Saturday, April 15, a sunny Chicago morning. Twenty-four-year-old Reginald Clay and some of his friends were getting ready to go a funeral. Police are roaming this West Side neighborhood on a so-called “gang de-escalation” mission. They spot Clay, who they claim “leaned into a car in a suspicious manner,” and decide to pursue him. Clay, in fear, takes off running. Within 15 seconds, Clay is dead—shot five times by this murdering pig.

Clay worked at Amazon. He had a FOID card—“Firearm Owner’s Identification,” a license to carry a weapon—which means this young Black man had no record. He had a three-year-old daughter. His family, friends and the young men on the block kept emphasizing that he wasn’t into the street life even though it surrounded him on the West Side of Chicago. As the video shows, Clay had his gun on him and was trying to get rid of it and surrender when he was killed. Around the same time this was occurring, in neighboring Indiana, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was holding their annual convention. They listened to Mike Pence talk about the sanctity of the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms. A right that never did and never has applied to Black people, especially young Black men.

A member of the Revolution Club Chicago, who grew up on the West Side, saw the photo of Reginald Clay and recognized him as the young man he had met at the funeral for his own nephew and had been Facebook friends with since then. So the next morning, a representative from the Revolution Club took an orchid, a poster of Bob Avakian’s quote about youth (“No more generations of our youth, here and around the world, whose life is over…”), a copy of the book BAsics and a card for “those who knew and loved” Reginald Clay to the spot where Clay was killed. As she left these, she made some connections with his friends and gave them copies of Organizing for an Actual Revolution: 7 Key Points, explaining briefly that we, the revcoms, are organizing for a real revolution.

Returning a couple days later, two of us from the Club engaged with people further and were asked to join a protest the family had planned at the nearby police station. People began to gather with red, white and black balloons outside the police station. The crowd swelled to maybe 75 people, almost entirely friends and family of Reginald Clay. Many were dressed in red to honor Clay, who was known to friends and family as “Lil Red.” We were not able to have deep engagements with people in the midst of this but got Internationalist May 1st fliers, copies of the 7 Key Points and the 5-2-6: 5 Stops, 2 Choices, and 6 Points of Attention broadsheets into people’s hands. We had a large Stolen Lives banner, which we laid on the ground. Many people took pictures of it and were stunned to see all the photos and stories of people gunned down by the police. Someone brought a life-size cutout of Clay, and others displayed posters with enlargements of his FOID card. The crowd was chanting loudly and calling out to the police, and while angry and intense, the protest remained peaceful. His parents spoke over the bullhorn, and his three-year-old daughter called out “Justice for my dad!” One of his cousins pulled up in a car, brought out a large speaker and sang a song for Lil Red. As the sky started to darken, bouquets of red, white and black balloons were released to the sky in Clay's honor.

PS. Two days after May 1st, family members reached out to us with an invite to a protest at the police headquarters in the heart of Bronzeville on the South Side. We spread the word via text and social media. Two Stolen Lives families members joined the protest, as did a woman who has been a fixture at protests since her husband died of COVID-19 in the Cook County jail at the start of the pandemic.

The police body cam video was made public shortly before the protest. The news only showed part of the video of Reginald Clay’s killing, angering the family as it left out the part that makes clear Clay was trying to surrender as he was murdered. Forty to 50 people gathered at this protest, and family members poured out their rage and sorrow to the media who were there in force. The younger people in the crowd, together with members of the Revolution Club and some others, took to the streets and blocked traffic as they chanted. Cars passing by, almost all with Black people, honked and showed their support for the protest in other ways. Club members got our “We Are the Revcoms” proclamation to the crowd. This protest was covered by almost every news outlet in Chicago. Until this time, there was very little coverage about the murder. Some TV stations posted the full police body cam video on their websites in response to the family’s outrage. See coverage from the local NBC news affiliate.