Another Black death provokes mass protests

Another young Black man has been killed by police in St. Louis, Missouri, just two months after the killing of Michael Brown led to mass protests in Ferguson (part of the greater St. Louis area) and around the United States.

Vonderrit Myers, 18, was murdered by a white off-duty cop who was patrolling the predominantly Black neighbourhood of Shaw for a private security firm. That night and the next, there were clashes between angry protesters and police, who used pepper spray.

That a private firm was conducting armed patrols in a Black neighbourhood is revealing of the institutionalised racism in the present-day United States.

The police said that Myers shot at the off-duty cop first, who then let loose a fusillade of 17 shots.

The young man’s family says he did not have a gun, but was holding a sandwich, when he and two friends ran away from the patrol. “The police are lying”, said Myers’ grandfather.

In response to the epidemic of similar police killings nationwide, there was a mass four-day protest from 10 October called “Ferguson October”. Seventeen people were arrested for staging a sit-in at a gas station near where Myers was gunned down.

On the second day of the protests, there was a march of thousands in the city of St. Louis. The march was loud and angry, with shouts of “No justice, no peace!”, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” and “Fight back! Fight back!” One of these speakers repeatedly called out “This is our Freedom Summer!” and the crowd responded with “And we will win!”

This was a reference to the Freedom Summer in 1964, led by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, in which students from across the country came to fight for Black voting rights.

Protester Alexis Templeton told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!: “We get all these young people to protest for the right to live, the human right to protest, and we get arrested, maced, tear-gassed and rubber-bulleted.

“I’ve been arrested three times. I’ve spent more time in jail than Darren Wilson [the cop who shot Michael Brown]. We are sick of it … and we want St. Louis to know, in front of [the famous St. Louis] Arch, that we aren’t going anywhere until you stop killing us. You will stop killing us. And we mean that.”

Lew Moye, president of the St. Louis chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, said: “We have asked for an independent prosecutor … This situation has shined a spotlight on other issues, the economic situation … 67 percent of African American males between 19 and 24 years old here are unemployed …”

After the rally, another march led by Montague Simmons, the chairman of the Organization for Black Struggle, with a casket at the head, went to the police headquarters. There they stopped for four-and-a-half minutes of silence, for the four and a half hours Michael Brown’s body was left by the police in the street after he had been killed. His family was barred from covering him with a sheet.

On the final day, there was a wave of civil disobedience actions. One at the police station resulted in 43 arrests, including of Cornel West, a professor and an increasingly outspoken African American activist.

That night, activists unfurled a banner in the stands of a St. Louis Rams football game, which read “Rams Fans Know Black Lives Matter” and “Racism Lives Here”.

Activists also shut down three Walmart stores, in a solidarity protest over an earlier police murder of another young Black man in an Ohio Walmart.

In that incident, John Crawford was looking at a BB gun in the store, when someone called the police with a report that a Black man was pointing a gun at people. So the police burst into the store with weapons blazing and killed Crawford without even trying to find out what was going on.

The New York Times wrote, “These carefully staged events, one by one across the St. Louis region, made up the largest and most organised acts of civil disobedience in the two months” since Michael Brown was murdered.

One outstanding characteristic of the four-day event was how well it was organised, as well as how broad were the endorsements, including the major civil rights groups, churches and, quite significantly, the AFL-CIO, the largest labour federation.

Richard Trumpka, AFL-CIO president, issued a statement emphasising that by endorsing the weekend, the whole federation was standing in solidarity with its Black members.

Another important thing of note was the role of young Black people, not only as participants, but as organisers of the event.

One of these was Ashley Yates, a poet and artist from the area. She explained that the initial demonstrations following the police murder of Michael Brown were spontaneous.

“People were just angry,” Yates said in an interview with Goodman. “We had seen too many Black lives gunned down at the hands of police. So we just took to the streets to show our resistance to the system.

“As the weeks passed, then the organising really started. It was just people getting together with those they had been on the front lines with and saying, ‘How can we move forward?’

“And that’s why we formed our organisation, Millennial Activists United.”

Tory Russell was another young person who joined the initial protests, and met Simmons from the Organization of Black Struggle. Russell went on to help organise Hands Up United, a group campaigning to end state sponsored violence.

Another organiser was a young St. Louis rapper known as Tef Poe. He says he “met Tory Russell and Ashley and other youth organisers, and we formed a united front”.

He used his singing appearances to draw more young people in. One week before Ferguson October, the police unsuccessfully attempted to shut down one of his shows.

Poe said, “I told a police officer once, ‘You can only do two things to me. You can kill me, or you can lock me up.’ Once you get past being scared of either one of those, a brand new world opens up.”

These and other young organisers not only have shown their courage and determination. The four-day event is testimony to their leadership qualities as well, which include bringing in the many more experienced individuals and organisations needed to pull it off.