FERGUSON, MO.–The federal and local police agencies enacted martial law on the African population of Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2015.
The move was an effort to suppress the righteous resistance from the people on the one year anniversary of the murder of Mike Brown by white Ferguson cop, Darren Wilson.
Exactly one year after the Ferguson police shot Brown and left his body to bleed in the scorching heat for four and a half hours, Ferguson pigs opened fire on 18-year-old Tyrone Harris, another African, who was among the hundreds of protestors who took to the streets on Sunday.
Ferguson is widely recognized by Africans everywhere, and by the colonial state, as the ground zero of the re-emerging African Liberation Movement inside the United States, two generations after the U.S. government’s military defeat of the Black Revolution of the 1960s.
The police arrested over 25 protesters on Sunday, including professors and preachers. The military forces set up barricades in strategic sites, deployed troops in riot gear and assault rifles, occupied the streets with armored vehicles and flooded the African community with local, federal and undercover police agents.
The U.S. government is desperately trying to demoralize the African community of Ferguson, a tiny city of only 30,000 people, because of its symbolic significance as the spark of the resistance that has simmered in African communities with varying degrees of intensity for the past year.
The U.S. also tries to use Ferguson to control the character of the resistance by setting the terms for legitimate protest as opposed to so-called “violence.”
The police and their media spokespersons will allow “nonviolent protest”—even celebrate it—but resistance that physically targets the institutions of State power (police cars and stations, news vehicles, parasitic businesses, etc.) will be met with the most severe condemnation and criminalization by the rulers and their lackeys.
Ruling class media’s false notion of violence
The State will use the false notion of “violence” to isolate and destroy our just struggle to overturn our colonial oppression by the U.S. and its military occupying army in the form of the police.
Similarly, white leftists, liberals and anarchists will attempt to exert control over our liberation struggle by setting the terms for what our resistance should look like.
In St. Petersburg, Florida on August 9th, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) led a spirited march to the St. Petersburg police station calling for Black Community Control of Police.
Amerikus Luvene of the Black National Defenders traveled from Milwaukee to participate in leading the mobilization with chants such as “cops and the Klan go hand in hand,” and “cops in your hood, ain’t no good, so don’t arrest me; arrest the police!”
Amerikus gave a powerful speech from the steps of the police station: “I’ve lost my voice, but that’s a small sacrifice, because my brothers and sisters have lost their lives.”
Gazi Kodzo and other Uhuru Movement organizers led the march from the Uhuru House to the St. Petersburg police station under the banner “Black Power Matters,” before congregating in Akwaaba Hall for a community rally and vigil.
The demonstrators marched with a permit and were escorted by police after taking to the streets, to the dismay of some of the “whites who love us.”
The people were thrilled to see this militant African-led demonstration that fearlessly challenged the police with in-your-face chants like, “Hands up, fight back! Get the pigs off your back—” despite the police “escort” and contempt from whites who left because the police escort made them uncomfortable.
African people set the terms for our liberation, not our colonizers
The African community, that is too accustomed to being chased by cops, were electrified by our example.
They chanted boldly, coming out of their houses to cheer and applaud the demonstrators.
We are our own liberators. We will set the terms for how our struggle is going to be waged at every stage.
Genuine solidarity is not leftist imperialist colonizers “uniting” with us when it makes them “comfortable” to do so.
Our march was not for “the white people who love us.” It was for our people and we will win with or without conditional controlling “unity.”
Our objective is to advance our struggle for total liberation of our people, for self-determination and the power to govern.
