Boston: Students and Others in the Streets
November 26, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
The night of the announcement of the grand jury decision not to indict the cop who killed Michael Brown, a couple of hundred students from Simmons College and other places gathered at Boston City Hall and marched to the state house. An impromptu rally also took place at Boston College that night involving a hundred or more students.
Crowd chants "WE SEE YOU" to Black inmates in Back Bay jail. Photo: Shared via Twitter.
The next day, November 25, there was a speak-out at noon at the Umass Boston campus that pulled in around a hundred students, with a number of students taking the bullhorn in between the raps of the revolutionary communists. Chalk outlines were drawn on the plaza with names of people killed by the police. Students also added "save our children" and "no more." Someone cited Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, around the systemic nature of the problem. Someone else proposed an economic boycott. We made a couple of thousand copies of the new Carl Dix statement on the grand jury decision, and people grabbed up bunches to get out in class. Mainly though, people did not cut class and seemed to question what could be done to really make a difference and whether students at this school could be rallied to do much. A bunch of people signed up for follow-up actions, and many were planning to attend the big rally called that evening in Roxbury by Black Lives Matter Boston. One student who had gone to New York City with us to attend the Dialogue between Bob Avakian and Cornel West was out there with us and spoke out, urging his fellow students to really step out and act to make a difference. We went downtown at rush hour with a bullhorn and reached a lot of commuters, many expressing the sentiment that they were "too angry to speak honestly on the bullhorn about it."
In Roxbury a rally began at 7 pm across from a major police station in Dudley Square. Here groups of students from area colleges, including Northeastern, Boston College, Harvard, etc., as well as community activists, anarchists, high school students—a wide range of thousands—came together.
Inmates at Southbay Prison, Boston, banged on windows, flipped lights on an off, and held their hands up in the windows protesting the grand jury decision. Photo: Shared via Twitter.
After about an hour of people speaking out, we marched, taking over main streets with around 3,000 people, more at times. People headed to the South End and ended up near the ramp for the I-93 freeway, which sits next to a major jail, South Bay. The prisoners were banging on their windows and flipping lights on and off, loving it, and everyone felt an electricity in the air from this show of solidarity. The police let people march up the long entrance ramp and then blocked the actual highway itself off so that the crowd was unable to block I-93 itself, although we did cause a major disruption of the surrounding area. From there a large segment marched to downtown Boston and then to the central police headquarters (check out "Black lives matter turn out for mike brown indict America" on Facebook). One woman grabbed one of our signs saying "We are all Mike Brown ...the whole damn system is guilty! revcom.us" and many had homemade signs saying things like "Amerikkka never loved us," "Fuck white supremacy," "# Shut it down" and a whole lot more.
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