Tampa demonstrators gathered Dec. 5 to protest the recent grand jury decisions which continue allowing police to murder Black people with impunity. More than just the callous, brutal shooting of 18 year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson or the videotaped illegal choke hold used to kill Eric Garner in New York, or the cavalier gunning down of 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Ohio, the protesters condemned the system which ensures that these murders continue to happen.
Chants of “Shut it down,” “I can’t breathe,” and “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail/ the whole damn system is guilty as hell,” could be heard from Gaslight Park, down Kennedy Boulevard, and all the way to the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park. The demonstrators marched to shut down busy downtown streets and bridges, making their voices heard while showing that even though the state clears these police of any wrongdoing, the people still find them guilty.
Crystal Wilson is a student and activist who recreated SNCC at the University of South Florida in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder. She spoke on organizing, as well as the presence of police brutality in her
life and her community.
“Now I see police brutality more. When I was growing up, I just saw children playing, ’cause that’s what we were doing, playing, but as I got older my grandmother took me into the house so I wouldn’t be in the streets. But now that I’m back on the streets, yeah, there is a lot of police terror. There’s always been police terror in the community. Because as we grew up they were telling us, if the police come, it’s time to go home. These are the do’s and don’t’s that you do around police. So, the fact that those rules are there shows me, now that I’m older, that there has always been police brutality there.”
For Wilson, the organizing slogan, “Black lives matter” is not simply a chant or a hashtag, it is the principle by which she conducts her activism and organizing. Wilson told Liberation News, “What brought me into organizing was the case of Trayvon Martin. I felt like I needed to do something so I went outside and I held a sign by myself. And then came the organized protests at USF for Trayvon Martin which eventually led to change at the University itself because they added two courses to address that issue. The reason why I organize, why I protest, is because of my family. Black lives do matter to me, my family matters to me, I matter to me, my community members matter to me. So that’s why I became so active and so passionate about it. I can’t think of a time or a day when life is not important. Unfortunately, we do have to donate our lives to run society.”
The protest in Tampa was an example of multinational, multiracial solidarity. As photos on social media have shown activists in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America supporting the Ferguson protests, Tampa demonstrators of various backgrounds came out to support the struggle for Black life, while connecting the struggles in the United States to struggles abroad. Laila Abdelaziz is a Palestinian-born activist and organizer, formerly with the Arab and Muslim advocacy group EMERGE USA. She spoke to Liberation News about the ways in which racist state violence and discrimination can both damage diverse communities, as well as being a
cause for solidarity.
“I’m not Black American, but I did grow up in post-9/11 America as a Muslim American woman, so I do understand what discrimination and mischaracterization and prejudice is in the community, especially being a Palestinian refugee. So I feel like all of these angles of my upbringing have definitely driven me on a path to understand my community better and always participate in something to make prejudice no more. I really did feel the pain of many communities that were reacting to the Michael Brown decision and the Eric Garner decision and then what happened to Tamir Rice. I wanted to be a part of that emotional grieving state that a protest can compensate for”.
Abdelaziz also spoke on the ways that chauvinistic national talking points can often ring hollow to oppressed nationalities. This was a theme brought up by many Tampa demonstrators, echoing Malcolm X’s famous quote that black America experiences not an American dream, but an American nightmare. Abdelaziz told us about how a better system is both possible and necessary, saying, “It’s possible to police the society without having 21 Black American men killed extrajudicially for every white American killed extrajudicially. There’s very serious systematic problems in our country. And as Americans, we look at the Middle East, or Latin America, or Eastern Europe and say ‘We should be an example,’ or ‘We should export our democracy,’ or ‘We should oversee their democratic elections’ or ‘We should get involved with exerting our morals, policies and values’ on other people. So, growing up as an immigrant American, I feel like there’s so much contradiction. America is so willing to look at other people and exert its morals and values, when here at home we haven’t even reached this ideal state of implementing our own morals and values that we claim internationally. I think it’s a really important time for America to start looking at itself.”
While the political class has been wringing its hands attempting to put forward shallow, cosmetic reforms, the people in the streets are demanding more. Although the Tampa protesters came from so many diverse cultural and political milieus, they were united in declaring that this issue of racist police violence is systemic and written into the fabric of the United States. Activists are spreading the message that police militarization and racist policing methods are not accidental. As the slogan “Shut it down” is gaining traction nationwide, people are understanding what ‘it’ truly is.
