Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant met with Trayvon Martin’s parents and spoke at a Los Angeles rally on Saturday that honored the slain teenager. The event was described as an “an anti-gun violence and racial profiling rally” at Crenshaw “on the one-year anniversary of the controversial George Zimmerman verdict.”
Bryant got himself into some controversy when he initially said that blacks should not defend other blacks just because of their skin color when asked about the Martin case.
“I won’t react to something just because I’m supposed to, because I’m an African-American,” Bryant told the New Yorker. “That argument doesn’t make any sense to me. So we want to advance as a society and a culture, but, say, if something happens to an African-American we immediately come to his defense? Yet you want to talk about how far we’ve progressed as a society? Well… then don’t jump to somebody’s defense just because they’re African-American. You sit and you listen to the facts just like you would in any other situation, right? So I won’t assert myself.”
As Breitbart Sports reported, Bryant walked back those comments a bit after he was called everything from “cornball” to “jerk” by tweeting, “Travon Martin was wronged THATS my opinion and thats what I believe the FACTS showed. The system did not work #myopinion.”