Ferguson
and American History
by Margaret Kimberley
Good afternoon.
I am deeply honored to have been invited to join this conference. I am also
very happy that the subject which I’ll be discussing
is of such great interest to people all over the world. The police killing of 18
year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014 was a turning
point. Sadly it is not because the circumstances of his death were at all
unusual.
According to a
study conducted by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person is the
victim of an extra judicial killing every 28 hours at the hands of police,
private security or vigilantes in the United States. Michael Brown is just one
of over 300 black people who will succumb in the same way before 2014 ends.
What made
Brown’s death different was the response from his community. The people in a small
town outside of St. Louis reacted with a sustained protest which caught the country’s
and the world’s attention. It wasn’t only the resistance which generated
attention but the force they were met with by local police. Many people were
shocked to see military vehicles, armored personnel carriers, and jeeps on the
streets of an American city, but in reality it should not have been surprising
at all. The trend of police militarization began nearly 50 years ago during
urban rebellions in Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities.
On December 8,
1969 the Los Angeles police department attacked the headquarters of the local
chapter of the Black Panther Party and a shoot out ensued. Ultimately all of
the panther party members were acquitted of attempted murder and other charges
six months later. The urban riots, the raid on the panther headquarters and the
subsequent acquittals hastened the establishment of Special Weapons and
Tactics, SWAT teams, which began to proliferate around the country.
But in truth,
black Americans have always been under the most surveillance, and are the most
controlled group of people in the country. This level of control goes back to
enslavement in the earliest days of American settler history and impacts us all
two hundred years later. Slavery
could not exist as an institution without police state terror and the legacy of
that history continues until the 21st century and thus Ferguson.
So while it is true that beginning in 1997 the department of
defense enacted Program 1033 which gave surplus military equipment to local
police departments, it was never far from the historical imperatives of the
American state. Tanks in the streets of Ferguson are also tied to the mass incarceration
state. The United States leads the world in the number of persons incarcerated,
some 2.3 million people.
With just 5% of the world’s population, our country has the
dubious distinction of having 25% of the world’s prisoners. Not only are those
numbers astronomically high, but fully half of those incarcerated persons are
black. The all too brief black liberation movement ended America’s apartheid
but was quickly followed by mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was
used as a pretext for putting more people of color behind bars.
I would also add that our country’s domestic policy closely
follows its international policy. Not only does the U.S. lead in incarceration
but in military spending, which is greater than that of the rest of the world’s
nations combined.
Just this week, the United States senate released a report five
years in the making which detailed an official policy of torture during the
Bush administration. Among other outrages, the report revealed that the
government paid 2 psychologists $81 million to develop methods of literally
driving prisoners insane, prisoners in so-called
“black” sites and at Guantanamo.
Torture was not just the policy of the CIA. It is also a
policy of American law enforcement and led directly to the death of Michael
Brown. Last month Brown’s parents and activists from around the country
travelled to Geneva, Switzerland to testify before the United Nations Committee
Against Torture. The committee concluded that the use
of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons constituted torture, as did police actions
which disproportionately inflict brutalization on black people.
These policies that are enforced at home and abroad continue
no matter which political party is in control in Washington or who presides in
the white house. As bad as Bush’s policy was, his successor Barack Obama
asserts the right to actually kill anyone he says is a terrorist. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen whom the president
assassinated with a drone as method of execution. He also killed Awlaki’s teenaged old son.
What does the president’s kill list, a name which his
administration coined, have to do with Ferguson? Ever since Michael Brown was
killed the United States department of justice has contended that they are
hampered in their ability to bring about a federal prosecution of killer
policeman Darren Wilson because the legal bar is too difficult to reach.
Needless to say we should all be very skeptical of these claims.
When the president decided to kill Awlaki,
the bar was suddenly very low, the burden of proof non-existent. Attorney
general Eric Holder, the leading law enforcement official in the country, made
a bizarre claim regarding Awlaki’s killing. Our
constitution guarantees a right to due process of law, but the Obama
administration says that isn’t really true, that we have no right to due
process if the president so chooses.
This was absolute nonsense, a lie meant to allow the
president to get away with extra judicial murder. There is no prior case law to back up this claim, there are no legal scholars who can say where this
theory came from. I bring this up because the Obama administration through
leaks to newspapers and even in public statements claims that federal prosecution
of Wilson is unlikely to take place. But as we saw in the case of Awlaki, they made the bar low because they wanted him dead.
The bar is only high if they aren’t interested in meeting it.
The truth is this. The police in the United States are the 21st
slave patrol and unless Americans acknowledge that fact, grand juries like the
one in Ferguson, Missouri will issue verdicts that allow them to kill at will.
This was a very difficult year for anyone concerned about police misconduct. In
July a New York City man named Eric Garner died in what a coroner ruled a
homicide at the hands of police. His killer was also not indicted. Two weeks
ago a 12-year old child with a toy gun was killed by police in Cleveland, Ohio,
a state which has laws on the books allowing for open carrying of firearms.
All of these cases have renewed demands for justice and
thousands of people have demonstrated across the country on behalf of these
individuals and their families. As I mentioned before, there is now an
important effort to bring American police brutality before the international
community.
A mentally ill black man was killed by what can only be
called a firing squad of police in the state of Michigan. As in other cases,
the Obama justice department chose not to prosecute anyone, despite the
existence of video evidence of murder. Activists took his case before the Inter
American Commission on Human Rights. The United States should not be able to
point fingers at countries around the world while allowing its own terrible
human rights abuses to take place. America must explain itself to the world.
Americans love to think of their country as being
“exceptional” and superior to all others. I don’t believe there is another
country in the world where a teenager can be shot in the eye and in the head as
Michael Brown was, and then have his dead body lie in the street for four
hours. It is an undisputed good for the world community to pass judgment on America.
These problems begin and are maintained by those at the very top
of American power. President Obama promised transparency and change when he campaigned
for his job. Now he is like his republican predecessor, defending the current
CIA director who was one of the architects of the international torture
project.
The attacks on September 11, 2001 were the pretext for
torture, black sites for prisoners and greater militarization of the police.
But as I have pointed out, poor black people were always at risk of being
treated in heinous ways without having recourse for justice. The next
presidential election will take place in less than two years and none of the
presumed candidates have said a word about the senate torture report or about
police brutality. It seems that we can expect more of the same from Hillary
Clinton, Jeb Bush or whomever else may be the next
president.
Our demands must be simple. We must have federal prosecutions
of killer police officers and torture in all its forms must be made explicitly
illegal. None of that can happen unless the United States becomes the
democratic nation that it claims to be. That will not happen unless ceases to
be the de facto ruling principle in America.
“Hands up don’t shoot” should not be words on t-shirts that
are quickly forgotten. They can and they must be a rallying cry to make
systemic change. Thank you.
Malcolm
X Grass Roots
http://www.operationghettostorm.org/
Black panthers
http://www.latimesmagazine.com/2011/04/policing-revolution.html
U.N., Geneva
http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14546
Michigan ACLU