Carol Medina, left, and her cousin Blanca Zavala attend a rally following the George Zimmerman verdict in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. 
 
 Carol Medina, left, and her cousin Blanca Zavala attend a rally following the George Zimmerman verdict in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Jason Redmond/Reuters 
 
 George Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer, has been found not guilty in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin last year in Sanford, Fla. 
 
 George Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer, has been found not guilty in the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin last year in Sanford, Fla. 
 
 George Zimmerman’s acquittal Saturday night on all charges in the killing of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, sparked deep emotional reactions across the country Sunday, resurrecting an intense national debate about the role of race and racism in American life. 
 
 President Obama declared Martin’s killing an American tragedy but called for calm. 
 
 From church pews to street corners to the sprawling social-media universe, Americans expressed outrage, disgust and, in some cases, relief at the verdict. Rallies and vigils were held in Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as well as in Sanford, Fla., where the killing and the trial took place. Others were scheduled in Boston, Detroit and Baltimore. 
 
 “I grew up in Georgia, and what happened to Trayvon would be the norm for any black man in Georgia,” said James Ealey, 73, recalling an earlier, more segregated nation. “That was the way it was. We are going backwards. We are not in a post-racial America just because of Barack Obama,” he said after Sunday services at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington. 
 
 The White House issued a statement in which Obama characterized Martin’s death as “a tragedy . . . not just for his family . . . but for America.” The president acknowledged that “passions may be running ever higher” in the wake of the verdict but urged citizens to remember that a jury had spoken. 
 
 “I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son,” Obama said. “And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities . . . if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis. . . . That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.” 
 
 The verdict did little to close the stark divisions the case opened up among Americans along the jagged fissures of race and personal safety — starting when Martin was shot about 18 months ago. 
 
 A Zimmerman attorney argued throughout the case that race had little bearing on the initial confrontation or the outcome. But the case has played out against a racially charged backdrop since Zimmerman followed the unarmed Martin as he walked through his central Florida neighborhood and later said a confrontation led him to shoot Martin in self-defense. 
 
 As one side sees it, a racially biased criminal justice system was slow to charge Zimmerman and quick to believe a white man’s version of events. The other side sees in Zimmerman a law-abiding citizen who tried to protect his neighborhood and properly claimed his right to carry a weapon in self-defense. 
 
 Protesters across the country decried what they called the injustice of Zimmerman’s acquittal. They insisted that something must change in a court system and body of law that would allow an armed and self-appointed neighborhood watchman to pursue a black teenager, based on the suspicion that he was up to no good, and kill him. 
 
 A group called the Coalition for Justice for Trayvon hosted a rally Sunday afternoon at the Seminole County courthouse, where a jury of six women acquitted Zimmerman of second-degree murder. In Washington, critics of the verdict were pumping fists and chanting along the U Street corridor early Sunday morning. Among the placards they carried were these two messages: “Stop criminalizing black men” and “Only White Life is Protected in America.” 
 
 The NAACP began circulating a petition late Saturday asking Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to take action in the case as the group held its annual conference in Orlando. 
 
 “It is time for the Department of Justice to act,” the petition says. “The most fundamental of civil rights — the right to life — was violated the night George Zimmerman stalked and then took the life of Trayvon Martin.” 
 
 During a vigil Sunday night at Howard University, students, community members and alumni honored Martin with a moment of silence and the hymn “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Then Taylor Davis, a Howard student who is president of the school’s NAACP chapter, delivered a rousing address that had the crowd shouting in affirmation. 
 
 “We will honor the voice of the jury, but we will put ourselves in a position where they will honor our voices as well. Make noise,” she said. She urged her listeners to sign the petition and to register to vote so that they can cast ballots against lawmakers who support legislation like the “stand your ground” law that protected Zimmerman. 
 
 Although some people criticized the verdict, many argued that state investigators should have never prosecuted Zimmerman, because there was simply not enough evidence to prove who was the aggressor. Even legal analysts who said they strongly suspected that Martin was an innocent victim agreed that evidence proving so beyond a reasonable doubt — the standard that must be met for a guilty verdict — did not exist in this case. 
 
 Ultimately, there were no living witnesses other than Zimmerman. 
 
 Zimmerman said Martin punched him and threw him to the ground. A few neighbors testified that they heard yelps and saw an altercation but not who was doing the harm. A friend of Martin’s said he had called her on her cellphone minutes before his death, complaining that he was afraid of a “creepy-ass cracker” following him. 
 
 Attorneys for Zimmerman said at a post-verdict news conference that they were ecstatic at the decision and praised the jurors, saying they weighed the evidence carefully. But defense attorney Mark O’Mara complained that some in the public and the media turned Zimmerman into a civil rights cause — and a monster. 
 
 “If only those who decided to condemn Mr. Zimmerman as quickly and as viciously as they did would have taken just a little bit of time to find out who it was that they were condemning, it would never have happened,” O’Mara said. 
 
 Added another defense attorney, Don West: “I think the prosecution of George Zimmerman was disgraceful. . . . It makes me sad, too, that it took this long, under these circumstances, to finally get justice.” 
 
 The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation of Martin’s death shortly after his shooting. A department spokesman said Sunday that the investigation remains open and that officials are looking at whether there is enough evidence to pursue a civil rights case. 
 
 But for many Americans furious with the jury’s decision, Sunday was a day to look to their religious faith for comfort and understanding. 
 
