Articles on Ferguson and Black Uprising reprinted from the November-December 2014 issue of The Organizer newspaper EDITORIAL Ferguson and the Struggle for Black Freedom Today When Pat Bailey, an elderly Black woman in St. Louis County, learned of the grand jury exoneration of Darren Wilson, the white cop who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, she was not surprised. She told The Guardian of London, “I’ve lived long enough to know that if you’re African American in this country you’re not considered a human being.” Hundreds of thousands of people – mostly Black youth – have taken to the streets in more than 1,100 cities across the country echoing Ms. Bailey’s anger with chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace!” The demonstrations, many of them spontaneous outbursts of rage, have continued week after week — which is unprecedented. The list of Black victims of racist police violence -- growing numbers are calling it genocide -- increases by the day. List of Victims Grows by the Day • There was Michael Brown, whose killer was let off scot-free by a grand jury in the pockets of the white cops and a prosecutor at their service – a decision that sparked outrage across the country. • There was Dontre Hamilton, who was shot 14 times by police officer Chris Manney in a public park in downtown Milwaukee. A Starbucks manager had called the police to remove Hamilton from the public park near their business, where he was resting after a long walk. When officer Manney responded to the call by Starbucks, he woke up Hamilton by illegally patting him down and poking him with his baton. Hamilton reacted by grabbing the baton, so Manney shot him 14 times. A Starbucks worker wrote that Hamilton never touched the officer. Manney claimed Hamilton hit him with his baton, but he sustained no injuries and no bruises. There were no marks on his body. (This was verified by photos from the DAs office.) • There was Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was killed by a Cleveland cop after waving around a pellet gun. The officer, Timothy Loehmann, shot Rice within two seconds of arriving on the scene. • There was Eric Garner, whose killer, police officer Daniel Pantaleo, was also exonerated in the murder of Garner despite the fact that the chokehold that killed him was recorded on a cell phone video that was viewed by millions of people the world over. The medical examiner had already ruled the case a homicide, caused by a chokehold by officer Pantaleo and the compression of Garners neck and chest. The list goes on and on. Police killings of unarmed Blacks are becoming virtually a daily occurrence. Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra-judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012, according to a recent study. This means that a Black person is killed by a security officer every 28 hours. “Obama’s “Window-Dressing” Met with Derision In a desperate attempt to put out the spreading fires of rebellion, President Obama has twice addressed the nation to give lip service of concern over these police killings but mainly to urge support for “law and order” and for the institutions designed to safeguard such order. He and Attorney General Eric Holder have also held a meeting with “civil rights leaders” to devise “window-dressing” solutions to the mounting crisis. But as Black Agenda Reporter editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley wrote in a recent BAR posting, “the game is up. . . . Obama’s sleight-of-hand distractions have finally worn thin.” Kimberley notes, for example, that Holder’s speech at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta was continuously interrupted by protesters and that Obama’s grand announcement for federal funding of police body cameras was met with loud derision. Mychal Denzel Smith, a contributing writer at The Nation magazine, reports that on the campus of Vassar College “a student told their administration that putting body cameras on security guards was like ‘Band-Aids to a bullet hole.’” Smith continued, “I was in attendance and was struck by just how literal that phrasing was. We are being choked and shot with impunity, and yet all that is being offered to us in response is a means to relive the experience over and over again.” Call for Federal Prosecution Grows Kimberley then affirmed what more and more people across the country are saying: “The only person standing in the way of federal prosecution is Obama himself, and the masses of Black people know it.” Kimberley continued: “The police must stop killing Black people with impunity, and nothing will make that less likely to happen than the sight of Darren Wilson and his partners in crime sitting in federal prisons. “The cry of protests must remain loud but also quite clear. There must be a unified call for federal prosecution. No one should be confused by obfuscation and lies from a president who acts when he wants to. . . . [T]here is plenty of case law to support a federal civil rights prosecution. George H.W. Bush did it in 1992 after the police acquittal in the Rodney King beating case, and Obama can do the same in 2014.” “Instead of ‘Hands up, don’t shoot,’ protesters must turn to a very simple, one word chant. ‘Prosecute!’ Every time Eric Holder or Barack Obama or a high profile misleader turns up in public they must be met with this very simple demand.” No sooner were these words published in the Black Agenda Report than the National Action Network (NAN) headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton issued a call for a demonstration in Washington D.C. on Saturday, December 13, with the explicit goal of demanding federal prosecution of Wilson, Pantaleo and their other partners in crime. LFN Urges Support for Dec. 13 March in DC The Labor Fightback Network, in a posting issued December 4, urged labor and community organizations and activists nationwide to mobilize in Washington, D.C. “Given the failure of state or local grand juries to act, pressure must be placed squarely on the federal government. We in the Labor Fightback Network have no illusions that it will intervene on its own and charge those responsible -- in the first place in Ferguson and Staten Island -- with violations of the Civil Rights Act. After all, the Justice Department was supposedly considering taking action in the Trayvon Martin murder case two tears ago but has done nothing by way of follow through. “This time it can be different. This time it must be different! The pervasive anger and outrage in the Black community and its allies in this showdown struggle for justice must be translated into action and the building of a new movement of millions that will eclipse anything we have seen before. The starting point is mobilizing for the December 13 action in Washington.” Democratic Demands and the Struggle for Black Liberation A great many activists in the Black Liberation Movement have expressed strong reservations about lining up to go to Washington behind the Rev. Al Sharpton, a well-known political opportunist. This is understandable. Others ask whether fighting for federal