I’m still seething at NYPD Commissioner Bratton’s remarkable admission last week, in which he touted a special machine gun-toting task force to be used for such incidents as terrorist attacks and,…protests. After reading that, a quote from a recent New Yorker article kept echoing through my head: “These days, Bratton spends his off-duty time with one-percenters who he says disdain the mayor; de Blasio’s downtime is more likely to be spent sweating in souvenir T-shirts at the Park Slope Y.”
To be fair, he’s since backed off from his over-the-top remarks, but the message was clear: we’ll come after you if we don’t like what you’re doing - constitutional rights be damned. In a larger sense however, I think the New Yorker article's framing of the two personalities this way should give us occasion for pause, as it is quite unsettling in its ramifications.
Lest Bratton forget his history, peaceful protest and non-violent civil disobedience are quite literally the cornerstone from which the country of the United States was erected. It was everyday people taking to the streets against the Stamp Act, to throw tea into the Boston harbor. It was Crispus Attucks, a black man, getting shot by skittish young British soldiers charged with controlling the ever-growing, restless colonial crowds. Every subsequent advancement we made as a society was due to public protest, such as the efforts of abolitionists, suffragettes, and united labor unions, whose courage, sweat and blood led directly to the better, more equal society we enjoy today. It didn't just happen because legislators knew it was the right thing to do. No, they had to be pressured by the public.
Furthermore, history also reveals time and again that it’s the oligarchs who call for the shots. Let’s remember the chilling words of robber baron Jay Gould who said, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other.” We Are the 99%: the OWS call for solidarity across all racial and class borders is forged in the fire of that kind of very real treachery. This isn't hyperbole folks. There are mountains of evidence showing this country’s failure to enshrine the civil rights protections of left wing radical protesters, of which my purpose is not to detail at the moment (Please see Cointelpro).
Perhaps someone ought to tell Bratton, as well as the Ferguson police and the rest of America, something else: the heart of the #BlackLivesMatter movement resides with fearless black women across this country; they sense the moment and they will not back down.
Indeed, both the origins of the now ubiquitous rallying cry and of the 50k+ march in NYC supporting #BlackLivesMatter, come from black women. A social media response to the Trayvon Martin verdict by two black LGBT queers and a Nigerian-American woman led to the creation of BlackLivesMatter, and the biggest anti-police brutality protest to date was organized by a pair of young black women artists (19 and 24 yrs old) who met online and organized the #MillionsMarchNYC. And because of each of their efforts, and those of many others, the cause is now embraced worldwide.
For many, the writing is on the wall: the time to speak radically, and of revolution, has come. Panderers of the false notions that freedom and equality exists in black America must be condemned with full throat. There has to be an uncomfortable national conversation lying the myth bare and results in proper restitution and the rightful place of blacks within American society. Nothing short of this will suffice.
To wit, there were many black women on hand last weekend who organized and attended an impressive movement day called The Gathering that took place at Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his pivotal Beyond Vietnam speech in 1967, in which he called out the triple evils of militarism, racism, and capitalism.
At The Gathering were folks from Ferguson Response Network, Stop Mass Incarceration, Copwatch, Union Theological Seminary, as well as veterans from Occupy Wall St, Occupy Sandy, Socialist Alternative and permaculture activists.
I and a friend attended independent media and tactical workshops, as well as participated in invigorating direct action training with a throng of like-minded activists. Then, in the early evening, we were all invited to a special plenary of activists speaking about the state of the movement.
The plenary took things to another level. We were told the entire amazing event was planned by movement women. Then, we watched and listened as black women from ages of 20 to 75 sat at the dais as its only occupiers. The host, stage hands and video crew were also black women. (The entire event can be seen from a one-camera view from the audience here).
Hosted by Baruch College history professor Johanna Fernandez, the event was one of the most inspiring speaking engagements I’ve ever attended. With each successive speaker you were left thinking, well, how is that going to be topped? And each time it was.
Fernandez, a coordinator for the Campaign to Bring Mumia home, started by quoting Mumia Abu-Jamal, the imprisoned radio journalist who was wrongfully convicted of killing of a white Philadelphia police officer and sentenced to death in 1982. Jamal is just one of many black radicals who are today incarcerated because of the work they did in the 1960s and ‘70s against police brutality, each similarly framed by a corrupt criminal justice system.
About Ferguson, Jamal observed, “When they dared protest the state street murder of one of their own, the government responded with the tools and weapons of war. They attacked them as if Ferguson was Fallujah in Iraq.” He also connects it with the state oppression and brutality in Palestine, and then ends his commentary with a famous quote from Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens. There are weeks when decades happen.”
This was a recurring theme of all the speakers: that this precise moment happening now is the one we’ve been waiting for in the United States. Fernandez finished by saying, “Ferguson and the events here in New York have essentially given us a sense of our power. And most importantly, it has pushed back the violence and the terror of the police."
First up was Danette Chavis, who founded National Action Against Police Brutality after her son Gregory was killed by the NYPD in 2004. She pulled no punches, using her experience of dealing with a corrupt and closed-off justice system to lay plain the stakes. In December, Chavis was invited, along with nine other mothers of sons who had been killed by police, to speak in Washington DC. “I don’t believe that the government has a sincere interest in changing anything. You’re either on the left hand or the right hand -- you can’t be a government administration that says yes, we’re concerned about Ferguson, Eric Garner, murders by police, but on the other hand you’re facilitating military weapons in our streets. We found out that when we were in Washington that there is a prerequisite to issuing those weapons to police. They are required to use a new weapon within one year! What do you think that does?”
