Wisconsin Students Walk Out of School to Protest Police Killing of Tony Robinson

Hundreds Occupy State Capitol to Say Police Getting Away with Murder Must Stop!

by Carl Dix | March 10, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

On Friday, March 6, 19-year-old Anthony “Tony” Robinson was killed by a cop in Madison, Wisconsin; another young Black man dead at the hands of the police. This time the killer cop was responding to reports of someone running across a busy street thru the traffic and getting into fights. The cop forced his way into Robinson’s apartment and shot him dead. Then they dragged Tony’s body out of the house, leaving his blood all over the steps of the building. Horrors like this must STOP!

Many people in Madison took to the streets enraged over this murder. Protests began that night and continued over the weekend, with hundreds taking to the streets on Saturday. A candlelight vigil followed on Sunday, and then young people took things to a higher level on Monday. Students from Sun Prairie High School, the school Tony graduated from, walked out of school, marching thru the streets of Madison over to the state capitol building and took it over. By this point, the numbers had swelled to 2,000 people, as students from another high school, middle school students and some college students joined in. Older people joined too, forming a ring around the students to keep the police from attacking the youth.

This outpouring is reminiscent of the powerful, beautiful and very necessary outpourings of resistance last year after the police killed Michael Brown and after grand juries let the cops who murdered Brown and Eric Garner walk free. And it’s exactly what needs to be happening again, all across the country.

Think about it—if people hadn’t poured into the streets last year, people across the country wouldn’t even know about what happened to Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and this issue wouldn’t have been forced into the consciousness of millions of people. And the authorities wouldn’t be doing investigations of police departments or even talking about police killing so many Black and Latino people as being a problem.

What the students did in Madison is exactly what April 14, the national shut-down, needs to look like. The powers-that-be came at the movement of resistance to police getting away with murder with threats and false promises. They arrested many, many protesters. They told us we should get out of the streets and sit down with them to discuss ways to reform how the police operate, even as they continue to let cops who brutalize and even murder people walk free when they do it. Remember what really hit them where it hurt—us going into the streets in protest, exposing the savage brutality and murder their criminal “injustice” system was inflicting on people before the eyes of the world and calling for it to STOP! We must mount this kind of resistance all across the country and follow it with wave after wave of resistance, until the horror of police getting away with murder is really NO MORE.

The students in Madison are showing the way. We must join with them. Make Justice for Tony Robinson a theme in the March 14 “Blow the Whistle on Brutal, Murdering Cops” day. Send video and written messages of solidarity to the youth and others in Madison taking to the streets. And we must do just like they’re doing in cities all across the country on A14.

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