Michael Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden
Carl Dix and Travis Morales on Why They Will Be Standing With the People in Ferguson Instead of Marching Across the Bridge to Staten Island
The brave people in Ferguson, Missouri are standing up. They are pouring into the streets and fighting back against police terror in the aftermath of the cold-blooded execution of Michael Brown, an unarmed, 18 year old Black youth. The powers-that-be came at them with militarized police armed to the teeth, and “responsible Negro leaders” trying to get them to cool out and stop resisting. Yet people are continuing to fight back and, through doing that, have had tremendous impact on people in this country and around the world.
People rising up like this has not happened in a long time. This is heroic and inspirational, and we need to be there standing with them. We need to be there uniting with the fight for justice for Michael Brown and connecting this fight to the struggle to STOP police terror, mass incarceration and all its consequences.
So, we decided to change our plans for this weekend. Instead of going forward with the planned march across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Staten Island to demand that the cops who killed Eric Garner be indicted, that the repression of the witnesses stop and that Bratton and the Broken Windows policy must go; we will be with the brave people of Ferguson.
What is going on there concentrates what is said in the Call for the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation. What’s unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri has drawn the attention of the country and the world. Carl and Travis need to be there with them on the front lines of the fight we are taking up.
We have changed our plans for this weekend, but we have not stepped back from the struggle for justice for Eric Garner. And we remain committed to our goal for October 2014: Mobilizing the kind of resistance that can reverberate everywhere, and be the beginning of the end for mass incarceration in the U.S.
Carl Dix and Travis Morales will be sending news back from Ferguson. Stay tuned.
Carl Dix is a long-time revolutionary leader and a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party; and is a regular contributor to Revolution www.revcom.us
In 1970 he was part of the Fort Lewis 6, the largest mass refusal by active duty soldiers for orders to Vietnam. For this stand he spent two years at Fort Leavenworth Military Penitentiary. Carl co-founded the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation in 1996. In 2011, along with Dr. Cornel West, Carl co-initiated a civil disobedience campaign to stop the NYPD’s illegitimate, racist policy and practice of “Stop-and-Frisk.” Carl is currently spearheading national efforts to make the month of October 2014 a Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.
Travis Morales is a long time revolutionary communist. In 1978/79, he was one of the Moody Park 3 Defendants, facing 140 years in prison on charges of felony riot in Houston, Texas, after police killed an unarmed man. In 1987, he led the founding of La Resistencia in Houston.
La Resistencia built resistance to all attacks on all immigrants, militarization of the border, raids and deportations, detention of Haitian refugees, and the targeting of Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants for secret detention and deportation after September 11.
