November 27, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Oakland Day 2:
"This is far from over"
From a reader:
A second night of powerful protest resounded through the streets of downtown Oakland Tuesday night, November 25. About 1,000 marched, full of fury at the grand jury’s refusal to indict and rejecting the assertion of genocidal white supremacy the decision represents. “Black Lives Matter! Latino Lives Matter! All Lives Matter!” rang through the streets of Oakland.
For the second straight night, there were two seizures of major freeways. First, I-980, which runs between downtown Oakland and West Oakland (a historically Black community), was seized. Traffic in both directions was stopped on the freeway (though not for as long as the massive freeway shutdown the night before that lasted nearly two hours, in part because there were fewer protesters involved at this point). When the protesters exited the freeway and poured into West Oakland, people from the area were called on to join the march, and more than a few did. And people also helped marchers evade the police.
The people on the march did not stop after being forced off the I-980 by police. They continued to march through the streets of Oakland, confronting a very large police force that had conceded the downtown streets to the protesters, but were trying to draw the line, to the degree they could, at refusing the protesters entry to the freeways.
After the march made forays testing other possible freeway entrances, which were blocked by the police, there was a second freeway seizure on I-580 (the freeway seized the night before, this time in a different place, near the intersection with another freeway, Highway 24). Both sides of the freeway were closed. By this time, more people had joined the march, which numbered nearly 1,000. Police encircled a large group of the protesters on the freeway; some of them managed to escape, but others were arrested, and some were brutalized by police.
The people involved in this were young, full of energy, very determined to not let this grand jury decision stand, and very determined that a license for police to kill Black youths with impunity will NOT be the way things go. The crowd was multinational: Black, white, Asian, Latino. There were many students along with a few ministers and people of different kinds and ages—including, for example, people who work in middle class jobs in downtown Oakland. The crowd also included a sizeable contingent from Berkeley High School (the Oakland public schools had closed the whole week for the Thanksgiving holiday). The Berkeley High contingent included people who were out shutting down freeways the day before, and some young women who had been involved in a campaign protesting sexual harassment at the high school that day.
People from three different mobilizations joined together in the march.
Organizers called for a third day of protests on Wednesday, November 26. More to come as news comes in.
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