Southern California:
Hands Up Don't Shoot: A Great Beginning at Our Campus
August 28, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Today at our university in Southern California, a few dozen people gathered for a rally in conjunction with the outrage that is asserting itself in Ferguson and around the country. The title of our action was "Hands Up Don't Shoot: Justice For Michael Brown."
A couple of us who are working with the October Month of Resistance decided to call this event. We know we need to organize more people to get with this so that we can hit the ground running once classes start (first week of October). But we can't wait until we have a big formal group to start taking action. The guidance on the Stop Mass Incarceration Network website was very much what we did: "EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE, ACT, FROM THE PUBLIC SQUARE TO THE 'HOOD, GET OUT THERE—MAKE A SIGN—FIND SOME PARTNERS OR START ALONE AND THEN GET WITH PEOPLE—BUT BE IN THE STREETS."
Students rally in Southern California in support of Ferguson. Photo: Special to revcom.us.
One of the lessons from this is that nobody should wait until they feel they have a large enough group to just take action wherever they're at. I knew we would meet PLENTY more people along the way that are eager to get involved, and this is what happened. In fact some of my own hopes were surpassed because I didn't expect the event to reach so broadly.
Some of the first people to show up were from another campus half an hour away! We had put the call for this campus on Facebook, and more people got a hold of it, so pretty soon hundreds of people (mostly students) had gotten the invite. Also, a group of three community college students came from an outlying community in the desert, about an hour away! A young woman who came with this group said as soon as she got the information, she made 200 copies at her school and passed them all out. All of them got materials to take back to where they're from.
Some people had brought some homemade signs, and a few people from the local student government were pretty supportive too, bringing us a table, markers, and some other materials. A writer for a website about goings-on in the city we contacted even came by to cover what we were doing. He said he would also come back once we got more people at the start of school. As soon as enough people had shown up, I said, "Hands Up..." and the crowd started chanting "Don't Shoot," "No Justice No Peace," "We want Justice for Michael Brown," etc.
The content of the speak-out tied together the struggle for Mike Brown in Ferguson (to jail the killer cop, and to stand with the people of Ferguson) with the recent police murders of Omar Abrego and Ezell Ford in LA (we named many other victims of the cops). We chanted and yelled about the New Jim Crow, mass incarceration, raids and deportations, and how it's time to put a stop to ALL this shit. Students were very enthusiastic to see this happening, and there were quickly calls to repeat and amplify this action during the first week of classes. Lots of people gave their info, and we got out Calls and flyers for October.
The young woman who came from the desert town is working with a survivor of police brutality out in her area. She said this person had a panic attack in a liquor store, but the police took her to jail instead of helping her. She also has a friend from Farmington, Missouri, which is apparently not far from Ferguson. This friend of hers says Confederate flags are still all over Missouri, the police work with the Klan, and poverty and abandoned houses are everywhere. So just by doing today's action, we got into contact with people who are from not even far from Ferguson!
Several women from some of the local labor unions connected to our campus brought a lot of support and thanked us for putting it together. One student said she already got the October flyer and started wearing the sticker at FYF fest this past weekend, a big concert in LA that some of us were handing out materials at.
We marched through the campus with a banner and chants, handing flyers to students who looked like they were at a job fair, or visiting. We turned a lot of heads and got a lot of thumbs up. But there's a need to get much bigger by the time classes get back in session, and the rumbling beneath the surface tells me that we certainly WILL get bigger and stronger, starting now and throughout October.
Another woman from a nearby proletarian town, who has recently started working with Revolution Books in LA, got in touch with us and came as soon as she got off work. She named a lot of the community colleges around here that we could bring this to, and we had some discussion about the statement "We Stand With the Defiant Ones." We talked about how we could help her get these materials out to her neighborhood, and how to get the word out in Black churches.
One of the last people to come through was eager to know what else we had planned. She's studying to be a math teacher, and she said this injustice is very linked with the genocide happening in Palestine. We exchanged info, and got her the latest issue of Revolution so she could get a sense of the whole movement for revolution.
A formerly incarcerated brother, now a barber shop owner who gets Revolution newspaper and has posted the October call in his shop, says now he notices things changing....meaning, before Ferguson, people might have taken the flyers, but now they're asking him about who's taking action against this injustice. (I recorded a long conversation on my voice recorder I had with him and one of his friends, including about the role of BA's leadership and the possibility of revolution, and I will work to sum that up and share it!) I visited this same barber right after that action and showed him footage of the rally, and he was stoked! He feels that if we march from campus towards his shop and down that main boulevard, he knows a lot of people who would be enthusiastic to join us, including come to the campus to speak, because people's experiences with the police in this town are pretty horrendous.
Today was a very brief action, but it didn't take much to get it off the ground. Throughout the course of it we met way more people, including from outlying areas. After the event, a few of us kept talking in a local cafe. We made some plans for October 22 and talked about the political climate in each of our cities.
As I write this, my roommate, a Black PhD student, is texting me about being followed by the cops his whole way to the gym, and how he might need people to come out with cell phones to walk him home when he gets out. It's time to Blow the Whistle on this shit!
Today was a great beginning, but the struggle ain't over! If you're on a campus, build these networks, get people to tell their stories about being victimized by the system, fight to make the October Month of Resistance and especially October 22nd massive, raise money for people who traveled to Ferguson (I got one of my family members to donate!), and introduce people to BA and the movement for all-the-way revolution! Don't underestimate the moment we're in!
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