Revcom Writes From the Scene:
Night After Night in St. Louis

October 2, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

We received this several days ago from a member of the Revolution Club:

In St. Louis there has been a sustained thing of people taking the streets and shutting it down. Every day there is a meet-up spot where people drive to and gather until the word comes out from one of the leaders about where to go.

On Friday, we met up north in a mall parking lot located in the middle of not much. The only place open was a huge store that sold arms. We got word to head up to a casino and to follow as a caravan. A lot of cars got split because of red lights and a lot of people got lost—including us—since we were following a car that made a U-turn he wasn’t supposed to make. We ended up parking and heading over to the meet-up spot in St. Charles, a predominantly white suburb where a lot of cops live, and there was an Oktoberfest event where everyone was getting drunk. We marched through the streets and alongside the festival chanting “Indict convict...” and “Hey hey, ho ho these killer cops have got to go.” Some drunks tried to follow and start shit with us but were kept away by the pigs. There were the chants “This is what democracy looks like.” We went alongside the festival as Black people said they were called the N-word and people were told to get out of their city. The crowd would give high fives to those sticking their hand over the fence.

There was a young white woman who joined our march. I asked her if she had just joined and why. As she was carrying her empty collectible glass jug of beer, she said, “There’s too much corruption in this system. The cops are killers.” Her male friend also was marching and was taking live video. As we marched down, some residents were out of their houses supporting us. One white person yelled out, “I’m a part of this!” The leaders of the movement were on the bullhorn as we took over one of the intersections and said they were not anti-police but anti-bad police and got into what Black Lives Matter means to them. There was a moment of silence as some hecklers tried to disrupt things. The pigs blocked off the major intersection that led to the casino and the leaders called the night off.

The movement to stop police murder took a big hit this weekend with the brutal arrest of some people, including at least one Black youth who was strangled, thrown to the ground, and arrested along with his grandmother who was trying to free him. People had met up at the Galleria mall again like they had in the last week to shut it down. We met in front of the mall and then people went around and gave word to meet in front of the Apple store. There was an announcement downstairs and it all began with people marching through. At the escalator, a pig blocked one of the ways to go up, so people just charged through. As stores began bringing down their gates and closing up, there were people behind the rails looking over at the bottom level and cheering. Once everyone got downstairs we did more chants in celebration, but then some whistles went off by the pigs and there were a line of them charging at people. People began to run toward the exits. Inside the pigs had gone after people, with one throwing and wrestling a white man to the ground with more pigs jumping over the man. The leaders outside did agitation against the police who had come outside to single out a white man and threw him up off the ground and body slammed him, jumped on him, and arrested him. One pig walked toward me as I was blowing the whistle and then they all started chasing one of the leaders of the movement, who got away. Everyone went over to the courthouse to protest and spent the day there. At night, the Galleria was filled with state troopers. People met at a nearby shopping square where they shut down Target. Riot police came out as there was a moment of silence for Anthony Lamar Smith.

One night I stayed at the place of someone I met at the St. Charles protest. She was reading the “role of the police” poster I had. I got into the strategy to defeat them with her and she said she had been thinking about how to do that. She said she’s a part of a democratic socialist group and is helping as she can with donating and volunteering to feed people and provide resources. She had been reading BAsics that I left at her place. She really likes the first quote and thinks it is true. She has read the first few pages and likes the part about the U.S. military and the interests it serves. She wishes there were more statistics, but she figured she has to get into the cited works that follow each of BA’s quotes. She offered to drive me to the protest that was happening in a few hours, so I went to her house where she pulled up BA on the big screen. She pulled up BA Through the Years and began snapping her fingers in agreement to the beginning. When it got to the Revolution Talk, she said, “Wow he’s still at it... after all these decades.” I announced BA will be in Berkeley next year, and she said, “I wonder if we can drive over there.” After getting into a lot of things like the Points of Attention, she said, “I’m down.” Today, she’s printing more of the November 4 This Nightmare Must End flyers and will pass them out at her campus. We’re getting back together later this week.

When we got to the protest, she raised that she should form a communist group on campus. She had questions about corruption and other individuals taking over and what are the different lines and difference between Trotskyites and communists and anarchists. After we discussed some, she asked me, “OK, should we go around and get these flyers out?” She introduced me to her socialist friends. I gave a Revolution newspaper to one guy and I was talking about getting with the leadership of BA. He asked who is Bob Avakian and knows nothing about him and had heard that we’re “weird.” He went on to say he’s already a communist and is working in St. Louis. He asked whether I was from St. Louis and if there was a Revolution Club in St. Louis. The young woman I was with pointed at me and said, “That’s why he’s here.” I asked him what is his strategy, solution and way beyond these relations between people. He said they’re still figuring it out. I gave him the choice to get to know BA by taking the paper and if he wants to do that he can, and if not then he could continue not knowing the way out and whatever it is, we need to organize to drive out this Trump/Pence regime. The young woman afterward said he was definitely not one of her friends and she thought it was ridiculous for people to not get into BA if they didn’t know anything about him.

I met one of the students we interviewed the other day who really liked the Trump fascist poster from Revolution. She said she passed out the materials we gave her on campus and I gave her a stack of November 4 flyers for her to get out, and she said she would make more copies and will get back to us.

I introduced myself to one of the leaders as I was handing out flyers yesterday. He is a Black politician and said he already knew me. I was like oh, OK. He said he couldn’t take a flyer but to contact him about uniting with it because he does unite with November 4 and thinks they could do something with it. He reasoned he is too much into putting a stop to police murder of Black people in St. Louis.

The march began with people having blue tape over their mouths to represent blue silence. Among the protests have been the chant “White Silence Is Violence,” and the theme of this march was “Blue Silence Is Violence.” It was over the fact that there was a Black cop who was shot by a white cop when he was off duty and a Black undercover cop who was brutally attacked and arrested by the police. In front of the pig headquarters, one of the leaders said, “They can’t even take care of themselves. So how can they take care of us? We gotta take care of ourselves!” People began chanting “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail” without my starting it. Then people took a knee for a minute for the players of the NFL and Kaepernick. Then hundreds took to the streets. People attempted to take over a blocked highway with pigs on bikes standing there. It was interesting they sent out pigs on bikes.

The sentiment among the crowd was a lot of anger for the brutal arrests of people who just got out and joined the protest with the parents of Isaiah Hammett and Isaiah Perkins who vowed not to give up until their murderers were in jail. Then the crowd headed to Busch Stadium to declare, “NO JUSTICE—NO BASEBALL!” The protest ended with the reverend saying they had a strategy and they go back each night to figure out what to do for the next day.

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