CLEARWATER, FL—On July 19, 2018, a 24-year-old African woman named Britany Jacobs waited in the parking lot of a convenience store while her boyfriend, Markeis McGlockton, and five-year-old son, Markeis Jr. were inside.
While in the car, Jacobs was approached by 47-year-old Michael Drejka, a white man who proceeded to verbally attack the African woman at her car window because of where she parked.
Drejka was a killer vigilante no different from Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman who had given himself authority to police and murder African people.
Drejka was also reported earlier in the month having threatened another African man who had parked briefly in the same spot at the
convenience store.
Upon sight of the encounter, McGlockton came out of the store and approached Drejka, and in defense of his family, pushed Drejka to the ground.
Drejka then pulled out his gun and shot Markeis in his side, killing him in front of his son and girlfriend.
In a case where Drejka, this cold-blooded murderer, is obviously guilty, we see the 600 year- old relationship of colonial violence and State protection take effect as Pinellas County sheriff Bob Gualtieri ruled in favor of Drejka, using the “Stand Your Ground” law as a justification for this brutal assassination.
Using the same tired line as the pig Darren Wilson, who killed Mike Brown in 2014 or George Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin, “he feared for his life” is the excuse Gualtieri gave to the people as a means to protect Drejka from any punishment.
In the same breath, as the State and its colonial media always does in these events, Markeis was painted as the villain for protecting his family.
Gualtieri spends his time defending Drejka, saying the “Stand Your Ground” law places this white vigilante in his “rights” to shoot an African man.
Michael was given the power to play judge, jury, and executioner despite not having a formal title as either of those things.
However, because the State came into existence as a means to protect the white population while carrying out acts of extreme violence against colonized African people, Gualtieri’s ruling comes as no surprise.
It’s not shocking that the same Gualtieri, who ruled the murder of 18 year- old African Laboriel Felton by his deputies as a justifiable homicide, would dismiss the murder of Markeis McGlockton and say explicitly he deserved it.
Gualtieri stated, “Markeis wouldn’t be dead if Markeis didn’t slam this guy to the ground,” in an attempt to equate Markeis’ justified defense of his family to
Drejka’s murder.
The man at the time was driving his company’s truck, and Drejka took the number off of it and called his job, leaving a message using white nationalist slurs and threatening to kill the man if he ever showed up in front of him again.
To this Gualitieri said that Drejka’s past actions would not be considered in the “Stand Your Ground” ruling.
“Stand Your Ground” law deputizes white people
This law was made and works solely for regular, plain clothed white people who wish to carry out violence against colonized and oppressed people.
At any moment a white person feels threatened by the individuals, by which they live at the expense of, they can carry out violence against them under the guise of self-defense.
This law allows for white people to run rampant within the African working class community and commit any kind of offense.
The police no longer become necessary because regular white people do the job for them.
Africans being gunned down by police and their counterparts, the white vigilantes, has become (though not completely) the modern day lynchings of this era.
Regular, everyday white people enthusiastically carried out the lynchings and burnings of Africans, and today carry out that same violence by gunning Africans down, public execution style.
The same “Stand Your Ground” law and its arguments don’t work for African people, however.
It didn’t work for Dessie Woods in Georgia in 1975, when this African woman on a trip with her friend Cheryl Todd, shot and killed a white man attempting to rape them.
It failed in 2010 for Marissa Alexander, an African woman who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots at the ceiling of her home in an attempt to escape her abusive husband.
If the roles had been reversed, and it had been Drejka on his knees, bleeding from his intestines, Markeis would be arrested, if not killed by the police on sight.
The demand for justice must include Black Power
Clearwater is a mere 20 minutes from St. Petersburg, Florida, which houses the headquarters of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM).
InPDUM recently concluded a dynamic 2 year campaign for justice for the three teenage black girls drowned and murdered by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department in 2016.
Our Party has been engaged in active struggle against the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department and “Killer” Bob Gualtieri, waging the demand for the immediate indictment of Gualtieri and all deputies within the department guilty of murder, as well as for Black Community Control of the Police.
Our struggle has never been centered around defeating racism, struggling for Gualtieri to give a damn about African people.
In our demand for justice, we have always recognized that justice is never granted to black people through their court systems.
Genuine justice comes in the form of our demand for power being realized.
Only when African people have power in our own hands and are able to exercise that power through Black Community Control of the Police (BCCP), which allows for our community to hire, fire, train and discipline those who should function with arms in our community, can we say true justice has been achieved.
Gualtieri, Drejka, and all the killer cops and vigilantes running wild in our community will be convicted and jailed when we have achieved BCCP!
Justice for Markeis McGlockton!
Killer Bob Must Go!
