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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to address NAACP amid probe of Trayvon Martin case
(Bloomberg) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (pictured), resuming an investigation into the fatal shooting of an African American teenager in Florida, will travel to the state today to speak to the group that’s demanding civil-rights charges in the case.
As he speaks at the NAACP’s (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) annual convention today, the public focus for the country’s first African American attorney general has shifted from the probe to a broader dialogue on race – a topic he has tried to broach with varying degrees of success during his more than four years leading the Justice Department.
“This tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly about the complicated and emotionally charged issues that this case has raised,” Holder said yesterday in a speech to the national convention of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in Washington.
“We must not – as we have too often in the past – let this opportunity pass.”
The shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an African American teenager, by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman exposed anew racial divisions in the U.S.
Zimmerman’s acquittal on a state second-degree murder charge by an almost all-white Florida jury on July 13 prompted scattered protests in cities including San Francisco, New York and Chicago.
Holder, has made civil-rights enforcement a focus of his tenure. Yet in the Martin case his department faces significant hurdles, according to former prosecutors.