She also spoke about the ominous cloud in the ranks of today’s police, as well to the highest ranks of law enforcement. “For me the key marker was, when those Towers dropped. The US as it was previously known no longer existed. There was a totally new agenda that went into play -- maybe it was an old agenda, but at that point, it began to manifest more and more clearly. You saw people’s rights being taken away.... Everyone knows about the NDAA, signed by the President, which means anyone can be accused of being a terrorist, they don’t have to tell you what you are being arrested for, you have no rights to process or an attorney -- based on an accusation alone. Everyone applauded when those laws only pertained to Muslims, whom the country was told were terrorists. But when it was time to sign the paper, they flipped it, and it applies to all Americans. So we must have concern for each other: black, white, all Americans. Because people turned a deaf ear and blind eye to Muslims being persecuted -- black folks are the last folks that should go with that, they have been lying and lying to us since we got here.”
“When I see police, I see them operating from a position of: Obey. Period. Obey. Do not question what I am saying; do not question what I am doing.” She also echoed a refrain spoken by many in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. “A lot of people think we are revisiting the ‘60s; it’s the same thing - been there, done that. I assure you, it is not.”
To get a sense of what a presence Danette Chavis is, watch her off the cuff explain just how deeply unjust and racist our criminal justice system is, succinctly covering it in a way Matt Taibbi would admire:
Up next was Asha Rose, a young, black, lesbian organizer. She has taken the plight of black and brown youth from the streets as a founding member of the Black Youth Project 100 to the United Nations as a delegate of We Charge Genocide. She had no use for small talk or platitudes. Her first words were, “I’m a 20-year-old black girl who has never seen the police keep anyone safe. But I have seen them harass and abuse young people of color, coerce false confessions from black teenagers, and use their power to control black communities, communities of color, queer communities, poor communities.”
But she took time to expound on the longview, stressing the importance of forming organizations to sustain the work, and finding radical imagination to fuel it.
“I was a poet before I was an organizer, so this is a part of the work that I hold near and dear to my heart; I’m also 20 years old, so I’m an idealist; that’s cool and fun, we’ll see how long that lasts. But to change the world, to dismantle systems of oppression, we need to envision what we want it to look like. So holding up the work of artists in the movements, organizers today, creative tactics we see -- there are people doing protests nothing like any protest I’ve ever seen before in this moment, and that’s dope.”
And lastly she reminded the assembled that this was ultimately about taking direct actions. “I define Direct Action as anything that confronts power outside of the proscribed channels to do so, and ideologically and personally I believe in direct action as a mode of organizing. I believe we need to take power when it’s not given to us.”
Thenjiwe McHarris came from Ferguson, and spoke about the ugly and frightening realities of police militarization there, in which “children could be met with machine guns in matter of seconds,” as well as tanks and tear gas, a misleading euphemism. She told us, “if someone says ‘tear gas’ to you, tell them to stop using that term, which is a sanitized way of saying, 'I’m going to fuck up your entire respiratory system.'”
“We can’t get lost in talking about individual pieces of policy. We have to imagine what we want for ourselves and our people, and find the courage to do that. As a movement, we need to admit to ourselves that we can win. It’s not only possible, it’s coming.”
And then finally there was Colia Clark, veteran of the Civil Rights movement and Special Assistant to Medgar Evers. A former professor and Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, she is a tour de force of history, brilliance, tactics, and oration.
“What time is it? What time is it? It’s nation time!”
She began with a rumination of looking back across 60 years of her involvement as an activist, as a child in Mississippi, finding herself in civil rights movement and tying that moment to an omega understanding with the original goddesses along the Nile in Egypt 15,000 years ago. “'I am that which I am; I am the beginning; I am the end. I am the first,'” and she must have been talking to a man when she said, 'And I will be when there is no more'.”
Colia roused the crowd with familiar cadence of baptist preaching but intoned with an academic flavor too. She brought her own history alive, speaking about the decision by the mother of Emmett Till to keep his casket open for the world to see how brutally his face was smashed and battered, the young boys and girls desegregating schools in the South, the lunch counters, the solidarity of folks standing with one another.
Ultimately, she concluded we must view the entire historical context of America. "This moment is the moment we will end forever the lie that this is a democracy. This has never been a democracy.... It’s clear that the constitution can never serve US blacks. It’s a slavocracy...The intent was always to kill anything that challenges white western capitalist imperialism.”
“My assessment is, we need to have a constitutional convention, if we are lucky enough to get there.”
King made similar statements in this very same church. A year later he was gone.
His pronouncements were similarly firm. Freedom and equality is not possible until the triple evils of racism, militarism and capitalism were confronted and defeated. In 1967, he was buttressed by the country's then-widening anti-war movement.
But the Civil Rights movement didn't have the benefit of coming after a worldwide populist movement directed at how unbridled capitalism is the cancer at the very heart of so much of society's ailments. Occupy Wall St only a few years ago focused the entire world's attention on the death grip of concentrated wealth and the banks' pernicious practices that have turned the economy upside down. The slightest bit of investigation into the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner revealed not just the racially-motivated tactics of Broken Windows, but how deeply intertwined these tragedies are as a part of a deregulated capitalistic system with policies that keep poor minorities spinning in an ever-churning diabolic trap of ticketing, court appearances, and prison terms, to the benefit of local municipalities and private businesses. There's a wind at the back of this movement.
#BlackLivesMatter gets the whole picture, and similar events are happening all over the country right now.
African-descended goddesses are ready to show the way.
Millions March NYC 2014 from Simone on Vimeo.