Mumia Abu-Jamal Remains the Voice of the Voiceless

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Black August Series No. 2

After 40 years of incarceration the “voice of the voiceless” remains a focus of international attention

Mumia Abu-Jamal speaks at a memorial for Fred Hampton in Philadelphia. Source : commonnotions

During the late 1960s, Mumia Abu-Jamal became a youth activist in the city of Philadelphia where a succession of racist police chiefs engaged in widespread abuse against the African American community.

Philadelphia has a centuries-long history of African self-organization dating back to the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries when the Free African Society, African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and other institutions were formed by Richard Allen, Sarah Allen and Absalom Jones.

During mid-19^th century, the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society provided avenues for men and women to build support for the Underground Railroad and the movement to completely eradicate involuntary servitude in the antebellum border and deep southern states. By the 1960s, the city became known as one of the first municipalities where African Americans would rise up in rebellion on the north side during the late August 1964.

Max Stanford (later known as Muhammad Ahmed), a co-founder of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in 1962, was from Philadelphia. RAM proceeded the Black Panther Party (BPP) and sought to form an alliance with Malcolm X (also known as El Hajj Malik Shabazz), a leading spokesman for the Nation of Islam and later the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). RAM advocated for the development of a revolutionary movement in the U.S. and consequently became a target of the Justice Department.

In 1969, Mumia joined the Black Panther Party at the age of 15 when the organization was deemed by the then Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) J. Edgar Hoover as the “greatest threat to national security” in the United States. The Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) had a special division which was designed to monitor, disrupt, imprison and kill various leaders and members of African American organizations from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the BPP as well as a host of other tendencies. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) since the mid-to-late 1970s indicate that the BPP was a principal target of the U.S. government and local police agencies.

Why was the BPP considered so dangerous by the leading law-enforcement agency inside the country? In order to provide answers to this question it must be remembered that between 1955 and 1970, the African American people led a struggle for civil rights and self-determination which impacted broad segments of the population in the U.S. helping to spawn movements within other oppressed communities.

The Black Panther Party was first formed in Lowndes County Alabama in 1965. Its origins grew out of the organizing work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose field organizer, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) was deployed to the area in the aftermath of the Selma to Montgomery march in late March of the same year. Working in conjunction with local activists, an independent political party was formed known as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The group utilized the black panther as its symbol while rejecting both the Republican and Democratic Party. 

In subsequent months, there were other Black Panther organizations formed in several cities including Detroit, Cleveland, New York City and other urban areas. In Oakland, California during October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

This movement represented an emerging phase of the Black liberation struggle where there were calls for armed self-defense, mass rebellion and the political takeovers of major municipalities by those who had been excluded from the reins of official power. Thousands of African American youth flocked to the Black Panther Party viewing the organization as a symbol of uncompromising resistance to racism, national oppression and economic exploitation.

Mumia and the BPP

Although the BPP was projected in the national corporate media as gun toting militants willing to use weapons against the police when they were threatening the Party and the community, most of the work of the organization revolved around distribution of its weekly newspaper, the establishment of free breakfast programs for children, community health clinics for the people in the most oppressed areas of the African American community while building alliances with revolutionary forces among other sectors of the population including, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans and whites committed to fundamental change within U.S. society.

Mumia noted the diversity of programmatic work during his tenure in the BPP of the late 1960s and early 1970s in his book entitled “We Want Freedom”: “As the Breakfast program succeeded so did the Party, and its popularity fueled our growth across the country. Along with the growth of the Party came an increase in the number of community programs undertaken by the Party. By 1971, the Party had embarked on ten distinctive community programs, described by Newton as survival programs. What did he mean by this term? We called them survival programs pending revolution. They were designed to help the people survive until their consciousness is raised, which is only the first step in the revolution to produce a new America.… During a flood the raft is a life-saving device, but it is only a means of getting to higher ground. So, too, with survival programs, which are emergency services. In themselves they do not change social conditions, but they are life-saving vehicles until conditions change.” (https://www.commonnotions.org/blog/tag/Mumia+Abu-Jamal)

On December 4, 1969, the Chicago police under the aegis of the Illinois State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan and the Chicago field office of the FBI, raided the residence of BPP members on the city’s west side. Two Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed while several other occupants of the house were wounded. 

These police actions along with hundreds of other attacks on BPP chapters across the country resulted in the deaths of many Panther members and the arrests and framing of hundreds of cadres. Numerous BPP members were driven into exile as others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. 

