Dream Defenders: The First Ten Years

In 2005, Florida became the first in a large group of states to pass legislation which has come to be known collectively as Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws. These laws took various forms, but generally removed the legal requirement to retreat from a threatening situation when outside one’s home. Stand Your Ground laws were criticized widely for contributing to a rise in homicides rather than lowering crime rates. More disturbingly, between 2005 and 2012, a review of SYG cases in Florida revealed that when a shooter was Black and the victim white, there was a significantly greater likelihood that a SYG claim would be denied than if the shooter was white and the victim Black (ABA, 2015; Ackerman et al, 2015; National Urban League, 2013; Mack & Roberts-Lewis, 2016). This takes us to the threshold of the murder of Trayvon Martin by George ZimmermanThis chapter explores the protests, organizing and activism of a group which calls itself the Dream Defenders. It made the murder of Trayvon Martin a reckoning for white supremacy and Stand Your Ground laws. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) began to coalesce in 2013 after the not guilty verdict for George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, but arguably gained national and international scale after the murder by police of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. While police killings of Black men, women and children have continued since Ferguson, opposition to Stand Your Ground (SYG) legislation in Florida was core to the work of Phillip Agnew and the Dream Defenders. I will first discuss Phillip Agnew’s previous activism, involving protests over the murder of Martin Lee Anderson while in detention at a juvenile detention camp in Panama City, Florida in 2006. I will then discuss the formation of Dream Defenders, and the broadening of its affiliations and actions. I will examine the other streams of activism in which Dream Defenders have taken part as covered in both traditional and campus newspapers in Florida from 2012-2022. I will conclude with a discussion of the ways in which Dream Defenders and its ongoing work have created a bridge between the protest movements of the Civil Rights era and this era of Black activism, which it helped to usher in.