The Dogs Are Still in the Streets

Ferguson 2015—It's Still Right to Rebel Against Injustice!

by Carl Dix

August 11, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

One year since the police murder of Michael Brown. A year marked by resistance on a level we haven’t seen in this country in decades. This resistance was ushered in by the refusal of defiant youth in Ferguson to accept this murder in silence, and it spread among people across the country; youth and students, clergy, professional people, people of all races and nationalities. It has also been a year of police continuing to murder people and the whole damn system working to exonerate them when they do.

It was right for the youth to rise up a year ago after the murder of Michael Brown, and it’s right for them to continue rising up today. It was very heartening to see youth in the streets in Ferguson, the parents of Michael Brown and VonDerrit Myers Jr. hold activities to mark the murders of their children last year, and family members of police murder victims from all across the country join the protests. It was also very good to see clergy and others do civil disobedience, and artists hold concerts. The system has doubled down on giving a green light to killer cops. We must take our resistance to a much higher level.

And on the very anniversary of the murder of Brown, cops from three different jurisdictions flooded the streets of Ferguson using rubber bullets, armored personnel carriers and smoke grenades against youth who took to the streets in anger at the way the system continues to let killer cops get away with murder. The dogs are still in the streets!

And one year to the day after the murder of Michael Brown, police shot Tyrone Harris, an 18-year-old Black man, a few blocks from where Wilson murdered Michael Brown. The police say Harris fired shots at another man and then at some undercover cops—who shot him, severely wounding him. The full circumstances of this shooting are not yet known. But there is no reason to accept what the police say as true. And witnesses saw police handcuff Harris while he lay on the ground bleeding and arrest someone who demanded they get Harris medical assistance.

The authorities justify the violence their police inflict on Black and Latino youth by depicting them as thugs and criminals. And they try to get sections of people to buy into the way they depict the youth so they won’t oppose the clampdown they enforce on the youth. In reality, this official violence is aimed at suppressing sections of people this system has no future for, people it hates and fears. This kind of violence has been built into the very fabric of America since the first Africans were dragged to these shores in slave chains centuries ago. It is completely illegitimate, and it must be stopped.

Everyone with an ounce of justice in their hearts, everyone who hates hearing that another Black or Brown person has been killed by the police, needs to join the fight to STOP these horrors. The Rise Up October National Tour has been going around the country and was in Ferguson for the anniversary, spreading the message: Stop Police Terror—Which Side Are You On? A key way for people to join the fight to STOP these horrors is to throw in to make the October 24 National March in NYC as powerful as possible. Help spread its message everywhere. In this way, we will have the backs of the youth who are targeted by brutal, murdering cops.

Such an unprecedented outpouring of protest and resistance, along with the whole process of building up to these days, would awaken and inspire millions, and sharply raise the question to the whole society and the whole world: WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? The aim is to get things to the point where there are millions who both feel in their bones that this system of intimidation, terror and murder is INTOLERABLE... and are willing to step out and act in all different ways to stop this, and have the ways to do so. In other words, these actions in October aim to change the whole tenor and direction of society and make a major leap in turning back and stopping this terror in blue. So I urge every person and organization who feels these murders must stop to join with Cornel West and myself and many others to make this happen as powerfully as possible.

Police terror concentrates an ugly program of suppression targeting Black and Latino people. It will take revolution, nothing less to end this and all the other horrors this system enforces on humanity—the attacks on women, the wars for empire, the devastation of the environment, and more. Bob Avakian, BA, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has developed a way to make revolution, for real. A way to actually go up against the monsters who run things now in an all-out struggle for power and to have a real chance of winning when the opening emerges and the time is right. A way to fight today—for real—against the powers-that-be so that we build up our strength and change conditions to bring about that opening—as soon as possible.

BA says, “There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.” If you yearn to see all these horrors ended, once and for all, get with the movement for revolution that we are building.

 

 

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