 Among them was Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, who tweeted about her deep faith and quoted Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.” 
 
 She also tweeted: “Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!” 
 
 Martin’s parents and relatives were “in church this morning, praying and turning to God, a higher authority, to make sense of it all,” family attorney Benjamin Crump said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” The family cannot believe the verdict, Crump said. 
 
 They don’t fault the prosecutors, he said, but they are trying to make sense of the jury’s decision while continuing to mourn the 17-year-old’s death. Family members are trying to decide what to do next and will look into filing a civil lawsuit. They have set up a foundation in Martin’s memory and pledge to fight gun violence. 
 
 In sermons Sunday, many pastors mentioned the verdict and the pain it had caused their flocks. At some churches, members wore hooded sweatshirts in Martin’s honor to bring attention to racial stereotypes about young black men who wear such attire. 
 
 But Sunday was a day of celebration for supporters of Zimmerman, who believed he had properly defended himself from a threat and should never have been prosecuted. 
 
 His brother, Robert Zimmerman Jr., tweeted early in the day: “Message from Dad: ‘Our whole family is relieved’. Today . . . I’m proud to be an American. God Bless America! Thank you for your prayers!” 
 
 Manuel Roig-Franza in Sanford, Fla., and Hamil R. Harris, Sari Horwitz and Julie Zauzmer in Washington contributed to this report. ||||| President Obama did something Friday that he hardly ever does — and no other president could ever have done. He addressed the racial fault lines in the country by laying bare his personal anguish and experience in an effort to help white Americans understand why African-Americans reacted with frustration and anger to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. 
 
 Mr. Obama’s comments during a surprise appearance at the White House press briefing crystallized the dissonance around this case. In the narrow confines of the trial, all talk of race was excluded, and the “stand your ground” element in Florida’s self-defense law was not invoked by Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyers. But in the broader, more profound and more troubling context of Mr. Martin’s death, race and Florida’s lax gun laws are inextricably interwoven. 
 
 On the first, Mr. Obama said: “The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments.” The jurors, he added, “were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict.” 
 
 But on the broader context, Mr. Obama eloquently rebutted those — like Representative Andy Harris, a Republican, with his dismissive “get over it” remark on Tuesday — who said that the verdict should have ended discussion of the case, especially talk about race and gun laws. 
 
 “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.” 
 
 He said there are “very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store” or “the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.” 
 
 “That,” he said, “includes me.” 
 
 Mr. Obama said African-Americans are also acutely aware that “there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.” 
 
 He said it would be naïve not to recognize that young African-American men are “disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence.” But using those statistics “to then see sons treated differently causes pain,” he said. 
 
 Mr. Obama called on the Justice Department to work with local and state law enforcement to reduce mistrust in the policing system, including ending racial profiling. He also called for an examination of state and local laws to see whether they “are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case.” 
 
 Mr. Obama raised questions about the message that “stand your ground” laws send, telling a citizen that he “potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation.” 
 
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 Mr. Obama noted that Mr. Zimmerman did not invoke that defense. But he said it was still relevant. In one of the most powerful parts of his remarks, he said: “I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?” 
 
 If the answer is “at least ambiguous,” Mr. Obama said, “we might want to examine those kinds of laws.” 
 
 Mr. Obama said Americans needed to give African-American boys “the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.” 
 
 He said he was not talking about “some grand, new federal program” or even a national “conversation on race,” which he said often ends up being “stilted and politicized” and reaffirms pre-existing positions. 
 
 In a way, Mr. Obama began that conversation with these remarks, while speaking directly to African-Americans who have longed to hear him identify with their frustrations and their anger. 
 
 It is a great thing for this country to have a president who could do what Mr. Obama did on Friday. It is sad that we still need him to do it.
– Barack Obama famously and controversially weighed in on Trayvon Martin's death ("If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"), but the president will not be getting involved in the DOJ's looming decision on whether to prosecute George Zimmerman on civil rights charges, Politico reports. Obama "has no position to express" on the matter, White House press secretary Jay Carney said today. Obama did, however, weigh in on Zimmerman's not-guilty verdict, and Carney said that's because it "was fairly big news and it was something that was being watched nationally." As for the fact that Obama got involved in the Trayvon case in the first place, the president's "interference in a local law enforcement matter was unprecedented and inappropriate, and he comes away from the case looking badly tarnished by his poor judgment," writes civil rights expert Abigail Thernstrom for CNN. Other than having the same skin color, Obama's hypothetical son would have led a life "almost as dissimilar from Trayvon's as one could imagine," full of affluence and privilege, Thernstrom points out, noting that not "all brown-skinned boys are the same." The National Bar Association, the country's oldest and biggest national association of principally African American lawyers and judges, released a statement on the Zimmerman verdict yesterday. "We are extremely disappointed," it reads. "As lawyers we respect the rule of law, but in this instance the Zimmerman verdict sadly highlights the continued injustices Black Americans face in the US legal system." The organization has scheduled a "call to action" in Miami on July 27 and 29. One of the jurors is about to get a book deal, and Gawker features a video of her questioning as a potential juror, during which she revealed her distaste for the media ("Newspapers are used in the parrot's cage, not even read. ... It's a lot better use in the parrot cage.") and, asked to describe Trayvon Martin, referred to him as "a boy of color."