Michael Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old African, was shot to death by Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white cop with the Ferguson, Missouri police force, on Saturday, August 9, 2014.
Michael had his hands up in surrender when Wilson shot him.
He was hit at least six times, with the shot that killed the six-foot-four teen striking him in the top of his head.
Michael fell face down in the middle of the street where Ferguson police left him rotting in a pool of blood, for over four hours.
Africans gathered for a candlelight vigil in Michael’s honor the next day. Ferguson cops showed up to the vigil messing with them which sparked a rebellion that busted up buildings and set Ferguson on fire.
Police aggression is colonial oppression
Michael and another African man were walking in their neighborhood when Wilson rolled up on them and stopped them.
The cop didn’t stop them because they were doing something wrong. He stopped them because that’s what colonial occupation forces do.
They swarm African communities harassing us all the time in an attempt to intimidate us and suppress our will to resist oppression and win our freedom.
Millions of Africans are “stopped and frisked” by police throughout the U.S. every year.
New York cops alone stopped Africans more than 2.5 million times over the past 10 years. In one year, they stopped and searched 850,000 mostly African men. And, in Philadelphia, they stopped 250,000 men.
The result of many of these stops is the coldblooded murder of Africans, as in Michael’s case.
The people who say that the guerilla-style rebellions being carried out by the young brothers and sisters in Ferguson are not about Michael Brown are right.
They are about more than Michael Brown.
These rebellions are about Africans who are killed in the U.S. by police or related agencies at least once every 28 hours.
The rebellions are about 43-year-old Eric Garner, who New York police choked to death last month; 22-year-old John Crawford III, who was murdered on August 5, 2014 by police in Beavercreek, Ohio in a Wal-Mart while holding a BB gun that was for sale.
They are about Ezell Ford, an unarmed 25-year-old, was slain by LAPD two days after Michael Brown was killed. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The August 15-17, 2014 weekend edition of USA Today contained a front-page article entitled, “Local police kill 400 a year.”
The article exposed the fact that, “Nearly two times a week in the United States, a white police officer killed a black person during a seven-year period ending in 2012, according to the most recent accounts of justifiable homicide reported to the FBI.”
According to the article, “On average, there were 96 such incidents among at least 400 police killings each year that were reported to the FBI by local police.
The numbers appear to show that the shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, last Saturday was not an isolated event in American policing…
“While the racial analysis is striking, the database it’s based on has been long considered flawed and largely incomplete.”
The rebellions are about brothers and sisters in Ferguson who are fed up with police aggression and are brave enough to do something about it.
A new generation of Black Power
The rebellions in Ferguson represent the resurrection of mass African resistance against colonial tyranny at the hands of the U.S. government.
Africans have been resisting oppression since white people first kidnapped us from our homeland and dragged us here in chains to work for them for free.
There has, however, been a 40-year drought of mass resistance since the U.S. government militarily crushed the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
The U.S. government used COINTELPRO, FBI, CIA and local police to kill hundreds and jail thousands of our revolutionary leaders, including the high profile murder of Black Panther Party Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton in Chicago on December 4, 1969.
After killing and jailing resistance leaders, the U.S. government extended its counterinsurgency.
They created a colonial drug economy in our communities with heroin that they stole from Southeast Asia in the 1970s.
In the 1980s, they flooded our streets with a drug derived from cocaine they brought from Central and South America where they were fighting resistance movements.
They separated working class African men from their families, by creating policies that made it financially beneficial for their wives and girlfriends to live without them.
They put in play policies like Weed and Seed, Hope VI, “One Strike,”“Three Strikes” and mandatory minimum prison sentences that made us victims of homelessness and endless concentration camp prison sentences.
This also made it difficult for us to survive or build revolutionary organization.
With the exception of the St. Petersburg, FL rebellion in 1996, which forced Bill Clinton to send members of his cabinet to assist in pacifying it, mass African resistance decayed for two generations.
Until now!
The truth about the Ferguson rebellions
It is critical to subscribe to and support The Burning Spear newspaper because mainstream media is a tool of the status quo.
Its task of keeping this capitalist-colonialist society the way it is makes it impossible for it to give an honest analysis of the rebellions in Ferguson or anything else.
All over the networks the featured cry is for “peace” and “calm” when it should be for social justice.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela says in the Point of the Spear, “Those who are genuinely concerned with peace must fight for it… Those who want peace must take a genuine stance for social justice.”
Mainstream networks say stuff like the people are “looting” and “tearing up their own neighborhoods.”
Impossible! How can the looters get looted?
Every store in Ferguson, like every store in America, sits on land that was stolen from Indigenous people, stores that sell second-rate, overpriced stuff to poor African people.
The store merchants aren’t a part of the neighborhoods where they set up. Ferguson is predominantly African.
Most of the stores there are owned by white people who, until the people are up in arms, take our money to their communities at the end of the day.
None of those storeowners did the neighborly thing and demanded that police quit stopping Africans at disproportionate rates and none of them went to see about Michael Brown while he lay in the road like an animal for hours.
Those stores exploit Africans, and when they take the Africans’ money to white banks the Africans don’t have access to our own money through loans and stuff like that.
The biggest lie of all that these news outlets are telling is that a “tiny minority” is responsible for the Ferguson rebellions.
They say this for the same reason they label oppressed people as minority groups—to make us believe we don’t have the capacity to beat our oppressor.
They also say this to split our community.
This is to give an opportunity for the “good” Negroes to prove their loyalty to the system by denouncing their brothers and sisters who are really doing the heavy lifting in Ferguson by giving real teeth to the resistance.
The brothers and sisters rebelling in Ferguson need to know that every working class African who is victimized by police aggression is their ally.
An even larger reality is that the people in Ferguson have worldwide allies.
They share the same oppressor as the people in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip and everywhere on earth waging war against the U.S. right now.
The sustained rebellion in Ferguson is proof that they share the same political consciousness, too.
Ferguson exposes U.S. military containment strategy
One extremely important consequence of the Ferguson rebellion is its tenacity.
This has allowed the world to see the use of military force against Africans colonized in the U.S. in the same way they use it everywhere else they are engaged in military occupation in the world.
While the white media are claiming that the heavy assault weaponry on display is peculiar to Ferguson, Africans, especially in young working class communities, know full well that what we see in Ferguson is ordinary for our communities.
The media are reporting that the police in Ferguson are becoming heavily militarized through acquiring “surplus” U.S. military hardware. This is so much nonsense!
How can this military hardware be called “surplus” year after year? Surplus is something that is above and beyond what is needed.
Clearly what is happening is this “surplus” is the method being used by the U.S. to hide its military inventory designated specifically for use in our communities.
It is an off the books, hidden-in-broad-daylight military acquisition for suppressing the just struggle of African people for liberation from white colonial domination.
“Touch one, touch all!”
Oppressed people in every corner of the world must join the people in Ferguson in demanding:
1. The immediate indictment of Darren Wilson;
2. The withdrawal of all military forces from Ferguson and African community control of the police;
3. Reparations to the family of Michael Brown;
4. The immediate release and dropping of all charges against everybody arrested since the rebellions were initiated;
5. The replacement of the public policy of police containment with a public policy of economic development for our oppressed and exploited community.
In the final analysis what Africans require for an end to the police repression and brutal exploitation that is common to our existence throughout the world is revolutionary organization.
Build the African revolution in Ferguson, Africa and the world over!
Freedom first, then peace will come!
Join ASI, APSP, InPDUM and BIB!
Fight police aggression until we make it stop!
Uhuru!
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