The Voice of the Voiceless from the Streets to Death Row

On December 9, 1981, Mumia was arrested in Philadelphia and charged with the murder of white police officer Daniel Faulkner. He was railroaded through the courts and convicted on July 3, 1982. The following year, Mumia was sentenced to die by capital punishment. He remained on death row until 2011 after an international campaign to save his life proved successful.

However, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole. Mumia and his supporters have maintained that he is not guilty of the crime of killing a police officer. 

After his sojourn in the BPP, Mumia utilized his writing and journalist skills learned in the Party to become a formidable media personality in Philadelphia. He was a fierce critic of police brutality and a defender of the revolutionary MOVE organization which emerged during the 1970s in the city. 

Mumia was a co-founder of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in the 1970s. He worked as a radio broadcaster and writer exposing the misconduct of the police surrounding the attack on the MOVE residence in August 1978. In 1979, he interviewed reggae superstar Bob Marley when he visited Philadelphia for a concert performance.

While behind bars Mumia has become an even more prolific writer and broadcast journalist. He issues weekly commentaries through Prison Radio where he discusses a myriad of topics including African American history, international affairs, political economy, the deplorable conditions existing among the more than two million people incarcerated in the U.S. along with police misconduct. (https://www.prisonradio.org/correspondent/mumia-abu-jamal/)

A renewed campaign entitled “Love Not Phear” held demonstrations around the U.S. and the world during the weekend of July 3 marking the 40^th anniversary of his unjust conviction in 1982. Love Not Phear says that it is committed to the liberation of all political prisoners including Mumia Abu-Jamal.

An entry on their website emphasizes that: “The landscape has changed over the last 40 years, a time frame that also marks the years Mumia has been incarcerated. The fight for the release of political prisoners requires a recalibration in order to challenge police corruption and racism as they have evolved in this new landscape. We cannot deny the racism, corruption, and misconduct that permeated the so-called ‘Halls of Justice’ during Mumia’s arrest and unjust kangaroo court trial. The people today know the truth; commonplace bribed witnesses, suppressed evidence, biased judges, and backroom deals put Mumia behind bars.” (https://lovenotphear.com/)

Mumia through his attorneys have filed another appeal based upon evidence related to prosecutorial misconduct which has been further revealed over the last four years. The hearing will take place on October 19 in Philadelphia. Supporters of Mumia and other political prisoners will attend the hearing in this latest attempt to win the long-awaited freedom for this activist who is now 68 years old

source: https://borkena.com/2022/08/17/mumia-abu-jamal-remains-the-voice-of-the-voiceless/

Important lessons 30 years later/A Marxist Defense of the LA Rebellion

Occupied South Central Los Angeles, 1992.

By Sam Marcy posted on May 6, 2022

The following excerpts derive from a pamphlet written by Sam Marcy, the late Chairperson of Workers World Party. 

The 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles was touched off by the racist verdict in the Rodney King beating case, but it elicited sympathy and participation from other oppressed communities. Sixty-three people, the majority Black and Latinx, died.

The entire pamphlet may be downloaded at workers.org/book/a-marxist-defense-of-the-l-a-rebellion/ 

Marxism and insurrection

May 5, 1992

The brutal suppression of the Los Angeles insurrection offers a classic example of the relationship of bourgeois democracy to the capitalist state. All this has to be seen in light of the repressive forces amassed by the city, state and federal government: 8,000 police, 9,800 National Guard troops, 1,400 Marines, 1,800 Army soldiers and 1,000 federal marshals. (Associated Press, May 5)

Bourgeois sociology must leave out of consideration the fact that society is divided into exploiter and exploited, oppressors of nationalities and oppressed. The basis for both the exploitation and oppression is the ownership of the means of production by an ever-diminishing group of the population that controls the vital arteries of contemporary society. They are the bourgeoisie, the ruling class. 

At the other end of the axis is the proletariat of all nationalities, the producer of all the fabulous wealth. Material wealth has been vastly increasing along with the masses’ productivity of labor. But only 1% of the population amasses the lion’s share of what the workers produce, while a greater and greater mass is impoverished.

No amount of praise, no amount of flattery, can substitute for a clear-cut delineation of the class divisions that perpetually rend society apart.

To the bourgeois social scientists, the masses are the object of history. Marxist theory, on the other hand, demonstrates that the masses are the subject of history. Where they are the objects of history, they are manipulated as raw material to suit the aims of ruling-class exploitation. They become the subject of history only when they rise to the surface in mass revolutionary action.

Their rising, as in Los Angeles, is what Karl Marx called the locomotive of history. Their revolutionary struggle accelerates history, bringing to the fore the real character of the mass movement.

One cannot apply Marxism to any meaningful extent without first recognizing the existence of national oppression — the oppression of a whole people by capitalist imperialism. This is one of the most characteristic features of the present world reality.

