Carl Dix Calls for Huge Stolen Lives Installations for April 14th Actions!  

April 8, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On April 14th, we've got to revive the spirit of Ferguson, that spirit of refusing to suffer the brutality and murder of the system in silence. We've got to revive it—and we've got to take it higher. We have to get back out in the streets, and we've got to declare that we're not backing down and that we are NOT going away. We have to say that we're determined to fight this on April 14th—and then coming after April 14th, we've got to continue building wave upon wave of resistance, even more powerfully, until we can STOP murder by the police. [applause]

We need to push the truth back out there. And we've got to put ourselves on the line as we do it. We can use these posters [pointing to Stolen Lives poster] in doing that, taking them into the streets, out of the campus or into school, into your neighborhood. We need to use them to polarize the situation, forcing them to look square in the eye of reality, and challenging them to join us in doing something about it.

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Now this is a pretty big poster. But we need to make even bigger enlargements of this poster. HUGE enlargements—maybe even something like 30 feet. And then carry them into the streets on April 14th­, like they're floats, you know. They need to be so big that by themselves they will capture the attention of people and break things out of the normal routine of society, whether we got a thousand people carrying it, or 10 people carrying it. These posters powerfully represent the hundreds of people the police kill every year. When we take them into the streets, we are carrying the justification for what we are doing, the thing that indicates we are right to do it. We're putting the horror of police murder out there for everybody to see. And we can't back down when we do this. If the authorities come to us and say, oh you have to get off to the sidewalk, we have to say: No. This needs to be out in the streets. This needs to be where everyone can see it. [applause]

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And then leading up to April 14, this next week, these posters have got to be everywhere. You know, they should be big. They don't have to be as big as the 30 foot one I'm talking about—they should be big enough to attract attention. When you do that—'cause I just came back from L.A., we were at UCLA, we were at UC Riverside on Stolen Lives Days—riveted people's attention. People wanted copies of the poster. They wanted to take pictures of themselves in front of it, and tweet in and put it on social media. We need to be doing this for this next week, and we need to be recruiting the people whose attention is riveted by this poster, to act with us on April 14th to stop these horrors.

People need to go to the website of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network that Cornel and I co-founded. That's stopmassincarceration.net. And we need to be working to drive people to that website. And we also should be working to drive people to the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party, revcom.us. Everybody needs to be going to these sites, finding out what's going on, getting a fuller perspective of what's behind what's happening, and getting organized and organizing others. People need to send in photos, reports, stories and vines to these sites, and we'll post them up, so that the people can get a sense of the growing nationwide movement of resistance.

In this way, we'll be making a huge move against police getting away with murder, and against mass incarceration—and also a move towards the transformation of all of society. We can do this, sisters and brothers. A whole lot of people want to see something done to stop the way the system gives a green light to killer cops. It's right beneath the surface, and sometimes it bubbles over, comes out in the open for people to see.

Excerpt from Carl Dix’s speech at the April 6 emergency meeting on police murder. Go here for more on the April 6 meeting.

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