Below are some photos from historic march to the Department of Justice in St Louis. It was led by faith leaders including; Rev Toni Blackman, Rev Sekou, Dr Cornel West, Pastor Mike McBride, Jasiri X and many others who sought to win justice not only for Mike Brown who was killed a year ago, but also for the countless other victims of police brutality…
Faith leaders march to Department of Justice in St Louis to win Justice for Mike Brown…
By Kali Akuno
National Organizer – Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Director of Education, Training, and Field Operations – US Human Rights Network
Kali Akuno
The righteous anger and indignation on graphic display in Oakland, California Thursday, July 8th at the mockery of justice rewarded to Johannes Mehserle for murdering Oscar Grant and the open collaboration of several non-profit organizations with the government to contain and delegitimatize the people’s resistance is a clarion call. It’s a call not just for justice for Oscar Grant and the countless victims of police terror, but for radical, systemic change. The anger, and its focus, indicates a heightened awareness on behalf of a new generation of working class Black, Latino and Asian youth of the intractable contradictions between the imperialist state and oppressed peoples and the willingness to challenge them.
A new phase of development and a new set of challenges now confront the movement to win justice for Oscar Grant. The inexperience of the youth forces engaged and the current weaknesses and fragmentation of the left make this a very, very delicate time. If certain conversations aren’t had, if certain lessons of the past and present aren’t incorporated, and if certain contradictions aren’t addressed, then all of the radiant energy on display July 8th could easily fade, or just as easily turn its wrath in upon itself and miss its true target.
This small contribution is an attempt to help ignite conversation, share reflections from critical movements of the past, and offer suggestions in the hope of helping to facilitate strategic and programmatic development within the movement.
On Next Steps and Organizing Orientation
1. Joint Reflection: to move the Justice for Oscar Grant Movement forward progressive forces focused on building the democratic mass movement, should join forces and come together to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Justice for Oscar Grant Movement over the past year and half. One of the two main objectives of such a collaboration, in the short term, would be to produce a joint assessment and a unified set of demands, both tactical and strategic, to help anchor the movement in its next phase of struggle.
2. Joint Assessment: This assessment should be issued as a statement and/or document that provides a clear analysis of the movements weaknesses and errors and some strong points of orientation to try and anchor, sustain, and guide it going forward. Some key points of assessment should include (but not be limited to) the following:
a) A firm condemnation of collaboration and opportunism; but avoiding personalized vilification of the social forces that collaborated (being mindful of the lessons of COINTELPRO)
b) A statement of distinction on the role of political and community organizations as opposed to non-profits; and clarity on the reformist orientation and political limitations of non-profit organizations
c) The function of organization in the movement to combat infiltration (as appears to have occurred within the Black Bloc and other formations)
d) The need for strategy to help facilitate forward development and political advancement of the movement(s)
3. Joint Strategy and Work Plan: The second primary objective of such a collaboration would be to draft a one-year strategy and work plan to realize the unified demands that are put forward to the movement to democratically accept (understanding the independence of initiative of each formation), modify, or categorically reject.
This convergence of forces, although necessarily centered in California, particularly the Bay Area and Los Angeles, should seek to build and consolidate a national and international organizing initiative.
On Demand Expansion and Development
1. The opening of a Federal Investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) can and should be used as a national organizing opportunity. However, more self-determining justice initiatives should be organized simultaneously to challenge US hegemony (internally and externally) by internationalizing the struggle. More concretely, an independent “people’s or citizens” commission should be established to conduct an autonomous examination of the evidence, issue indictments, and pressure the DOJ and its process. This commission would ideally consist of family members, community activists, lawyers, jurists, etc. and call on various international bodies within the United Nations (UN) and International System (such as the Inter-American Court) to intervene in the case and challenge the racist policies and practices that enabled it.
2. The demand for resources and economic development must be supported unequivocally, but modified in a manner that puts limits on the controls of City Hall and its near exclusive access by “grasstop” forces. A means to accomplishing this (not without its faults or limits by any stretch) could be the institutionalization of participatory budgeting systems to determine the use of the cities resources to ensure they are used to address and service human needs such as adequate housing, health care, education, etc.
Synthesis Demands
This synthesis is an attempt to combine and expand on the demands originally articulated by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) Coalition, and the New Years Movement (NYM).