This concept above all others must be kept foremost, if we hope to understand what has happened in Los Angeles and in other major cities of this country.

What is the state? What is democracy?

The insurrection and the way it is being suppressed closely follow the exposition by Frederick Engels in his book “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” and later brought up to date by Lenin in “State and Revolution.”

Bourgeois sociologists and scholars, and above all capitalist politicians, always confound the relationship between the two. They often treat them as a single phenomenon. In reality, the relation between democracy and the state is based on an inner struggle — between form and essence.

The state can take on many different forms. A state can have the form of a bourgeois democracy; it can be a monarchy; it may be ruled by a military junta. And in modern society, on the very edge of the 21st century, it may have a totalitarian or fascist form.

Whatever its form, its essence is determined by which class is dominant economically and consequently also dominant politically. In contemporary society, this means the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie over the proletariat and the oppressed nationalities.

The bourgeoisie cannot maintain its class rule by relying solely on one particular form of the state. Under such circumstances, should there be an imperialist war or a deep capitalist crisis that leads to ferment among the masses, the bourgeois state would be vulnerable to revolutionary overthrow.

But the state is not just the officialdom — who presume to govern in the interest of all the people. The state in its essential characteristics is the organization, to quote Engels, of a “special public force” that consists not merely of armed men and women but of material appendages, prisons and repressive institutions of all kinds.

Most noteworthy are the prisons calculated to break the spirit of millions of the most oppressed, while pretending to have some mock forms of rehabilitation. All the most modern means — mental and physical — are used to demoralize and deprave the character of those incarcerated. These repressive institutions, this public force, appear so omnipotent against the unarmed mass of the oppressed and exploited. But it stands out as the very epitome of gentility and humaneness when it comes to incarcerating favored individuals, especially the very rich, who have transgressed the norms of capitalist law.

In general then, the Los Angeles insurrection shows that democracy is a veil that hides the repressive character of the capitalist state. The state at all times is the state of the dominant class. And the objective of the special bodies of armed men and women is to secure, safeguard and uphold the domination of the bourgeoisie.

Engels explained that in the course of development of capitalist society, as the class antagonisms grow sharper, the state — that is, the public force — grows stronger.

The sharpening of class and national antagonisms had even then resulted in larger and larger appropriations for civilian and military personnel employed for the sole purpose of suppressing the civil population at home and waging adventurist imperialist wars abroad. The state grows in proportion as class and national antagonisms develop. Democracy is merely a form which hides the predatory class character of the bourgeois state. Nothing so much proves this as the steady and consistent growth of militarism and the police forces in times of peace as well as war.

The ruling class continually cultivates racism to keep the working class divided in order to maintain its domination. This is as true at home as it is abroad. The forces of racism and national oppression have been deliberately stimulated by Pentagon and State Department policies all across the globe.

Marxism on violence

After every stage in the struggle of the workers and oppressed people, there follows an ideological struggle over what methods the masses should embrace to achieve their liberation from imperialist monopoly capital. There are always those who abjure violence while minimizing the initial use of violence by the ruling class. They denounce it in words, while in deeds they really cover it up. 

Yes indeed, they readily admit the verdict in the Rodney King beating was erroneous and unfair. But — and here their voices grow louder — “The masses should not have taken to the streets and taken matters into their own hands.” Their denunciation of the violence of the ruling class is subdued and muffled — above all it is hypocritical, a sheer formality. It’s an indecent way of seeming to take both sides of the argument, when what follows is in reality a condemnation of the masses.

In times when the bourgeoisie is up against the wall, when the masses have risen suddenly and unexpectedly, the bourgeoisie gets most lyrical in abjuring violence. It conjures up all sorts of lies and deceits about the unruliness of a few among the masses as against the orderly law-abiding many.

The Marxist view of violence flows from an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses. Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.

Indeed, Marxists do prefer nonviolent methods if the objectives the masses seek — freedom from oppression and exploitation — can be obtained that way. But Marxism explains the historical evolution of the class struggle, as well as the struggle of oppressed nations as against oppressors.

As Marx put it, “force is the midwife to every great revolution.” 

None of the great revolutions has ever occurred without being accompanied by force and violence. And it is always the oppressor — the ruling class and the oppressing nationality — that is most congenitally prone to use force as soon as the masses raise their heads. Does not the bourgeoisie, once it has tamed the proletariat at home, use force and violence through its vast military armada to more efficiently exploit and suppress the many underdeveloped nations throughout the world?

While it might seem that in Los Angeles national oppression alone is involved, in reality it derives from the class exploitation of the African American masses dating back to the days of enslavement.

