OpEds—

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Why Words of Reconciliation Ring Hollow
What is happening now in Ferguson, Missouri has been a long time coming. The police / government strategy will be to demonize those rebelling and to come back with far more unjust force once the television cameras are out of sight.

by ROB URIE, Counterpunch

Ferguson SWAT (Flicker)

[F]ew who heard the eyewitness accounts of the murder of eighteen-year-old Mike Brown by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson needed an autopsy report to know that Mr. Brown was gunned down in cold blood. The autopsy report and the investigations to follow are the technocracy of racist slaughter, official reports of all of the details except those that matter. Had the murder been an isolated incident it would be tragic. But the death of Mike Brown was a political assassination.

The systematic nature in which youth of color are harassed, intimidated, incarcerated and assassinated perpetuates the historic repression of American blacks and browns from the barbaric founding of the U.S. in slavery and genocide to supposed resolution with the Civil Rights movement. This is to state that any of these murders might be considered individually but the aggregation paints a clear picture of systematic racial repression.

The sense of entitlement exhibited when white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot the young Mr. Brown combined the impunity of racial privilege with a pathological indifference toward the person of Mike Brown, his family and his community. Whatever the personal failings of Darren Wilson, it was in his official role on the Ferguson police department that he murdered Mr. Brown. Around the country the appearance of the police as invading armies in poor communities of color is because that is what they are. As the late Huey Newton put it nearly a half century ago, the police aren’t in poor communities to protect property because poor people have no property to protect. And the police in Ferguson conspicuously weren’t there to protect Mike Brown and other youth from violence.

Picture (1) above: the (private) autopsy of Mike Brown indicates that he was shot six times, including twice in the head. Given that Mr. Brown was unarmed and that by reports he was fleeing Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson when the shots that ended his life were fired, there was no conceivable threat to Mr. Wilson when he murdered Mike Brown. Public perceptions that there was any plausible rationale for shooting Mike Brown illustrate the role of ‘the law,’ and in particular the role of the police, in strategies of racial repression.

To the canard of black on black violence, three centuries of racial repression haven’t created a state of justice so why would continued repression by external forces be a plausible way to bring it about? Put differently, why would police violence of any sort be considered a solution to violence? The base premise at work is of intrinsic qualities of social dysfunction that justify / legitimate repressive tactics. The release by the Ferguson police department of a videotape allegedly showing Mike Brown shoplifting some cigars feeds into this premise. By way of comparison, pictured below are four Wall Street executives who ‘run’ banks that could be accurately described as ongoing criminal enterprises— this by the number of criminal and civil charges made against the banks, not as empty pejorative. Not only would it never occur to any cop in America to empty an entire clip into one of these executives under the premise of intrinsic criminality, the entirety of Western policing is dedicated to protecting them from criminal prosecution and from retribution by those harmed by the criminal acts that they oversee.

Chase’s Dimon: a perfect example of the 0.0001% sucking the life out the nation and the world.

Picture (2) above: laws as simple as Sarbanes-Oxley legislation could have led to criminal prosecutions of senior Wall Street executives for the acts that led to financial crisis of 2008 – 2009 and the ongoing economic misery they created. The legislation requires that senior executives be held responsible for the criminal behavior of ‘their’ organizations. The impunity, and with it implied immunity from prosecution, of these executives is emblematic of race and class privilege that make a mockery of charges of ‘black criminality.’ How many poor citizens of Ferguson lost their homes to predatory lending by the banks these executives represent?

Implied in the release of the videotape is equivalence; that the alleged theft of some cigars changes the balance of culpability in the murder of Mike Brown. Certainly in terms of quantum of accountability senior Bush administration officials launched aggressive war and tortured and murdered and Wall Street executives made off with the economic equivalent of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans filled with cigars. The point here isn’t simply that the Ferguson police ‘miscalculated’ in releasing the video— they calculated exactly and precisely as they always do. The effort was / is racist slander, that even though Darren Wilson didn’t know of the alleged theft of a few cigars by Mike Brown he was by degree justified in murdering Mr. Brown because Mike Brown was of a ‘criminal type.’ Conversely, anyone who reads a newspaper knows that senior Wall Street executives committed crimes that they were never prosecuted for. Does the Ferguson police department see a ‘criminal type’ when they see these same Wall Street executives being treated like royalty on television?

