King.
"There's power in the blood of Emmett Till," Jackson preached. "There's power in in the blood of Medgar Evers! There's power in the blood of Dr. King!"
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