SERGIO RODRIGUEZ—“The first thing to consider is that blacks in the United States represent 13% of the population. And that segment is overwhelmingly a Democratic Party voter. So, in electoral terms, Trump is attacking an opposition sector, which was not favorable to him before these events. On the other hand, in more structural terms it must be said that racism is a permanent phenomenon in the United States, it is intrinsic to that country…”
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The Harsch family has issued a statement, saying that they “want justice, not comfortable excuses.” They added, “There are many ways to die but considering the current racial tension, a Black man hanging himself from a tree definitely doesn’t sit well with us right now.” The U.S. has experienced protests across the country recently in response to the death of George Floyd, an African American man who died after a police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. America has a long history with hanging or lynching black people.
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MARGARET KIMBERLEY—The perpetrators of crimes against humanity are often elevated to positions of respect and admiration. It all depends on who did the killing, and who was killed. Now the murderers are being called to account. The new movement in the United States against police and other state violence has inspired this welcome change taking place all over the world. The criminals are being exposed decades and even centuries after their atrocities took place. There is no statute of limitations for murder nor should there be for calling out people who have the blood of millions on their hands.
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DAN WAKEFIELD—Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who had gone to the Mississippi Delta to visit his grandfather, accused of the crime of whistling at a white woman, was found at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River [shot through the head] and with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.
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MARGARET KIMBERLEY—The demand for community control of police ushers in a new stage of struggle, in which “young people are imagining a world where these tremendous institutions of imperialism and the police state are gone,’ said Max Rameau, an activist with Pan African Community Action (PACA), in Washington, DC. The PACA proposal would oversee police hiring, firing and operations by a board chosen from communities at random, like jurors.