The toxic narrative of black criminality ties in history to the (post-Civil War) Reconstruction practice of using ‘the law’ to continue the social repression of slavery by different means. Nominally ‘freed’ blacks were charged under criminal statutes carefully crafted to place them in work camps or in ‘convict-leasing’ programs. The goal was continued economic exploitation through mechanisms of social control. The modern ‘objective’ identification of black ‘criminality’ ties to Progressive efforts to develop a scientific basis for this social repression. Today the residual of this history continues to fail in several significant ways: a century and a half of laws written for purposes of social repression are still on the books effectively outlawing being black, brown and poor; the residual of the Progressive program is what is called by statisticians ‘selection bias’— if a population is fifty percent white and fifty percent black but nine out of ten people the police ‘investigate’ are black then most ‘criminals’ will be black even if the propensity toward ‘criminality’ is evenly distributed. Finally, relative social power determines the reach of ‘the law.’ Even if rich whites are charged with crimes they can afford an effective defense— a privilege plea-bargained away for economic reasons by many non-rich, non-white criminal defendants.

Away from Ferguson, the last dozen years spent ratcheting up racial repression by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg through his ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy illustrates the persistence of the Progressive project in strategies of racial repression. In defending stop-and-frisk Mr. Bloomberg raised both the issue of black-on-black violence and ‘going where the crime is’ to justify the policy. To the first, either there exists an intrinsic propensity toward violence and criminality or they have basis in social relations. Given the scale of history, well-to-do white guys have far greater propensity toward violence than any other group. Most of the great slaughters of history have genesis in Western imperial relations and their effects. And if six-hundred thousand white youth from the surrounding suburbs were stopped and frisked every year there might be some clarity gained around claims of ‘where the crime is.’ Stop-and-frisk is straightforward racial repression put forward as being in the interests of its victims. This is as true in New York City as it is in Ferguson, Missouri.

As the recent murder of Eric Garner by the NYPD for selling individual cigarettes makes clear, the ‘broken windows’ policing strategy of New York’s ‘liberal’ Mayor Bill de Blasio perpetuates racial repression under a full-blown theory (‘broken windows’) that never mentions race. Given American history and existing political economy those most likely to be found on the wrong side of prosecution for low-level crime are those who lack the social resources to commit high-level crimes. Drug laws have nearly a century of history as tools of racial repression and they turn a public health issue into a tool of racist policing and incarceration. Even if one accepted the premise of ‘broken windows,’ that low level crimes lead to a breakdown in public order, the functional immunity from prosecution that elites have points to a wholly different ‘public order,’ one where elite criminality is a fundamental component. To be clear here, what public order is it that is being protected when only the poor and people of color are charged with, prosecuted and imprisoned for ‘crimes?’

The growing militarization of the police is in part economics— what the U.S. economy increasingly ‘makes’ is weapons, faulty financial products and prisons. The distribution of military materiel creates a market for otherwise redundant weaponry. As with guns, were it not for the radical social dysfunction of the U.S. giving military gear to police would just be stupid, not necessarily murderous as it is. Given this dysfunction there is analog across the culture. Arming the police so that they can cause harm but can’t be harmed themselves (because of protective gear) finds analog in drone murders and in the business practices of large corporations. Military drones are a means of murdering people without direct risk of harm to those doing the murdering. And large corporations use their social power to take from the rest of us without risk to themselves— the predatory lending of the housing boom-bust is an example. So here’s the punch line— cops must be held accountable or people have a right to defend themselves from the police. The young Mike Brown had a more legitimate right to self-defense than Darren Wilson had to murder him.

