May, 1999
Marchers protest police brutality, demand justice
by Anne Jaclard and Paul Geist
New York-"No justice, no peace." New York City residents transformed that
essential truth into daily activity for a solid two-and-a-half months
following the Feb. 4 police murder of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African
immigrant, in a hail of 41 bullets. The demonstrations culminated April 15,
when 10,000 people or more marched from the Brooklyn Bridge to lower
Broadway in front of the federal building. So many people filled Brooklyn
Bridge that you could see neither the beginning nor end of the march.
Billed as a "rally for justice and reconciliation" by a coalition of civil
rights, community and religious organizations, unions and politicians, the
orderly march and two rallies contrasted with the still-angry mood of the
Black working people and youth who turned out in force. There was a strong
representation of union members from the low-wage, mostly Black service and
hospital unions. The crowd also included many whites, Latinos and Asians
who have come to join the struggle against police brutality through the
Diallo movement. Many people carried signs with the names of victims of
police beatings and murders.
The protesters were both furious at how deep and wide are racism and
brutality, and joyous about so many people coming together to fight back.
Many were critical of the demonstration's call for "reconciliation" when
nothing has changed and of the ten-point program for reforming the police
unveiled there. The influence of politicians and union leaders could be
seen in the mildness of the demands and one of them being to raise cops'
pay. That one was roundly booed by the crowd every time it was read out.
Earlier protests had more militant themes. One called by Women for Justice
kicked off a campaign of picketing police stations. Speakers said that in
Black and Latino neighborhoods the police arrest all the young people and
leave the drug dealers on the streets. One woman vowed to "dismantle and
crush the police state that is forming in New York City."
The daily demonstrations at Police Plaza, which grew enormous and
multi-racial over three weeks in March, were abruptly ended by Rev. Al
Sharpton. In all, 1,200 people were arrested, including, on the last two
days, CUNY professors, Chinese immigrants and Methodist ministers.
In his speech to the crowd the last day, Sharpton said, "They said we'd
never get the races to walk together-they not only walked, they went to
jail together. We showed that the city will arrest non-violent protesters,
but not violent police. We exposed the contradiction." In the same speech,
however, Sharpton truncated the dialectic he had begun to articulate,
saying, "We don't care if you're a socialist or a capitalist, we have to
protect ourselves before we can have debates."
The same week was the start of daily pickets at the Brooklyn federal
courthouse, where the cops who tortured Abner Louima are about to go on
trial. The abiding theme of all the demonstrations has been mass opposition
to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's attempts to "clean up the city" by sacrificing
the poor and minorities. He is hoping to run for higher office by appealing
to racism.
Did April 15 mark a new stage of the mass movement or put a lid on it?
Whereas Sharpton became the focus of the demonstrations due to his clear
articulation of police brutality issues, his insistence on only symbolic
law-breaking and legalistic demands may have held the movement back. It is
also possible that this terrible killing has brought out so many ideas for
discussion-including Mumia Abu-Jamal, institutional racism and loss of
civil liberties-that New York will never be the same again.
by John Marcotte
New York-The April 3 National Emergency March for Justice and Against
Police Brutality in Washington, D.C. brought together several thousand
people from many cities and small towns who have been organizing for years
around these issues. "People start to reminisce about what happened in
their little towns years ago and do not forget their history-the struggle
for civil rights. We are still in the midst of it-a few doors have opened
and many have shut," said a president of a South Jersey branch of the NAACP.
Speakers addressed the crowd for several hours. One said, "Police brutality
has been part of the fabric of this society since the formation of police
to capture runaway slaves." Jane Bye of the Committee Against Anti-Asian
Violence pointed out that the murder of Amadou Diallo in New York was "part
of a long and violent history of police brutality against young Third World
immigrants." A speaker from the Lakota Nation, Rosebud Reservation, brought
"greetings from the invisible people."
Richard Perez of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights called for a
higher level of unannounced civil disobedience at One Police Plaza in New
York, as did Al Sharpton. Sharpton said, "You can't preach morality in
Yugoslavia and ignore it in the U.S. You can't send our boys to Yugoslavia,
and we are afraid when they walk the street in Chicago." Pam Africa called
on us to unite to save Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The most powerful experience to me was when the family members of those
murdered by police began to speak for several minutes each. The list went
on and on-20, 30, you lost count! New York, Kentucky, Chicago, North
Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Pittsburgh-you felt this is truly a national
epidemic! The details of each case were horrifying. You began to see a
pattern of sheer unprovoked brutality, of state cover-ups.
We had an open mike discussion on the bus on the trip home. A Puerto Rican
mother who had been struggling for justice for eight years immediately said
she was angry at Sharpton for emphasizing the Diallo case so much, when so
many others have been struggling for years.
Several African-American women spoke to this thoughtfully, emphasizing that
they were by no means apologists for Sharpton, but that he had called for
reopening all the cases. More importantly, one cannot predict which is the
case that will move masses to action; we had to see this as a process of
all these cases building on each other. Diallo came after the Abner Louima
case last year, with its mass march across Brooklyn Bridge, and that is
part of its context.
One African-American woman explained that in the Louima case the movement
stopped, partly because the Haitian-American community held itself apart
from the African-American, and partly because once the lawyers got Louima's
case, they went into the courts. "Whatever you can say about Sharpton, he
is smart enough to know that, even when you are in court, you have to keep
pressure on in the streets." She also mused about what it meant that Diallo
was from Africa, the motherland, about the kind of resonance that had on
the African diaspora.
When this movement started in front of Diallo's home on Feb. 7 and for
seven weeks thereafter, it was nearly all Black with some Puerto Ricans. It
gradually forced other sectors of society to realize that this wasn't a
"Black problem," but a human problem. By April 15, the march of 10,000
across Brooklyn Bridge was rich in diversity of age, gender, class and
sexual orientation. That march was living proof to me of NEWS & LETTERS'
concept that throughout U.S. history Black masses have been at the
forefront of social change.
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