1. We demand that Officers Pirone and Domenici be indicted for murder.
2. We demand civil restitution and reparations for the family Oscar Grant, and the victims of Police violence by the OPD and BART.
3. We demand that BART Police be disarmed and disbanded.
4. We demand that the Police Bill of Rights, which shields the records of police misconduct, abuse and murder, be immediately abolished, and that all police records be made public.
5. We demand that an independent “peoples commission”, drawn and determined by the citizens of Oakland, with international jurists determined by this commission, be granted oversight into the Federal Department of Justice investigation of the murder of Oscar Grant, and systemic violations of civil and human rights by the Oakland and Transit Police.
6. We demand the termination of all Gang Injunction laws and policies in Oakland and throughout California on the grounds of their unconstitutionality and their violation of civil and international law.
7. We demand that Oakland be declared a sanctuary city, and that all ICE raids and racial profiling policies and practices targeting Latino/a, Black, Asian and other oppressed peoples be terminated immediately.
8. We demand that the City of Oakland, the State of California, and the Federal Government provide massive funding for education and jobs in Oakland that are allocated and distributed via a transparent and democratic public participatory budgeting process.
One-Year Plan Targets/Tactics
1. Conduct a mass and coordinated non-compliance action in Oakland and Los Angeles the day after Mehserle’s sentencing, that calls for Student walk outs and strike or “sick out” actions by Public Sector, Transit, Dock, and other workers that disrupts the regular flow of “business” to raise our demands and demonstrate the power of mass action.
2. Organize broad, neighborhood Police/Copwatch formations, and work to create “liberated zones” in Black, Latino, Asian, and white working class and poor communities, where the police are prohibited or curtailed in their activities.
3. Organize a massive local, regional, statewide, and national “Justice for Oscar Grant” petition drive to pressure the DOJ and build support for the movement’s demands (buttressed by broad internet and social networking interface to support and broaden reach).
4. Develop a broad people’s media and cultural workers initiative to provide educational, motivational, and agitation tools and resources for the movement and to provide sufficient analysis and coverage to frame the movement from its own perspective and counter the reactionary framing and attacks of the bourgeois media.
5. Hold a People’s Tribunal, with international observers and jurists, to pressure the DOJ and its deliberations.
6. Utilize Inter-American and United Nations special action procedures and special rapporteurs to conduct international investigations, recommendations, and sanctions on the US government for its failure to protect the human rights of Oscar Grant, the victims of police violence, and the targets of the various racial profiling laws and policies sanctioned by the government.
7. Organize local, state and national referendum and legislative initiatives to realize and support the movement’s demands. A possible start could entail running progressive candidates in Oakland who stand on a platform based on the movement’s demands in the upcoming elections to help define public debate and pressure the government to comply.
Without a doubt, accomplishing all of this is a tall order, particularly for a young and fragmented movement. But, as the history of the peoples’ struggles against white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism here and all over the world demonstrate, no political challenges are insurmountable. If we dare to win, then we must dare to struggle against the internal shortcomings and subjectivities of the movement that hinder us from building the operational unity needed to execute initiatives of scale such as those proposed in this paper. The struggle for unity does not mean that we should stop struggling against collaborationist and opportunist ideas and practices. It simply implores us to do all we can to seize the opportunities at hand. With organization, strategy, discipline, and determination we can and will win!
In Unity and Struggle.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Kali can be contacted via kaliakuno@gmail.com
By now many of you have heard of the tragic shooting around 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones. It’s beyond heartbreaking. It’s beyond shocking.. and sadly it underscores the disrespect and disregard far too many have for Black life. When word of this first came out, there were far too many who asked, ‘What did they do wrong?”, meaning that the family or even the little girl must’ve done something as opposed the police being dead wrong in their procedures. many were quick to point out that the police were looking for a suspect in the killing of a 17-year-old earlier that week and the family was supposedly harboring him.. Again, folks conditioned to immediately side with the boys in blue..Of course we now know that the police entered the wrong resident, tussled with the girls grandma after they tossed flash grenades in the house and shot Aiyana ‘by accident’. Here’s something many don’t know. Most police departments are media savvy and deeply embedded in the corporate media machine. They allow camera crews to follow them and we are bombarded with numerous ‘reality Cop spin-off shows that result in us forever having a ‘soft spot’ for the police who take us on highly edited and somewhat scripted adventures through the sordid world of crime and vice.