Picture (3) left: at eighteen years of age Mike Brown had his whole life ahead of him. By reports he had an extended family and community that loved him dearly. There are no ‘facts’ that could justify his murder.  Mike Brown was a human being who deserved better— from the Ferguson, Missouri police department, from all of those in Ferguson and surrounding vicinity charged with protecting and serving the public and from the nation to which he nominally belonged.

Those looking for resolution from the political ‘leadership’ in the U.S. are deluding themselves. Who has forgotten the empty promises from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that the Justice Department would step in if the courts failed to render a just verdict in George Zimmerman’s racist murder of Trayvon Martin? Might Darren Wilson have thought twice before pulling the trigger (six times) if George Zimmerman were serving a prison sentence worthy of the murder? But far more to the point, Messrs. Obama and Holder are the black faces now placed on this system of racial repression. When Mr. Obama calls for calm and ‘reflection’ in the face of Mike Brown’s murder, what does he expect that people will reflect on? That Mike Brown was murdered in cold blood by a racist cop in a racist police department that is part of a racist (in)justice system? That as tragic as Mike Brown’s murder is, he is but one of a never-ending stream of black and brown youth systematically harassed, intimidated, incarcerated and murdered? That there is never, ever, ever just resolution coming back out of this system? Or is it that after six years in office what is evident is that Messrs. Obama, Holder et al favor an unjust peace to justified social unrest?

What is happening now in Ferguson, Missouri has been a long time coming. The police / government strategy will be to demonize those rebelling and to come back with far more unjust force once the television cameras are out of sight. What the corporate-state wants is the appearance of order no matter how unjust that order is. Everything— EVERYTHING, that the Federal and state government and the police will say is to coerce unjust calm. Just ask the remaining survivors of the Attica rebellion or the Black Panthers who have been in prison for thirty or forty years now for defending themselves against police violence if this remains a question. Solving the social / racial divide in Ferguson, Missouri, New York and the rest of the nation requires redistributing the political and economic power and resources that the powers that be just spent the last thirty years putting into their own pockets. Without this redistribution words of conciliation and reconciliation are empty rhetoric designed to shut people up. Until people have the power to force the police to stop killing them nothing will be resolved.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is forthcoming.

By Fred Mazelis, wsws.org

[T]his Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes carried out during the long struggle to destroy the barriers of Jim Crow segregation in the American South. On the night of June 21, 1964, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, participants in the Freedom Summer campaign that aimed to add tens of thousands of disenfranchised African Americans to the voter rolls in the state of Mississippi, were murdered by a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen.

The three civil rights workers were shot to death and buried in an earthen dam. While their bodies were not discovered until 44 days later, their disappearance immediately became national and international news.

The Freedom Summer campaign focused on Mississippi, long notorious for the daily abuse and brutality suffered by its black citizens. As of 1962, less than 7 percent of eligible African Americans in that state were registered to vote. The Freedom Summer voter education and registration drive was led by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which included the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The radicalized students of SNCC took the lead.

The battle for the most basic democratic rights, a century after the US Civil War and nearly twenty years after World War II, was one that involved the efforts of millions of people. Centered in the Southern states of the US in the decade between 1955 and 1965, the movement was overwhelmingly working class in composition. The struggle attracted the passionate and deeply felt support of millions of workers, students, youth and intellectuals in the North. Over 1,000 out-of-state volunteers came to Mississippi during the summer of 1964, and they were joined by thousands of black students and youth from within the state.

Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney reflected the nationwide and multiracial character of Freedom Summer. Schwerner and Goodman, both of Jewish background, were among the Northern supporters of the movement. At 24 years of age, Schwerner was older and more experienced than the 20-year-old Goodman and the 21-year-old Chaney, from Meridian, Mississippi.

Schwerner grew up in the suburbs immediately north of New York City. He and his wife Rita had arrived in Meridian in January 1964, partly to lay the groundwork for the forthcoming summer campaign. Working as a field representative for CORE, Schwerner helped establish a local community center and also tried to speak to white workers in the area. He was immediately observed and targeted by the Klan.

