“Libby Schaaf, we want you to know these streets do not belong to corporate interests. These streets belong to the people. This is a moment of Black resistance leading to Black liberation. We own these streets. We value our lives. We don’t need the police. We don’t need you.” These were the triumphant words of Cat Brooks of the ONYX organizing committee and the Anti-Police Terror Project as she spoke to the group of protesters Wednesday night, June 10, who had just finished a march through Oakland that culminated in a takeover of the intersection at 14th and Broadway.
The protest was the last in a day-long series of demonstrations throughout Oakland under the banner of #OurBudgetOurCity. Oakland residents and community groups came out to demand that the city’s budget reflect the needs of poor and working people, instead of being used to fund state-sanctioned violence by the police and allow developers and other corporate interests to further gentrify the city.
What lacked at the march that night, however, was a police presence. There was not a single officer, squad car, or military-grade OPD vehicle in sight as 50-60 protesters marched through the streets with fists in the air, led by a contingent of Black women voicing militant chants of “Black power!” The march finished without any property damage and without violence.
This was exactly because the police were not there. It is the police who bring violence to these protests with their brutal repression, and on Wednesday night Mayor Libby Schaaf was forced to tell OPD to stand down. This was not an acknowledgement on her part of the righteous message of the protests but a forced response to calls by the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild to stop the illegal nighttime protest curfew she enacted a few weeks earlier. Victory for the people of Oakland on this matter was not won without struggle.
On the night of May Day in Oakland, a number of windows were broken during a small march through the city, following a mass “Labor Against Police Terror” march and rally initiated by Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The media went into a frenzy and put out the message that “Mayor Schaaf didn’t care about small-business owners.” In response to this, the mayor issued an extremely reactionary nighttime curfew on protests, a solution that did nothing to protect small-business owners and proved that the mayor had more concern for broken windows than the rights of the people to dissent. The specific language of the curfew was that “unpermitted marches in the street after sunset are not allowed.” Mayor Schaaf had decided to tell the people of Oakland that they must ask permission to protest once the sun went down, and gave OPD authority to strip protesters of their First Amendment rights.
Once the curfew was issued, it was first used during a #SayHerName demonstration later that week. Amanda Weatherspoon, a supporter of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, was in attendance and told Liberation News what transpired: “The protest was to emphasize the fact that females of color are killed as well by cops and face systematic brutality, as well as transwomen and other marginalized groups. What I saw that night was an immediate cascading by the police on this protest, which was not large, was mostly women and children, and they pretty much shut it down. There was no violence other than aggression on their end, as far as showing up with riot gear and tasers.”
After the initial protest where police used force against women and children to chase them off the street, OPD employed tear gas and made dozens of arrests at protests that followed, where the people continued to fight back against the repressive curfew measure. Even while meetings were occurring between Mayor Schaaf and the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild to inform the mayor that she was in direct violation of both the Constitution and Oakland’s settlement agreement on crowd control policy, hundreds of police officers were deployed against a small gathering of curfew protesters at Oakland’s First Friday street festival on June 12.
Prior to Wednesday’s #SayHerName #BreakTheCurfew protest that morphed into somewhat of a victory march, Roselyn Berry of the Black Youth Project 100, Bay Area Chapter, issued a statement to the 150 people who had gathered on the steps in front of Oakland City Hall at Oscar Grant Plaza.
“We are not surprised by the traditional practice of government to impose on the rights of Black people. We’re not surprised by the over-policing of our communities and our tactics of resistance. Not surprised is not the equivalent of indifference. It is not the equivalent of tolerance. It is not the equivalent of submissiveness. It is not the equivalent of passivity, and it will never be the equivalent of acceptance. … We will continue to fight Libby Schaaf’s unlawful misuse of her power. But more importantly, we will continue to fight back against the tyranny of all racist policies that keep Black people marginalized,” Berry stated.
The fight back against Mayor Libby Shaaf comes at a crucial time, prior to the 83rd annual U.S. Conference of Mayors, which will bring mayors from across the country together in the Bay Area to discuss how best to deal with the major issues that face their cities. If other mayors were to follow the lead of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, they will find ways to create golden opportunities for developers, landlords, and corporations to exploit poor and working people, while dumping money into their respective racist police departments to quell any dissent.
Capitalist plunder of labor and neglect of housing, health care, education, and other basic facets of life is an everyday reality that the people must struggle against. The victorious struggle in Oakland against the nighttime protest ban is an example of the power of the organized people to bring about change. Broader struggle for Black liberation is inherently tied to the liberation of all people from the oppressive system of capitalism and imperialism, and only through unified mass struggle will the people take back the power that is rightfully theirs.