Fewer workers, more cops

How interesting that technology everywhere displaces labor, reducing the number of personnel.

The truth is that the development of higher and more sophisticated technology under capitalism doesn’t contribute to the welfare of the masses but, on the contrary, throws them into greater misery.

What has been the general trend? The growth of technology, particularly sophisticated high technology, has reduced the number of workers employed in industry as well as in the services. The introduction of laborsaving devices and methods has dramatically reduced the number of workers in all fields.

But the opposite trend prevails in the police forces. This is an absolutely incontestable fact.

At one time the police patrolled the streets on foot. Maybe they used a public telephone for communications with headquarters. Today they are equipped with sophisticated gear. They ride either on motorcycles or in police cars or helicopters. They communicate by radio.

All this should reduce the number of police. But the trend is quite the contrary: to increase the forces of repression. This is not geared to productivity as in industry. Their growth is geared to the growth of national antagonisms, the growth of racism and the bourgeoisie’s general antilabor offensive.

In Los Angeles, the bourgeoisie is forced to bring in federal troops to assist city and state authorities. The social composition of the Army is not just a cross section of capitalist society. The Army and Marines, especially the infantry, have a preponderance of Black and Latinx soldiers. 

n Los Angeles the local police and state forces were inadequate. Only because the masses were unarmed was the bourgeoisie able to suppress what was in truth an insurrection — a revolutionary uprising.

Spontaneity and consciousness

As Marx would put it, such a rising is a festival of the masses. The incidental harm is far outweighed by the fact that it raises the level of the struggle to a higher plateau. The wounds inflicted by the gendarmerie will be healed. The lessons will be learned: that a spontaneous uprising has to be supported with whatever means are available; that a great divide exists between the leaders and the masses.

No viable class or nation in modern capitalist society can hope to take destiny in its own hands by spontaneous struggles alone. Spontaneity as an element of social struggle must beget its own opposite: leadership and organization. Consciousness of this will inevitably grow.

source: Important lessons 30 years later/A Marxist Defense of the LA Rebellion

VIDEO: Steve Arrington Shares Video for ‘Make a Difference

Today, Steve Arrington shares a video for “Make a Difference,” from his new album Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions out now via Stones Throw.

Breonna’s deathbed

Taken from a Sept. 23 audio column on prisonradio.org.

Her name, Breonna Taylor, has become a chanted and shouted call in protests, along with those of many other Black people killed by the state with absolute impunity.

In a recent decision, a grand jury* in the state of Kentucky did not issue a single indictment of murder against the police officers who broke into her apartment, shooting more than a dozen times.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

At least six shots hit Breonna as she lay in her  bed.  The policemen were ostensibly carrying out a raid against drug trafficking, but, note that they did not find any drugs.

Only one cop, who had been fired before, now faces charges. He is accused of endangering neighbors by shooting at their apartments.

Philosophers sometimes conduct thought experiments to see all sides of a controversy.  Imagine, if you can, that a 26-year-old white woman named Breonna Brezinsky, who worked as a technician in medical emergencies, is killed, shot in her bed by half a dozen police officers in a misguided raid.

What do you think would happen to those police officers?

The case of the Black woman, Breonna, reminds me of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, a 21-year-old Black man, shot in his bed after being drugged in the early morning hours of Dec. 4, 1969, in Chicago. Fifty years later, and the lives of Black people still matter.

From the imprisoned nation, I am Mumia Abu-Jamal.

*A grand jury does not determine a person’s innocence or guilt as a jury in a criminal case, but investigates a possible crime, accuses one or more persons and establishes the charges against them.

source: https://www.workers.org/2020/10/51653/

AUGUST 21, 1831 & AUGUST 21, 1971: NAT TURNER SLAVE REBELLION & PRISON ASSASSINATION OF BLACK PANTHER FIELD MARSHAL GEORGE JACKSON

    

The Nat Turner rebellion.

In 1831 a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southhampton County, Virginia. A religious leader and self-styled Baptist minister, Turner and a group of followers killed some sixty white men, women, and children on the night of August 21. Turner and 16 of his conspirators were captured and executed, but the incident continued to haunt Southern whites. Blacks were randomly killed all over Southhampton County; many were beheaded and their heads left along the roads to warn others. In the wake of the uprising planters tightened their grip on slaves and slavery. This woodcut was published in an 1831 account of the slave uprising.

RBG-GEORGE JACKSON TRIBUTE FILM| “Death of a … – youtube.com

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKh-agZxePM

#WE TOO

by  Shaka Shakur

#WE TOO

If there can be no peace without justice, then there can never be peace while the US Prison Gulag exists.

