In some sense, it's history you could recount from many places in America: It could be Miami, where Trayvon Martin came up, and where rioters scorched the streets in the 1980s over black motorists killed by police. It could be Prince Edward County, Virginia, near where George Zimmerman grew up, and where the county board of supervisors once abolished public education rather than comply with integration. Or it could be southern Wisconsin, where not long ago a noose and racial threats turned up on a college campus, and where earlier this month another gun owner killed a black man allegedly in self-defense.

But when it comes to a history of fear, racism, and violence, Sanford, Florida, has a particularly fraught past, one that traces right up to the night a month ago when an unarmed black kid was shot dead on one of its streets, and his killer went free.