The city of Detroit is one such department being profiled for reality TV -in this case 48 Hours and it was on that fatal night that Aiyana was killed that these dip shit cops with a camera crew in tow came busting into the wrong house, storm trooper style, tossing flash grenades and ‘shooting’ the girl-oops lemme rephrase.. the gun ‘accidently’ went off. What we all need to be asking is; ‘How much of their outlandish actions were attributed to them showing off and hamming it up for TV cameras?’ How much was their over the top approach attributed to them wanting to show LAPD, NYPD and every other city profiled on reality shows that Detroit PD was ’bout it bout it’?
I ain’t no expert in police work, but I covered enough of these stories and had enough police officers on my shows to understand a few things. First, officer safety is paramount. The goal is to come home at night, hence if you are not chasing down a suspect and you know he’s holed up in a unit that has children and other folks, you wait it out. You catch dude when he leaves the building. There’s all sorts of ways to flush someone out a resident that you have surrounded. However, the gung-ho shoot em up bang bang, Tea Party crowd that watches these types of reality cop shows would find thoughtful, methodic police work boring. So with TV crew on hand, and anxious producers needing some ‘action’ to satisfy the thirst of viewers, the police as was the case here in Detroit are gonna ham it up and perhaps break a few rules-end result a dead 7-year-old girl name Aiyana Stanley Jones.
Folks need to ponder on that for minute-serious ponder that…Was police work compromised by TV cameras. I been on TV sets before and I know the type of pressure producers can exert when looking for an angle or a result.I also know cops are human and while some are shy about the cameras, others play to it..Why a flash grenade in a house with innocent people? Let’s all pause and ask ourselves that for a second.
Second thing, folks need to understand that this isn’t the first time police have gone overboard when it comes to dealing with 7 year old girls. A couple of years ago in Pittsburgh, PA a mother Pamela Lawton was pulled over for what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. She was on her way to a Pee Wee league game with her two girls in the car age 7 and 8.
Pamela Lawton and One Hood member Reverend Cornel Jones
When the officer Eric Tatusko approached the car he had already drawn his gun on the mother and ordered her to put her hands up. As he approached the car, the mom, not knowing what was going on and why she was ordered to put her hands up was shaken and scared. She became more frightened when the officer went over to the passenger side where the girls where with the gun drawn. The whole ordeal caused Ms Lawton’s kids to cry frantically. The officer became annoyed when the girls would not stop. Bear in mind the mom still has her hands in the air.. Next Officer Tatusko pointed his 9mm gun at the 7 year old Joshalyn Lawton and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t stop crying.
When other officers arrived on the scene, they ordered Tatusko to withdraw his weapons. Then in an attempt to justify this egregious behavior, officers searched Pamela’s car ‘looking for weapons’. Of course they found nothing. Ms Lawton was cited her for having expired insurance and then hit with disorderly conduct charges for yelling at the officer. She spent an year in trial as the police did everything they could to spin the story.. Lawton thanks to the outrage and help of community members like X-Clan member Paradise Gray and rapper Jasiri X and their fellow members of the group One Hood who helped bring national attention to this story, was eventually found not guilty.
The Aiyana Jones tragedy, the Pamela Lawton case are coupled with a slew of cases including 3 officers entering a kindergarden class to put handcuffs on and arrest a 5 year old girl who was having a tantrum in Florida..Or the 94 pound, 10 year old in Martinville, Ind who was tasered by police .. There’s a long list and sadly what’s been missing is not only some sort of change in policy on how to deal with small children, but a lack of good cops stepping up and telling folks that these types of incidents are wrong. From what I been told; many are afraid to cross the blue line for fear of retaliation.. is this what are tax dollars are paying for?