“Prison Lives Matter as Black Lives Matter!!!”

“There shall neither be slavery nor involuntary servitude unless duly convicted of a crime.” — 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution

We as prisoners held captive in one of the united states many modern day plantations wish to stand in solidarity with our people as they protest the systemic racism and genocide perpetrated by the united states security forces and kriminal (in)justice system.

As our people march and protest in righteous anger and rage throughout the country, we not only want to add our voices in unity, we also want to say, We Too!

We Too! Are often murdered/lynched in the streets by the u.s. security forces and throughout its prison system, and it’s ruled a suicide or natural causes.

We Too! Are often lynched in the biased and racist courtrooms throughout amerika as we are railroaded into the Prison Industrial Complex.

We Too! Are systematically harvested from our communities and families and fed into the Prison Industrial Complex in the interest of big business, privatization and social control.

We Too! Are often the first to be sentenced to death, either literally or figuratively through a slow death of an outrageous amount of years.

We Too! Are the victim of racist attacks and beatings while unarmed or handcuffed behind our back by racist guards or strike teams and its covered up.

We Too! Are subjected to white supremacist gangs and militias hiding in plain sight behind badges, in prison guard uniforms and as prison administrators.

We too! Are subjected to the planting of evidence, the filing of false reports/charges and thereby extending our sentences without any checks and balances or oversight.

We Too! Are subjected to decades in solitary confinement without due process or penological justification.

We Too! Are the first to be denied parole or clemency for decades, no matter how many programs we have completed and in spite of meeting the criteria.

We Too! Are denied preventable health care and allowed to die and suffer due to official Indifference.

We Too! In the midst of a pandemic that is sweeping the country and ravishing the prison system, are also being denied C-19 testing.

We Too! Are being denied serious consideration for early release or pardons based on the color of our skin, what city or community we come from or based on our politics or religious beliefs.

We Too! Are here and feel your pain, because your pain is our pain and we stand united and in solidarity with you because Prison Lives Matter as Black Lives Matter!!!

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE WHO FIGHT FOR IT!!!

Committee For Freedom C.F.F.

Shaka Shakur #1996207

K.M.C.C
P.O. Box 860 Oakwood, Va 24631

 

 

source: #WE TOO 

Demand Freedom for Ed Poindexter!

You can read more about Ed here: https://prisonersolidarity.com/prisoner/edward-poindexter

July4 for Mumia Abu-Jamal

 

Saturday, July 4 2PM
1401 JFK Blvd 

 

 

‘The Confederacy of California’: life in the valley where Robert Fuller was found hanged

Damn you scary ass muthfucks back on this pussy ass bullshit. Well  you want to bring the noize this way come wit it cause i am  that big Black muthfucker that your parents warned you about. So make damn sure when you step to me make sure you got your big boy pants on and you better be ridin 10 deep cause truth be told 2 or 3 weak bitch made girlie men can’t hang.

In a corner of desert country at the northernmost edge of Los  Angeles county, Black boys have grown up watching their fathers handcuffed by sheriff’s deputies during routine traffic stops. Black girls have had racial slurs shouted at them from passing cars and been warned not to go out by themselves at night.

They have stood in line at the grocery store alongside white men with swastika tattoos. They have organized to protect themselves when they felt no one else would. They have learned which streets to not drive down to avoid law enforcement traffic stops. Some have stopped driving at night al together.

“The Confederacy of southern California is the Antelope Valley,” said Ayinde Love, a longtime Lancaster resident and organizer.

When the body of Robert Fuller, a 24-year-old Black man, was discovered hanging from a tree near Palmdale city hall earlier this month, it plucked at a trauma that had been etched into the Black community for generations. Just over a week before, the body of Malcolm Harsch, a 38-year-old Black man, had been found hanging from a tree just 50 miles east. Together, Fuller and Harsch’s deaths ignited a firestorm of fear in the region, of white supremacist hate group violence and police conspiracy, during a time of racial reckoning nationwide.

Coroners with the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department preliminarily declared Fuller’s death a suicide. But following widespread outcry, the Los Angeles sheriff, Alex Villanueva, backtracked on the finding and announced that the FBI and the state attorney general’s office would monitor the department’s investigation.

Two days later, Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies fatally shot Fuller’s brother. It was the department’s sixth fatal shooting since the killing of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests and heightened scrutiny of police violence.

Two mysterious deaths of Black men, a thin investigation from a sheriff’s department with a documented history of misconduct, another police killing, all within a dry desert landscape rife with historic anti-black hate. To many in Antelope Valley’s Black community, it came to represent the years of racism, bigotry and violence that has gone overlooked in what is considered one of the most left-leaning counties in America.

Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

“People are arguing whether it was homicide or whether it was suicide, but that’s not the position that I’m taking,” Love said. “It’s a lynching regardless, because it is an act of violence when the people that are supposed to serve your community send a message through their lack of concern.”

‘Black men’s fear? The police’

Fewer than 500,000 people live in this sunbaked valley, where the gnarled branches of the Joshua trees splay under miles of open sky. About 70 miles from the city of Los Angeles, hardscrabble brown mountains loom far in the distance on clear days – the Tehachapi mountains to the north and the San Gabriel mountains to the south.

Of those living in Antelope Valley, about 15% are black, compared with 9% in all of Los Angeles county, and 6.5% statewide. The community has grown rapidly, and recently: from 1990 to 2010, the Black population in Lancaster, one of the main cities, grew from just 7% to 21%, while the white population shrank from nearly 80% to less than 50%.

As that population shifted, in the years leading up to 2010, the region saw the highest rate of hate crimes in Los Angeles county.

A 2013 US justice department investigation documented a series of white supremacist-related crimes that had haunted Antelope Valley in the 1990s and early 2000s. The First African Methodist Episcopal church in Palmdale was firebombed in 2010. Three white youths allegedly killed a Black man in 1997 to earn a white supremacist tattoo. Two Black men were stabbed by a white mayoral candidate’s son who had been reciting “white power” slogans, and homes were vandalized with racial slurs and a swastika.

But when asked about what they feared more in Antelope Valley, Black men overwhelmingly responded: the police.

“I don’t care about the KKK because I’m allowed to defend myself against the KKK,” said Arthur Calloway II, 39, a Lancaster resident and president of the Democratic Club of the High Desert. “But every day I have to leave the house, not knowing if I’m going to get pulled over that day and if that could end up in an escalated situation with me actually not coming home.”

At the tree where Robert Fuller’s body was found in the early hours of 10 June, supporters had placed a bright green sign, splattered with red paint, among the flowers and the candles: “Cops and Klan go hand in hand”. Just 30 years ago, a group of deputies described by a federal judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” had been rooted out through a lawsuit that cost the county $9m. Authorities are investigating whether similar other gang-like cliques of deputies, stationed primarily in black and Latino neighborhoods, persist today.

Combined with the stories of the Black community, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department’s reputation of racism has solid footing in the valley. While working for a car rental agency, Love, the community organizer, was pulled over so many times that he had to ask his manager to call the sheriff’s station.

“One time, I was driving into a community and deputies were coming out and passing me and immediately, they turned their lights on and turned around and pulled me over,” said T, a black Lancaster man who asked to only be identified by his first initial out of fear of retaliation. “They said there was a break-in in the neighborhood I was going into. If there was a break-in, why would I be going back into the neighborhood where I just broke into a home?”

In 2015, the US justice department settled a lawsuit against Lancaster, Palmdale and the Los Angeles sheriff’s department for targeting black people with discriminatory enforcement of the federal housing choice voucher program. The investigation that preceded the settlement found that deputies in Antelope Valley engaged in a pattern of misconduct that included pedestrian and vehicle stops in violation of the fourth amendment, “stops that appear motivated by racial bias”, unreasonable use of force and discrimination against residents on the basis of race. A review of use-of-force cases from 2010 to 2011 in which the only charge was obstruction-related – resisting arrest – found that 81% involved black or Latino subjects.

‘If this had been a white man’

Jamon Hicks reacted the same way many others in the black community did when he learned about Robert Fuller’s death. His initial thought was that it felt odd, that he had never heard of a Black man committing suicide in such a public way, and from a tree. When he learned of the other hangings, not just Malcolm Harsch’s in San Bernardino county but around the country, he got scared.

The poppy fields of Antelope Valley, California. Photograph: Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images

A few days later, he was retained as the attorney for Fuller’s family. Sitting at his home about an hour south of Palmdale on Juneteenth, he took a more reasoned approach. He was preparing the family for the findings to come back as a suicide, or even undetermined, he said. What mattered, he argued, was that the findings came back at all, and followed a thorough investigation.

“What I look at is: if this had been a white man hanging from a tree, if this had been a white woman hanging from a tree, would you have so easily just said, ‘Well, we think it’s a suicide?’” Hicks said. “I’m saying the investigation seemed very haphazard from the beginning. And I wonder, was it that way because this was just a 24-year-old black man?”

The family needed answers, he said. Instead, they were left with more questions.

