JACKSONVILLE, FL—On November 12, 2012, 17-year-old Jordan Davis was shot down in cold-blooded murder in the parking lot of a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida.
Michael Dunn, the 47-year-old white man who murdered him, fired ten shots from a 9mm pistol hitting Jordan three times. One bullet cut through Jordan’s liver, a lung and his aorta, others piercing the vehicle in which three of Jordan’s teenage friends were passengers.
On February 15, 2014, after more than 30 hours of deliberations, a Duval County jury of four white men, four white women, a woman with a Spanish surname, and two African women said they could not decide whether or not Dunn should pay for murdering 17-year-old Jordan Davis.
They waited until a Saturday while kids were out of school and not en masse, to announce the verdict, probably in fear of mass African rebellion.
This jury was hung and the judge declared a mistrial on the first degree murder charge despite all the physical evidence and eyewitness testimony to the contrary and the lifeless body of 17-year-old Jordan Davis. It was murder.
Dunn had been indicted on five charges: first degree murder, three counts of attempted second degree murder, and one count of firing a missile inside Duval County. The jury found him guilty on all except the first degree murder charge.
Some of the most recent cases of the murders of young Africans include the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by white nationalist thug George Zimmerman in February 2012; the murder of 19-year-old Renisha McBride in Detroit in November 2013; and the November 2013 lynching of 28-year-old Alfred Wright in Hemphill, Texas— just 30 miles north of Jasper, where James Byrd, Jr. was dragged to his horrific death by white vigilantes in 1998. Wright was also from Jasper.
These murders—which expose the oppressive nature of African people colonized inside U.S. borders—the white ruling class media and their pundits (legal and political, black and white) come up with all manner of nonsensical reasons for these murders.
However, it is the responsibility of the leadership of the African working class to explain to the African working class, the victims of white nationalist vigilante and police murders, why is it that an ordinary white citizen or a terrorist cop is almost never found guilty in a U.S. courtroom of murdering an African person.
In fact, the Dunn verdict says that it is not okay to shoot at us and miss. If you do so, then they will convict. But as long as you kill the African, that’s okay. You can walk.
The murders of Jordan, Wright, McBride, and Trayvon come at a time when the very existence of U.S. white power is being challenged all over the world. The most telling evidence of the U.S. losing its power was its selection of Barack Obama as U.S. president.
Charlatans like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama and other neocolonialist stooges consistently stand in the path of the just wrath of the people by professing their loyalty to the U.S. government as wannabe Americans. They call for the U.S. Justice Department to intervene and tell us to let the court system run its course.
They tell us that it was because of the prosecutor’s handling of the case that the jury had no choice but to acquit. They don’t even have to have all-white juries anymore. They just do their profile and ensure they have the African who believes in the justness of this white power system.
And they ensure that those old religious Uncle Toms are the first to get to the relatives of the murdered African.
After hearing the verdict of her murdered son, Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath had this to say: “I will pray for him (Dunn). And I have asked my family to pray for him, but we are so grateful for the charges that have been brought against him. We are so grateful for the truth.”
And in another article that was published on the Black Agenda Report website, Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III wrote:
“As Africans in America and later African-Americans, we have been in a struggle for a very long time. Too many of us have forgotten what’s at the crux of the issue. Many believe it is economic, others believe it is civil rights.
“Both of these are important and play a significant role in improving our circumstances.
“But what we’ve been fighting to have recognized since those 20 and some odd ‘African indentured servants’ disembarked from the Dutch Man O War off the shores of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, is to be considered human.”
Then there is the ANSWER Coalition that attributes African oppressions to “racism.” In a February 19 article on Jordan Davis posted on their website, they say:
“Racism is not the same as prejudice, a biased opinion toward someone. As Beverly Daniel Tatum, scholar of race relations and current President of Spelman College, writes, racism is a system involving cultural messages and institutional policies and practices as well as the beliefs and actions of individuals. In the context of the United States, this system clearly operates to the advantage of whites and to the disadvantage of people of color."
The quotes from Jordan’s mother, Dr. Leon, III and the so-called multi-national ANSWER Coalition puts us on notice as to the war of ideas the revolution has to contend with. From afar these ideas would seem to be meaningless, harmless.
But these are precisely the ideas we must shake from the brains of the African working class. They must be replaced with revolutionary African Internationalism.
The ideologues of the bourgeoisie work to protect the capitalist system 24/7. It speaks through the mouth of Jordan’s mother Lucia when she prays for her enemy, and praises him because the system has tricked her to believe some sort of justice is forthcoming short of revolution.
The bourgeoisie speaks through the writings of Dr. Leon, III when he mysteriously changes us from being Africans in America to African-Americans.
And more importantly, Dr. Leon, III would have our struggle be centered around convincing white people that we are human as opposed to our genuine struggle for political and economic power in the hands of the African working class, a struggle for self-determination, socialist democracy and a united Africa.
Also, astoundingly we find the leaders of the white left refusing to unite with the leadership of the African working class.
Instead of quoting from Omali Yeshitela or other African revolutionaries, they choose to quote Beverly Tatum the head of a bourgeoisie institution whose mission is to reinforce the tenets of capitalist colonialism.
The African People’s Socialist Party has written extensively on the subject of colonialism being the major problem confronting Africans in the U.S. and throughout the world. Chairman Omali Yeshitela has explained that racism is the idea in white people’s heads, and the ideological underpinning that serves as the basis for Dunn’s and other white nationalists’ anti-black acts of murder and terror.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela in his Political Report to the Sixth Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party in December 2013 had this to say on the question of racism:
“We determined long ago that characterizing our movement as a struggle against racism was a self-defeating waste of time. What is called racism is simply the ideological foundation of capitalist imperialism. Rather than defining the system of our oppression, racism is a concept that denies Africans our national identity. It relegates us to the Sisyphean task of winning acceptance from, and often of becoming one with, our oppressors.”
And out of all the people on the planet who are struggling against colonialism and U.S. imperialism, they make us the only people whose struggle is against racism.
All of those who spout the ideology of the bourgeoisie deny class struggle when it comes to the colonized African, especially within U.S. borders. The bottom line is that they preach class peace instead of class struggle.
This is why with every police or vigilante murder, pages of the particulars and the legal jargon will have to become secondary to educating our people to the workings of a colonial court system and to the fact that the only justice forthcoming to the oppressed African throughout the world will come through revolution, led by the African working class and its vanguard organization, the African People’s Socialist Party.
However, we still call for justice for Jordan Davis. Our people must resist colonial white violence by any means necessary. Justice for Jordan will be won in the streets.
All Power to the African Working Class!
Justice for Jordan Davis!