I was in court with Barbara Anderson Young this week when three of the white teens who beat, ran over and killed her brother last June in a Mississippi parking lot pleaded guilty to murder and hate crimes. Those three now face life sentences in prison.

On April 25, 1963, my father, Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, came to Alabama to ask Gov. George Wallace to stop discriminating against black people. That morning, Wallace raised the Confederate battle flag over the Capitol, where he and my father would meet. His answer would be "no."

George Zimmerman appears to have concluded that young Trayvon Martin was "suspicious" based on nothing more than his race and the fact that Trayvon was walking in Zimmerman's neighborhood. Sadly, such assumptions are made about black youth every day. And they play out in a million disastrous ways.