Seven days after Robert Fuller’s body was discovered in Palmdale, Fuller’s brother, Terron Boone, was fatally shot by Los Angeles county deputies. According to the sheriff’s department, when they tried to stop his car, Boone opened the door and started shooting. The sheriffs were reportedly in plainclothes and an unmarked car, trailing Boone, a suspect in a domestic violence case.

“My question,” Hicks said slowly, “is did they know beforehand that it was his brother, before they attempted surveillance and before they followed the car?”

He wondered about the fears and conspiracy theories floating around the community, and whether they had reached Boone, who had been deep in grief. “If he’s thinking, ‘I’m being followed, something happened to my brother, now it’s me’ – if he’s in that mindset and he doesn’t know that they’re police, he’s in defense mode,” Hicks said. “He’s paranoid. He’s scared.”

‘You have to constantly think about your safety’

That sense of fear blanketed a Juneteenth rally in Lancaster, where hundreds came to demand justice for Robert Fuller, Malcolm Harsch, Michael Thomas, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. Amid the high energy and rousing speeches, a tension thrummed through the crowd.

Protesters demonstrate in front of the Palmdale Sheriff’s Station after Fuller’s death. Photograph: Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images

There had been rumors that the local Ku Klux Klan chapter would be hosting a meeting at the same park where the march would end. The Los Angeles sheriff’s department said it had been unable to confirm whether the meeting was to take place. Still, organizers put out warnings for everyone to travel in groups. They had a check-in system – when people got home, they had to text someone, and if that person did not receive a text message, then everyone had to mobilize as if it were an emergency. At the rally, people were on alert, watching to see if people got too close to the speakers.

Giovanni Pope, 17, had been scheduled to speak at a press conference a few days earlier. His parents have been incredibly supportive of his efforts as a young Black and gay activist – but they told him he couldn’t speak at this one, not with the rumors of hate groups.

At a recent protest, he left his face uncovered because he had been a main organizer and wanted to make sure he was recognizable. Near the end of it, a white man whom nobody could identify kept following him and taking his picture.

“In other parts of Los Angeles county, people don’t have to think about this at all,” said Pope, a Lancaster resident. “I go to Pasadena regularly and every young person there seems so carefree in that sense. It’s really easy to be an activist for things you believe in in those areas. Out here, you have to constantly think about your safety.”

Homicide by society

On Juneteenth, the family of Malcolm Harsch, the 38-year-old man found hanging from a tree 50 miles from where Robert Fuller was found dead, posted on Facebook that after reviewing surveillance video, they had accepted that Harsch’s death was a suicide. “We urge you all to continue your efforts concerning the hanging deaths of African Americans,” they wrote.

The next day, a small crowd gathered for a vigil at the tree where Harsch died near the Victorville public library. Harsch had been living in a nearby homeless encampment at the time of his death. Organizers of the vigil brought food and water for the encampment residents, stepping around the debris and garbage under the unforgiving sun.

“Even if it wasn’t murder, it was still homicide by society,” said Kareema Abdul-Khabir, an organizer, pointing out that city hall spent more of its budget on policing than on care for vulnerable people of color.

That’s why Love, the Antelope Valley community organizer, has characterized these hangings as lynchings. Racism comes in many forms in the high desert. There’s the specter of the hate groups. There’s police violence and overcriminalization. And there’s the damage of the passive slights and the allowance of racism. It’s Pope sitting in on a meeting with the mayor of Lancaster, listening to him talk about the need to differentiate “between the hip-hop kids and the good African American students”. It’s 24-year-old Isabel Flax, learning that when her family moved to Palmdale in 2000, her white mother was informed at two homes she had tried to rent that it was “a problem” that she had a Black husband. “It was always the little things, the things that happened when I was seven and I didn’t understand until I got older,” Flax said.

“Lynching was a tactic to instill fear and control the slaves. It had to be something perpetual,” Love said. “When all Black people have to experience the unacceptance of society to the point that life in itself can seem harder than death, it’s a lynching. It’s a lynching via the white supremacist systems that have been set up in place to oppress us.”

‘We’re not going anywhere’

Black people across the US are exhausted, and those in Antelope Valley appear to feel no different. With each passing day come more Black lives lost, and in making sure all Black lives matter, they find themselves forced to wear the mantle of slain names, loudly and publicly, even as their legs buckle under the fatigue.

One day after Robert Fuller’s body was found, sheriff’s deputies fatally shot 62-year-old Michael Thomas in his home in Lancaster. Deputies had been responding to a domestic violence call and said Thomas had reached for their gun. His family and his fiancee, who was at the scene, disputed that account.