Goodman, raised in Manhattan and a student at Queens College, came from a family that was culturally involved and politically active. A brother later recalled Leonard Bernstein playing the piano at the Goodman home. Goodman had arrived in Mississippi only hours before he fell victim to the white supremacists.

Chaney’s background and evolution typified that of many young African Americans in Mississippi and across the South in this period. He became politically active in high school, and was suspended for a week after participating in a protest at the age of 15. After high school, he joined a union apprentice program while continuing his civil rights activism.

The details of the murder plot are by now well known. The three young men were investigating the burning of a local church, a provocation by the Klan that was designed at least in part to draw them closer to the area where they were killed.

Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, closely tied to local Klansmen, arrested them, supposedly for speeding, in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi on the afternoon of June 21. Taken to the local Neshoba County jail, they were held for several hours while Price contacted the gang of racist killers, including Edgar Ray Killen, a local Klan leader. It was Killen who organized the group that followed the men when they were released. The timing of the release was part of the murder plot, designed to leave them at the mercy of the Klan.

Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were shot dead, with Chaney brutally beaten before he was killed. The murders were intended to terrorize the thousands of young people who had enlisted in Freedom Summer. The bodies were finally discovered in early August, after an informant tipped off the FBI.

Under the notorious racist and anticommunist J. Edgar Hoover, the supposed crime-fighting agency was known for its policy of ignoring white supremacist terror. In this case, however, the eyes of the world were on Mississippi and action was deemed imperative. US Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent 150 federal agents to the area. President Lyndon Johnson met with the parents of Schwerner and Goodman at the White House.

The killing of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman was by no means an isolated event, although the fact that in this instance two of the victims were Northern supporters attracted wide publicity. The six-week search for the young men, according to the Wikipedia article on the Freedom Summer murders, turned up “the bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Eddie Moore, 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby, and five other unidentified blacks whose recent disappearances had not attracted attention outside of their local communities.”

Eighteen men were tried in 1967 in connection with the 1964 killings, but because the state government refused to bring murder charges, they faced only federal charges of depriving the victims of their civil rights. Only seven were found guilty, and none spent more than six years in prison. There was strong evidence implicating Edgar Ray Killen as the ringleader of the mob, but he walked free after one juror, as later reported, said she “could never convict a preacher.”

It was not until 2005, more than 40 years after the killings, that anyone was put on trial for murder. A journalist for the Jackson [Mississippi] Clarion-Ledger, who had written about the case for years, was able to develop new evidence. Killen, at the age of 79, finally faced murder charges in January 2005.

Again, he avoided a murder conviction, but the jury’s guilty verdict on three separate counts of manslaughter led to consecutive 20-year terms, amounting de facto to a life sentence. Killen, having literally gotten away with murder for 40 years, remains in the state penitentiary at the age of 89.

The witnesses in the 2005 trial included the two surviving mothers of the young men, as well as Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender. The mothers were already in their 80s, but came to court to bear witness to their sons’ struggle and ultimate sacrifice.

Fannie Lee Chaney, a bakery worker in Mississippi, had been fired from her job and harassed after her son’s death and moved north to New York. She died in May 2007 at the age of 84, at her daughter’s home in New Jersey. Carolyn Goodman, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, died less than three months later at the age of 91.

Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner gave their lives in the struggle for basic democratic rights, and their sacrifice will continue to inspire future generations in the still unfinished struggle for social equality. A historical assessment of the events is necessary to draw important lessons for the future.

The 1964-65 period of Freedom Summer and the Selma-to-Montgomery march of the following March in some ways represented the high-water mark of the civil rights movement. The struggles of an increasingly mass character had begun after the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Later that year, the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott was launched. This was followed by the Southern sit-in movement beginning in February 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961 and afterwards, and other struggles for voting rights and desegregation, led primarily by the SCLC and SNCC.

