Two years ago this week, George Floyd was brutally murdered, suffocated by a sadistic pig in broad daylight on a Minnesota street, as three other pigs looked on and held a gathering crowd at bay. Once again, an unarmed Black man had been heartlessly murdered by police, even as he pled that he could not breathe.
The video of the murder went around the world, and sparked the largest single series of demonstrations and protests in U.S. history. The protests gave rise to a sweeping criticism of white supremacy in the U.S. in every sphere of society, as well as debate over the causes and what to do about it.
Two years later, the wanton police murder and repression directed against Black people and other people of color continues unabated—indeed, the figure for murders by police in 2021 was even higher than 2020 or the several years before that. Talk of reform has been replaced by “tough on crime,” code words for stepped-up repression—often by Black mayors like Eric Adams (“The Black Giuliani”) in New York.
Today there is a struggle to correctly understand the true significance of this uprising, its implications for the future and what is to be done. To that end, we are including important materials on this page: three pieces by Bob Avakian (two of them during that summer) that dig into the causes of this outrage, the source of it and the solution, as well as a criticism of the seductive but false program of “abolition”; and we are rerunning a feature from The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube last year at this time that went deeply into the beautiful rising and the lessons to draw from that important event.
Click image to start video.