Pastor Jacob Johnson, vice-president of the Antelope Valley chapter of the NAACP, said the deputies appeared to have violated at least several points of the consent decree set by the federal justice department as part of the 2015 settlement of the housing discrimination lawsuit – a section of the settlement covers use of force. Yet it’s unclear whether the officers will face any repercussions. This same drama has played out too often in police departments across the country. Officers violate policy. Black people die. No one is held accountable. “What’s the penalty if they break a consent decree – the oversight committee stays on for two more years?” Johnson said. “To be honest, if I’m the sheriff’s department, I could care less. Right now, there seems to be no repercussions. There seems to be no penalties.”

Related: Oakland moves to bar police from schools as bigger cities reject change

When it comes to police killings, people tend to ask first what the person killed did to deserve it – if he was suspected of a violent crime, if he had resisted arrest, if he had been armed. Always with this question, Black organizers think of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine in a mass shooting of a black church in South Carolina and was taken into custody unharmed. “Obviously there is no need for extra training because white adult males make it out alive all the time,” said Arthur Calloway, the Lancaster community organizer.

Johnson is tired. But in talking about the movement in Antelope Valley – and the Los Angeles sheriff’s department – he is reminded of another valley mentioned in the Bible, the Valley of Elah. “When David comes to fight Goliath, Goliath had been taunting the children of Israel for a while now, standing in the middle of this valley,” Johnson said. “By the time David shows up, his brothers say, ‘What are you doing, David? You can’t really do anything.’ And David says, ‘Is there not a cause?’

“That’s what keeps bringing people back,” he continued. “We’re tired, but we’re not going anywhere because there is a cause.”

Police will be held accountable

After years of living with racism, the black organizers in Antelope Valley are working to make sure this moment of protest is more than just that. Calloway has co-founded Vote Your Power Back not just to encourage people to vote, but to shape the next generation to run for leadership roles as well. “Once you get a mom on the city council who can feel the pain of Robert Fuller hanging from that tree, who can put that emotion and passion and empathy into legislation, police will have to be held accountable,” Calloway said.

Giovanni Pope, the 17-year-old activist, had planned on leaving for Syracuse University in the fall. But he too recognized that a shift was happening in his home, and he chose to take college courses from Antelope Valley for at least his first year so that he could also continue his work on some local campaigns. “I decided that having that localized attention on our valley was very, very important,” he said.

Ayinde Love leads a crowd of protesters during a Juneteenth demonstration. Photograph: Kyle Grillot/AFP/Getty Images

At the Juneteenth rally, Isabel Flax spoke about her five-year-old son, and how she wanted him to grow up in a different world than she did. In a later interview, she said that after watching the video of George Floyd, she couldn’t sit by the sidelines any more. She organized the first protest in Lancaster, and, together with the other organizers, has a strong future planned for the movement.

As Flax spoke, supporters were still on high alert for hate groups, watching the stage and pacing through the crowd. Armed sheriff’s deputies stood at a distance. “You almost fear the sheriffs, if they’re here to protect us and make sure nothing happens or if they’re here just to say they were here and to look the other way if something happens,” one protester wondered.

But for just one moment after Flax passed on the microphone, in a brief musical interlude, Frank Beverly and Maze’s Before I Let Go blasted out over the speakers. A wide smile broke out over Flax’s face and she allowed the beat to take her. Soon, she was leading an entire group of Black women and children in the Electric Slide, the BLM tattoo she got after her first protest still bold and fresh on her left calf.

Beyonce’s Formation came on next to loud cheers and the handful of dancers grew. Pope jumped into the middle of the circle to groove, as everyone sang along. And for one brief moment, there was celebration.

source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/confederacy-california-life-valley-where-100007342.html

BODY COUNT PULLS NO PUNCHES ON “POINT THE FINGER”

Ice-T is not fucking around. The legendary performer had just dropped his long-running hardcore band’s Carnivore album and was slated to embark on a world tour before the pandemic hit. Though those plans have changed, he and the rest of Body Count are still finding ways to get the word out. The video for “Point The Finger” finds the band going full DIY, filming everything from home. The track’s indictment of police violence is enhanced by its minimalism; there are no frills, no bullshit, just pure undiluted classic hardcore. Opening with a somber message from the man himself, the track finds Body Count sounding the tightest they have in years. Ice-T is always at his best when railing against the racism, violence, and hypocrisy of the system, and “Point The Finger” feels ever more timely in light of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. This is the real shit.

 

Grab your copy of Carnivore (which also features the band’s fan-fucking-tastic cover of “Ace of Spades”) here and catch more from Body Count on Instagram @bodycountofficial.

source: https://afropunk.com/2020/05/body-count-pulls-no-punches-on-point-the-finger/