Category: View from the Battlefield

Tulsa, Oklahoma and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania are on record as the only domestic bombings in U.S. history. It is no accident that the targets were African-Americans.

The same ships brought enslaved Africans and indentured Chinese to this country for the purpose of economic exploitation. The Southern economy was built upon the forced, free labor of Black people while the Chinese were paid pennies to build the transcontinental railroad under brutal working conditions.

The guilty verdict of Chauvin is an opportunity to bust through the walls of silence and racist insensitivity. This calls for a sustained and organized campaign to hold police accountable while defunding them.

Building a multi-racial, intergenerational movement in St. Louis is about more than one candidate. It’s about intentional progress for a city mired in a white supremacist, patriarchal past.

This thing, this is the notion that when Black people enter a particular white institution, they should suffer the slings and arrows silently because they knew the nature of the beast, the beast being systematic racism.

The struggle is always between democracy and barbarism, between progress and stagnation, between the haves and the have nots. There’s a part for all democracy defenders to play.

COVID-19 has dramatically shown us how interconnected our lives are in this country.

The country which beats its chest about being the beacon of democracy for the world continues to inch toward a police state.

Black and Brown people have been put in harm’s way by trump, his noisy collaborators and his quiet abettors. In the days ahead, we’ll be thinking about self-defense.

Our task is to intensify the organizing work over this last year and get to the source of the massive oppression and suffering.