The Police Murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago and the Coverup
The Whole Damn System Is Guilty as Hell
Updated January 4, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Chicago Goddam!
Laquan McDonald, 17 years old, gunned down on a busy Chicago street by a cop. Shot seconds after the cop pulled up and jumped out of the squad car, as Laquan walked away from the cops, hands at his side. After the first shot, Laquan fell to the ground and as he lay there riddled with 15 more bullets. This cold-blooded execution of a teenager was followed by a massive cover-up. 16 shots and a cover-up: CHICAGO GODDAM!
The city of Chicago, where Black people came up north seeking freedom and a better life only to be super-exploited in the steel mills and stockyards by this capitalist system, when they could get jobs at all...where 23 Black people were lynched or otherwise murdered “up south” in the bloody summer of pogroms in 1919 just to enforce their being locked down on the bottom of society and to let people know that there would be NO freedom in Chicago either...where white mobs rioted over and over again in the decades that followed whenever Black people dared to go in the “wrong neighborhood” or when schools were being desegregated and where this was managed by the top real estate interests in the city for the benefit of their capitalist system, backed up by the Democratic Party/city government and the mob...where the police murdered the Black revolutionary leader Fred Hampton in 1969 as he slept in his bed, drugged by one of their undercover agents, and then the city, the state’s attorney and the police all tried to cover it up (see “December 1969: The FBI Assassination of Fred Hampton—I Am a Revolutionary!’“)....where they tortured Black people for decades and the cops in the force still revere the pig commander Burge who ran the torture. The list is long and the crimes are many.
And now Chicago, where they not only murdered Laquan but conspired together, up to the very highest levels—and let’s not rule out the White House either—to cover it up... (See “Recent History of the CPD & More Revelations of Cover-Up in the Murder of Laquan McDonald”)
Here is this goddam city with its downtown of gleaming skyscrapers and sparkling lights, upscale retail shopping districts like the Magnificent Mile...where the rulers have no real way to make profits off of large swaths of the masses of Black people, and unemployment is sky-high and lasts for generations...where segregation is still the rule of the day, more so today than ever, when they are not literally driving Black people OUT OF the city...where the schools in Black neighborhoods are turned into virtual prisons and pipelines to actual prisons, when they’re not being shut down by the city...where, especially now that the capitalists no longer have any use for them to directly exploit, masses of youth are consigned to lives of such hopelessness and desperation that crime, in the words even of one of the capitalist system’s defenders, becomes a “rational choice” and “the life” becomes a source of meaning for the youth and they are driven to murdering and shooting and crippling each other.
From the Revolutionary Communist Party, Chicago branch:
McCarthy fired. Now Indict EVERYONE who is part of the CONSPIRACY to cover up Laquan’s officially-sanctioned MURDER!
POLICE MURDER AND TERROR MUST STOP!
The whole damn system is guilty as hell. We Need an ACTUAL REVOLUTION!
Read statement here
Download PDF of statement here
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.
Bob Avakian, Chairman, Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
