LOS ANs AGELES—A group of cops responding to a dispatcher call sending them to the 500 block of San Pedro St., an area of Longeles known as Skid Row, on Sunday March 1, 2015.
Shortly after their arrival they shot and killed an unarmed, 39-year-old black man known in the community as Africa.
Africa’s murder was caught on video by civilian observer, Anthony Blackburn and others.
News reports affirms that two of the cops were wearing body cameras.
LAPD chief Charlie Beck, however, said the video footage from the body cameras will not be released until the investigation is over.
Blackburn’s video shows five cops wrestling Africa to the ground, beating and tazering him before shooting him multiple times, killing him on the sidewalk.
The cops claim—as they usually do when they kill unarmed Africans—that Africa was “resisting.”
The cops and the white media characterize Africa as a felon, a fugitive and a homeless man in an attempt to criminalize him and justify his murder. The fact is that they manage to criminalize every African they murder.
Historical references like the police murder of 22-year-old Amadou Diallo in New York nearly two decades ago and present day occurrences like the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland less than four months ago clearly inform us that one doesn’t have to be a felon, a fugitive or a homeless person to be killed by the police when unarmed—you only have to be black.
The fact is that the cops are outsiders. They see all of us as suspects. That is why we must demand “Black Community Control of the Police.” Our community must have authority over the people who walk the streets with guns. They must live in our community and we must have the power to hire and fire them.
Colonialism is the root of all of our problems
Colonial domination is a condition of existence where every aspect of one group or nation of people’s lives are directly controlled by a foreign group or nation.
African people in the United States, like everywhere else in the world, are colonized by white people. These white people have organized them a State which the police are a part of. They protect the haves from the have nots.
Check it. White people, generally speaking, control our economics, our education, our housing, our healthcare, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and how we wear them.
This kind of colonial existence is at the root of every problem we experience in the African community because colonialism forces us into desperate situations which compel us to live in contentious and often horrible conditions.
Every colonial society has an army that stands between the colonized and the colonizer.
That army is called the police.
It is the police that function as an armed barricade between the thousands of homeless people on Skid Row and the empty houses that outnumber the homeless population by far.
Africa moved to L.A.—the mecca of movie stars—with aspirations of being a Hollywood actor.
He, instead, ended up down the street on Skid Row, an area of L.A. that boasts having one of the biggest homeless populations in America.
Africa was living in a tent on Skid Row, fighting the colonial condition of poverty when a gang of L.A. police accosted him on Sunday. They were supposedly there to talk to Africa.
Africans have the right to resist colonial domination
Minutes later, however, the video shows Africa is in a fighting stance taking swings at four of the cops, resisting—as much as he could— a Rodney King-style beat down or being murdered by cop like Oscar Grant met a few miles away from him in Oakland.
Africa was still fighting even after the cops slammed him to the ground.
Two of the cops dropped their baton during the scramble.
An African woman picked up one of the batons as she was passing by and tried jump in the fight, before cops tackled her.
The police and media claims that Africa was trying to take a gun from a cop.
Africa didn’t get the gun. The cops still shot him to death.
Resistance is the spirit of the day, as it should be.
It is our right and our responsibility, as African people, to resist colonialism by every means necessary.
We can’t beat colonialism alone, as individuals.
The African working class must organize in order to resist colonialism until we bring it down.
Join the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) in the fight against colonialism and police violence.
Resist! Resist! Resist!
Join InPUM!
Justice for Africa!
Black Community Control of the Police!
Uhuru!