-Davey D-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_Ig34hQQXo
Below is the link to the interview we did with organizer and author Adrienne Maree who attended the vigil for Aiyana and wrote the moving piece below
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/61117
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by Adrienne Maree
http://adriennemareebrown.net/blog/?p=1423
there is no justice. not for aiyana stanley jones.
there is punishment, and perhaps accountability. someone to point towards, many people, a trail of blame, stories, mistakes and tears.
but there is no justice.
i’m just home from a vigil for aiyana. i don’t like to go to these things because they make me feel too raw and hopeless. my partner, however, knew that we had to go and make sure aiyana’s story was told. so here it is: she was alive yesterday, 7 years old. she went to bed on a couch in a first floor room with her grandmother last night. in the wee hours of the morning, cops raided her house. a man outside the house shouted that there were kids inside. a man on the second floor of the house was a suspect in the murder of a 17-year-old last Friday.
the police threw a “flash bang” through the front window. it blinded everyone inside; it lit aiyana on fire.
the news reported a tussle with the grandmother, during which the firearm discharged. everyone in the family says there was no tussle, that the grandmother was throwing herself over the baby when aiyana was shot in the head.
what do you call the blinded, terrified groping of a grandmother who knows her grandchildren are in the room, blasted from safety and sleep into chaos and danger, whose granddaughter is on fire? how do you comfort a man like aiyana’s father, which was forced to lie face down in his daughter’s blood by the same police officers who killed her?
the police shot and killed aiyana. they shot her in the forehead. her family saw her brain on the couch. by accident, perhaps. which doesn’t even matter to a 7-year-old. you don’t get let off any hooks for your intentions in this case, officer.
apparently a crew from the television show 48 Hours were with the police during the raid. i can’t help but wonder what their footage shows, and if filming for the show had anything to do with the drastic tactics and fatal timing – flash bombing a home in the middle of the night when the women and children are most likely to be home and sleeping.
standing on the sidewalk with over 100 black people, some shell-shocked, some sharing bits and pieces of the tragic gossip, some railing against the mayor, some staring at each other or holding each other in quiet sadness…i only saw the children. they were running, kicking, punching each other. playing. they were all 7 to me, however big or small. they were all potentially aiyana. yesterday she was with them, today she is martyred for no cause.
several members of imam luqman’s family were present, in prayer as we approached the house, present in solidarity with the particular grief of losing a loved one to violence at the hands of authority figures.
as we left the crowd, a man walked past us – more literally was dragged past us, barely able to walk, wailing in grief. his voice ripped through the southern twilight on the street, the realest voice there. i had spent the whole day around beautiful, vibrant children – little boys who ran circles around me and kicked everything because they were ninjas, and then grabbed my hands gently and easily to cross the sidewalk. and then i held a 2-day-old baby, totally fresh, just barely opening his eyes to say hello. what is more valuable than our children? this man, stumbling down the sidewalk weeping – this is how it feels when society offers up our babies as human sacrifices in pursuit of an unattainable justice.
i wanted to hold him. i wanted to say it would be ok, that there would be justice for aiyana. but i don’t believe, right now, there is any real justice for the violent deaths of our youth.
every thread i pick up in the story leads to more impossible questions.
why are police officers legally able to use military tactics on a house with children in it on a sunday morning…or any morning, on any house, with anyone in it?
why do the grieving faces of people on this street look so unsurprised?
and when 17-year-old Jerean Blake was killed Friday, wasn’t that equally devastating? did we do enough as a community at that moment?
do we know how to keep our children safe?
can we admit that we don’t know anything about how to be the kind of society where this could never happen?
to step back from the immediate events is to see what happens in communities who internalize the corporate military worldview that some people are expendable. the way we function as an economy that places profit first is that it’s normal for people in uniform to throw bombs into the home of civilians and shoot children.
an economy that valued people first could never justify those tactics.
i think of the children in my life – those blessed and loved and safe, and those who will never really be safe because of how the world sees them. the way aiyana died, the last minutes of her life – that is terrorism. to know that that kind of terror and pain can happen to a child in this time – IS happening to children, funded by our tax dollars, right now, in iraq, afghanistan, palestine, arizona, and here in detroit – is to understand that as things stand, there is no justice. nothing will make it right, nothing will take away the pain, nothing will heal us – and anyway, there is no time to heal. not for aiyana.
detroit police, at the behest of the detroit city government, are on the offensive in this war against our community. this is national in scope – international really. we cannot keep half-healing from the wounds inflicted on us – we have to fundamentally shift the way we participate in our lives and in the creation of our local economies and societies. we have to demand that police fundamentally shift how they are allowed to function in our communities – they must be disarmed, we must demand they focus their training on the humanity of communities, unlearning these tactics of creating devastation from a safe distance.
we have to make today’s events impossible – that is the only way to regain our humanity. then, maybe, we can use the word justice.