prosecution will make any real dent in the structures of institutional racism. After all, as Mychal Denzel Smith points out, “Police officers are not regarded as citizens beholden to the law. They are an armed force charged with maintenance of a status quo steeped in white supremacy and anti-blackness. Key to the reign is the suspension of a belief in the rule of law. Whatever tools they require to carry out their actual purpose, the public and the courts are eagerly ready to provide.” This is absolutely true. But this does not mean that Black activists, and more generally working people as a whole, should not fight like hell for basic democratic demands – including the demand for federal prosecution under the Civil Rights Act, a huge gain of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It is true that the 1965 Civil Rights Act and all the democratic rights won during this period have been constantly under attack. Many provisions of this Act, in fact, have been rolled back by a recent Supreme Court decision. Basic democratic rights are never safe under capitalism in the epoch of imperialist decay – and this is especially true of the rights won through pitched revolutionary battles by Black people. Moreover, what kind of equality is there for Black people when they are the last hired and first fired on the job, when they are homeless and forced to live in squalor, when they are denied access to education and to their own history, and more? The fight to preserve basic democratic rights for Black people and for full equality, just as the fight to put an end to white supremacy and systemic racism, can only be won through the methods of class struggle. As such this will require, on the one hand, the creation of an independent Black political organization that fights for self-determination for Black people, and, on the other hand, the creation of a Labor Party based on the trade unions and progressive Latino and Black political organizations. In fact, these two struggles are intertwined. The relationship between the labor and Black Liberation struggles was articulated effectively by the Freedom Now resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in 1963. It stated, in part: “While the labor and Black movements march along their own paths, they do march to a common destination, and the freedom of Black people from oppression and of the workers from exploitation can be achieved only through the victory of their common struggle against capitalism. . . . “Because Black people are doubly exploited, their struggles have exceptional effects on the social and political life of this country. Their fight for simple democratic rights tends to upset the status quo. Their special demands introduce unsettling elements into the consciousness of the working class as a whole, disturbing the relations between the classes and inside the classes. Their independent action serves to spur, stimulate, awaken, excite, inspire, divide, unite, and set into motion other, bigger forces. . . . “There is no inconsistency, in logic or practice, between organizing or reorganizing the Black Liberation movement along independent lines and achieving alliances with other sections of the population. Many Blacks view doing the first job as an indispensable condition for successfully doing the second. They believe – correctly, in our opinion – that they must first unite, shape and orient their own movement. Only then will they be able to bring about an alliance of equals, where they can be reasonably sure that their demands and needs cannot be neglected or betrayed by their allies. . . . “There is a deep desire by the Black masses to determine their own destiny – to have their own organizations, their own leaders, their own strategy, tactics and programs. This requires breaking with the parties of their oppressors and organizing to challenge their political monopoly. “The idea of a Black party, a civil rights party or an equal rights party, is not a new one. Representative Adam Clayton Powell has talked about it on and off during recent years. . . . “The creation of an independent Black party running its own candidates would rock the whole political structure to its foundations. It would throw the Democratic Party into a crisis. Without the majority of Black votes that it now gets, it could never again hope to hold national power. The only place it could go would be down. Organized labor would be faced with an excruciating dilemma too. Its coalition with the Democrats is justified on the ground that the Democrats can ‘win.’ But when it becomes plain that they cannot win, the unions would be forced to reconsider their whole political policy. “Advocates of a labor break with the old parties would get a bigger and better hearing from the ranks. Thus the creation of a Black party would benefit not only Black people but their present and potential allies.” * * * * * * * * * * Is This Ferguson or Baghdad? By JIM HAYS St. LOUIS -- A week before the grand jury issued its verdict in the murder by white police officer Darren Wilson of Black youth Michael Brown, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in the St. Louis area. Mass hysteria was fomented by the local and national media and by government officials about possible riots and outside agitators. More than $170,000 of new riot gear was ordered for Ferguson alone. School officials readied for emergency closures, as people were told to board up their businesses and stockpile food. A unified command of local police, highway patrol, and National Guard was put into place. Forty-five FBI agents were mobilized to scare activists and set up stings. Ferguson and North St. Louis County came under U.S. military occupation, just like Baghdad – and much of the same equipment used in Iraq was deployed in Ferguson. All of this because of growing opposition of large sectors of the population to decades of police repression that was reflected in the Michael Brown killing. What Way Forward? The grand jury exoneration of officer Wilson was a foregone conclusion. There was no cross-examination of Wilson, as prosecutor Bob McCulloch relied almost entirely on the cops as prosecution witnesses. In more than 20 years of office, McCulloch had never, in fact, indicted one single police officer – despite decades of police violence against the Black community. In the aftermath of the grand jury decision, many activists argued that the police should set up committees to investigate themselves – which is wrong. The police, instruments of oppression and repression, cannot monitor themselves. Others, however, argued for the creation of a Civilian Review Board, controlled by the Black community, with the power to hire and fire police officers and to investigate any wrongdoings – that is, a review board with teeth (unlike so many of the phony review boards that have been set up nationwide to put out the fires of rebellion while only slapping the wrists of the murderous police officers from time to time).
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 22:25:48 +0000
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