Correspondence from St. Louis:

RevComs Connecting Up with Days and Nights of Determined Resistance

September 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Revcom.us received the following correspondence from a member of the Revolution Club who is in St. Louis where there have been days and nights of protest after a judge acquitted the pig who murdered Anthony Lamar Smith.

September 20, 2017. The atmosphere in St. Louis is determined resistance. There is a sense that the outrage of another cop walking is too much to bear, and the sense that this will not stop unless we stop it. Many of the young Black people we have met, some new, some old friends welcomed the revolutionaries the “revcoms.” They are proud of the struggle in St. Louis and being at the forefront of struggle against police murder and having that recognition and they want it to spread.

One person said, “We have to stay in the streets night and day,” and they have plans to carry this out for 300 days of resistance! Some have said and feel that it’s protest that got us here and that’s what we are going to do. They need to continue to disrupt the city and bring it to its knees.

An older friend that we had stayed with felt that the students have played a big role, in broadening out the struggle and bringing in other issues. That right now 70 percent of the people on the street are students. He felt that a lot was learned from the 2014 uprising in Ferguson. One thing is that they needed to be much more organized. The leaders of this protest have GoFundMe pages for bail (Fiona Apple donated $1,000 to the bail fund); they have people getting tents and calling on others to come out and stay. He felt people have been more radicalized over this past period. What happened in Charlottesville and Trump, are part of this radicalization.

We went to a birthday party for a young 22-year-old who was murdered by police. It was held in front of City Hall where we meet many new and older friends. People that we ran with in Ferguson, would say right away, “Here come the revcoms” and ask about revolutionaries who had been in Ferguson after the police murder of Michael Brown.  

Many of the Black youth, both male and female, have been drawn to the revcoms, and about 6-7 put on the “BA Speaks: Revolution—Nothing Less!” t-shirts and wore them at the protest at City Hall. We talked to some young Black male youth and challenged them to come over and recruit the young Black female youth. A lot of their friends, male and female, got shirts with some more people coming up to ask for t-shirts and learning what it meant to put on the t-shirt and get into the Six Points of Attention for the Revolution. One young woman and man pointed to Point #2—which talks about how women, men, and differently gendered people are equals and comrades—and said that sexism was something they didn’t like about this society. 

Some people are looking through the paper and we have been especially pointing out to people the statement from the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA—“HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution.” One young man was drawn toward this, wanting to understand more about how people would go about making revolution. When asked what he liked, he said because it’s talking about being “serious and scientific”—he picked up on that phrase. A lot of the youth were challenged and called forward to fill the needs of humanity and urgently get into the revolution. Putting on the t-shirt was a big step to coming in as leaders of the revolution. We got into what that looks like to lead others. One young man was arguing he was only one individual. We walked through the impact of his putting on the shirt along with others and challenging and calling forward others to do the same and how that changes and transforms the situation of how people are looking at them and the revolution and bringing the need for more people—while leading others into the revolution. We got into Bob Avakian and read quotes from BAsics, like 1:24 that talks about the role of the police; and what BA concentrates and the need to follow that. We also met a young woman who had written to the revcoms, who is going to Stanford and is doing a paper on the movement against police brutality. She is going to Chicago (she left today, and wants to hook up with the club). We got contacts to some of the key people we met at this spot.

Later in the day everyone went to Shaw Park in Clayton, the county seat. People met at the park, then got the word to go to the Galleria. People took off in cars and headed toward the Galleria, where the protest succeeded in shutting down the shopping center. There were tons of cops, but they apparently didn’t feel the freedom to do another mass arrest. Then after marching around the streets and through the parking lot, the crowd dispersed. The chant “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail” was taken up broadly and powerfully. One of the other chants, “No Justice, No Peace,” got turned into “No Justice, No Profit.” This protest was about 200 strong, with many faces from Ferguson, students and people of all ages and nationalities. One young sister carried the revcom.us poster of Trump in the Klan outfit on one side, and the cover of Revolution with “Pigs Kill Again.” She ran ahead of the crowd and was one of the people leading the march with these posters.

There is a need to struggle for people to more deeply see the links of the outrage here to the whole fascist agenda—and this means that we have to draw out the links between the ongoing and horrific murder of Black and Brown people by this white supremacist system that is bred into the bone of this country, and Trump, Pence, and Sessions putting that on steroids with their egging on of the police, like Trump did in Long Island. At the same time, it is very important—and a good example for all—that people in St. Louis are defying the brutalizing and arrogant pigs—these pigs actually have been chanting “Whose Streets? Our Streets,” which when they do it is basically saying “fuck the rule of law, we do what we want”—by going out every day; this should be learned from by the whole movement and prefigures in microcosm what needs to happen on November 4.

Through all this, we got out Revolution newspapers and the Refuse Fascism Nov. 4 pamphlet, BAsics, the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, and The New Communism by BA and directed people to go to revcom.us everyday.

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