The Freedom Fighters of Florida

IN MARCH 2012, with George Zimmerman still not charged for the killing of Trayvon Martin, three former student activists, Phillip Agnew, Ahmad Abuznaid, and Gabriel Pendas, issued a call to action on Facebook.

- Sierra Lyons

Nailah Summers, then a student at the University of Florida, was on the conference call set up to discuss what could be done; she had gone on a school trip to Mississippi, and the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was still present in her mind.

Social-justice history has often been made by the young: Members of the Black Panther Party were on average around 20 years old. The Little Rock Nine were high-school students, and the Greensboro Four were college students. The group on that call soon organized a march from Daytona Beach to Sanford, the town where Trayvon was killed. They named themselves the Dream Defenders, after the famous speech and the Langston Hughes poem. It was a good start, but not until Zimmerman’s acquittal did they galvanize into one of the most effective social-justice organizations in Florida, with chapters—they call them “Squadds”—in seven cities.

Until that verdict, “there hadn’t been a huge high-profile case that our generation was paying attention to,” says Summers. “So we were definitely at that point still holding on to hope.” Today, Summers is co-director of the organization with two other Black women, Jonel Edwards (who was a student at the University of Florida when she became involved) and Rachel Gilmer (who arrived in 2015). “We were hopeful and then we were watching this little TV, and it was just a mess,” Summers says. “We were quiet, we were crying, and then it was just like, ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’”