Former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason announces a draft pick during the third round of the NFL Draft, Friday, April 26, 2013 at Radio City Music Hall in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

by Greg Botelho

(CNN) -- If he had been listening from his car Monday morning, radio veteran Steak Shapiro knew what he would have thought of a bit mocking a former New Orleans Saint now battling Lou Gehrig's disease.

"I would have been offended."

Why? The now former host of "Mayhem in the AM" on Atlanta's 790 The Zone offered up plenty of reasons in an interview Tuesday with CNN's Brooke Baldwin. And none of his descriptions of the now infamous two-minute radio bit were positive.

JOHNNY C. TAYLOR, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE THURGOOD MARSHALL COLLEGE FUND

by Freddie Allen

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Saint Paul’s College, a historically Black college founded in 1888 in partnership with the Episcopal Church, announced last week that it’s shutting down and working to help current students transfer to other institutions.

The school, located in Lawrenceville, Va., announced that it was closing after a deal that would have allowed Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C. to acquire the struggling college collapsed under the weight of Saint Paul’s debt.

Already mired in debt, Saint Paul’s College terminated its sports programs in 2011 to cut costs. When the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a regional group that certifies degree-granting institutions, rescinded the schools accreditation last summer, administrators went to court to get it back.

Now, both the accreditation and the school are gone.

Areva Martin

By Freddie Allen

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Areva Martin watched her youngest child play with growing concern. Marty was almost 18 months old and he didn’t play like other kids his age. Instead of racing toy cars on a track or across the floor, Marty would organize them in lines. He did the same thing with crayons. Instead of scribbling on paper or trying to color, he would just line them up. Marty played obsessively with random objects that he would find around the house: a house shoe, a cup, or a spoon would consume hours of playtime. But Martin, a lawyer living in Los Angeles, was most concerned about his speech.

“The first thing that came to my mind was, ‘This kid isn’t speaking, so let’s get him to a speech therapist,’” she said. After several months with a speech therapist, and no signs of improvement, Martin took her son to a developmental pediatrician. That’s when she learned that Marty was autistic.

“I knew very little about autism. I wasn’t even thinking about autism,” said Martin. “It wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary.”

In this Sept. 20, 1955 file photo, jurors sit in a courtroom in Summer, Miss. for the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam who are charged with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till. Acquitted by the all-White jury, the two confessed to the killing of the Black teenager in a 1956 Look magazine article. From left in the front row are Gus Ramsey, James Toole, E.L. Price, J.A. Shaw Jr., Ray Tribble and Ed Devaney. In the second row are Travis Thomas, George Holland, Jim Pennington, Davis Newton, Howard Armstrong and Bishop Matthews. (AP Photo/File)

 
(AP) —Focus on the details, and the cases seem very different. One was killed by virulent White racists, the other by a part- Hispanic neighborhood watchman who insists he faced a vicious attack. One was weighted down and dumped in a river; in the other case, police were called by the shooter himself.

Six decades and myriad details separate the deaths of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, two Black teenagers felled by violence. Yet in the way America reacted to Martin's death - and the issues that echoed afterward - his case has created a national racial conversation in the much same manner as the saga of Till, infamously murdered in 1955 for flirting with a White woman.