The legislative achievements that followed these actions, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are often presented as gifts handed down by an enlightened ruling class. In fact, they were won only out of the bitterest struggles and in the teeth of fierce opposition. The 1964 Act was signed into law less than two weeks after the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.

The brutality and terror meted out to those who stood up in the fight for racial and social equality reflected the violent death throes of an outmoded social order. The Klansmen were the instruments in a campaign of violence whose backers reached into some of the highest levels of the ruling establishment, primarily, but not exclusively, in the South.

The struggles that put an end to lynchings and open racist terror were, in essence, part of the movement of the American working class in the post-World War II period. African-American workers and youth took the lead in the South, but they mobilized enormous support in other sections of the working class as well.

The three civil rights martyrs of 1964 joined a long list of others, including Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and the four schoolgirls killed in the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing of 1963. These victims of racism symbolized the struggle for the unity of black and white workers and the desire for social equality.

That is why it should also be noted that the years immediately following the Mississippi murders saw the assassinations of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Both were killed just at the moment when they began to address, if in a limited fashion, the underlying class contradictions of American capitalist society.

The civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, along with the establishment of Medicare and several other antipoverty measures from this period, was the last gasp of social reformism in the US. This was a period of deepening class struggle and political radicalization, which found expression in the massive social rebellions in the Northern ghettos, a growing strike wave and the mass movement against the war in Vietnam.

American capitalism faced deepening economic contradictions and the threat of a restive and revolutionary global working class. In the decade following the civil rights victories and the “War on Poverty,” the ruling class shifted towards a policy of social counterrevolution, an assault on the working class that continues to this day.

This shift was reflected in the infamous action of candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980, when he launched his presidential campaign by brazenly signaling his support for every other form of reaction, singing the praises of “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 murders.

The Democratic Party has been a partner in the escalating attacks on past social reforms. This party of big business, which for at least a century has fraudulently presented itself as the party of working people, was until the 1960s the party of the Southern Dixiecrats, the very same forces behind segregation and racist terror. Under the impact of the pressures of the Cold War against the Soviet Union and the movement of the working class at home, however, it was forced to shift its policy, a shift reflected in the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.

Even at this time, however, the Democrats’ fear of the working class far outweighed their opposition to Southern racism. This was demonstrated even at the high point of the civil rights struggle, at the 1964 Democratic Convention that nominated Johnson for a full term in the White House, where a rotten deal was imposed to seat the Dixiecrat delegation and deny the credentials of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats.

Today, while the Democrats pay lip service to civil rights history, their policy is diametrically opposed to the progressive traditions embodied by the sacrifice of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. The Democrats’ rightward trajectory has been accompanied by and based on the use of identity politics, turning the struggle for social equality into its opposite through the cultivation of a thin, privileged layer of the black upper-middle class. The class limitations and political weaknesses of the civil rights movement have been used to claim that the election of the first black president represents the fulfillment of the civil rights struggle, while in actuality the Obama administration presides over ruthless attacks on the gains of all of the past struggles of the working class.

The betrayal of the ideals of the civil rights movement also required the indispensable assistance of the trade unions. Even at the height of the struggle, the union bureaucracy did little but issue pro forma statements. The mobilization of working class support for the Southern struggle was not accomplished by the unions, which then organized at least one-third of the workforce. The gains of the civil rights battles were largely the product of the independent mobilization of millions of workers and youth, partly through such organizations as the SCLC and SNCC. In the decades since, the unions have been transformed into adjuncts of big business and the capitalist state, pillars of the status quo and enemies of everything the civil rights martyrs fought for.

Today, while Jim Crow is gone, the attacks on basic democratic rights—including the right to vote, the rights of free speech and assembly, and the basic social rights to decent employment, education, housing and health care—worsen daily. The only consistent defender and fighter for these rights is the working class, but its tremendous strength can only be brought to bear through the building of a new leadership that will finally break from the Democratic Party and the pro-capitalist trade unions. As we pay tribute to the civil rights martyrs, we must rededicate ourselves to the task of building the revolutionary leadership that will complete the struggle for which they gave their lives.