Samantha Shakur Bowden, a graduate student and activist discussed the connections between police brutality and the war on terror with Liberation News, stating, “Police brutality is basically the home front for the war on terror. The war has to come home. This is the empire striking back. And now citizens and non-citizens are the subject of repression. It’s the War on Terror coming home. That’s why the police look like they do. We’re the new enemy combatants now. I felt that really intimately connected to the War on Terror because of the Muslim community. Like, the spies they would send into mosques, the FBI looking for terrorists. And I think that protesters and people that are either Muslim or ‘look Arab’ or have dark skin because they’re from Southeast Asia or look like Sikhs or whatever are the subjects of racist policing. And I definitely see it affecting the Black community.”
As the 45th anniversary of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton’s murder by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department has recently passed, many are looking toward more radical approaches toward handling police violence. Demands for community control of the police and democratization of police discipline are gaining traction in communities which experience the police as hostile occupiers. Bowden spoke to Liberation News on this topic.
“Honestly, if people aren’t talking about who controls communities, both the force exercised in those communities by the police force and economically, then I don’t really care what they have to say. Because that’s always been the demand. We want economic control, we want to police our own communities, we want to control our own lives. That’s the only answer. Until America is actually willing to give forty acres and a mule, and police power, to Black and Brown communities, it’s going to be an outsider oppressing people. The police forces don’t represent the people they are policing. Because the people who control the police are the people who own the most property and need protecting. The police’s job is to defend property. We see this in protests. They defend property, not people.”
As the demonstration wound down, protesters gathered again in Gaslight Park to share ideas and experiences as a group. Many gave personal testimonies regarding police brutality suffered by themselves and their loved ones. Tanquilla Hallback recited a poem she wrote for her young son regarding her fears and hopes as he grows up facing threats of discrimination and violence.
“My son is biracial.” Hallback said, “His father is Puerto Rican. When me or anyone in my family calls him Black he corrects us and tells us he is Brown. The hardest thing I think I will ever have to do is tell him that the world won’t see him through my eyes. A sweet Brown boy who loves transformers and is the best compliment giver anyone has ever met. They may see him as a representative of a group of people they have classified into one group of thugs and delinquents. I don’t shield my son from the harsh realities because even as a child he is not safe from the raft of stereotypes. My main concern for him is that despite everything that is against him that he stays true to himself and always stand up for what I taught him is right no matter the platform or his surroundings. Black mothers can’t teach our sons to avoid harm or situations that could take them away from us. We can only equip them to lead a purpose filled life for the time that they do have here.”
Like Crystal Wilson, Tanquilla Hallback was mobilized by the murder of Trayvon Martin. As neither Martin, nor Mike Brown, nor Eric Garner, nor Tamir Rice have yet seen a shred of justice, many in the community are experiencing feelings of confusion, anger, and despair. “I see my son,brother, family and friends in those men.” Hallback told us, “To see their murders go unpunished left an emptiness in me that can not fully be explained.”
Hallback explained the psychological damage done to the Black community in allowing racist police terror to go unpunished. “The responses of the grand juries in Ferguson and New York are saying Black lives don’t matter outside of entertainment or sports. One of the practices that Willie Lynch taught is making an example of a slave in front of other slaves to instill fear and a sense of inferiority. Every time we witness the murder of an unarmed innocent black man and we watch the killers walk free we feel
both fear and inferiority.”
While the forces of reaction are strong and unified, the Tampa activists showed resolve, solidarity, and purpose in standing up to the system which extols private property while devaluing black life. These protests and uprisings show an opportunity to build a mass movement for justice among all the oppressed and exploited in the society. As Tanquilla Hallback told us, “The Civil Rights movement did not happen over the course of one year. I believe we are in a midst of a movement and this is only the beginning”.
Hallback’s poem “Sanford” which she read at the protest is reprinted below:
Sanford: Oscar Grant Kendrick Jhonson Jonathan Ferrell Sean Bell George
Junius Stinney, Jr., Alonzo Ashley I live an hour away from Sanford My son
name starts with a T He loves sweet hard rainbow colored candy excuse me if
I can see Trayvon in He Do I tell him to Walk? Do I tell him to run? Do I
tell him he has no right to stand his ground Even if he was the one to be
chased down by a man with a gun? Was he suppose to just lie there I mean do
I tell him to just lie there My son loves to fight fight he pulls his
hoodie over his little head on those cold winter nights I fell in love with
his daddy when he had those golds at the bottom But I’m afraid that if
Tyrique wore them it would be a “justifiable” reason as to why a
“upstanding” citizen shot him I mean could shoot him Its hard to paint a
picture for an individual when you see him as them Them meaning boys with
more melanin It’s not just a black and white thing Its a realty vs racial
profiling I mean.. I plan to live in a nice neighborhood that might have
neighborhood watch How do I show him not to look suspicious Like he’s about
to pick a lock In a way I’m kind of glad he did I can see people a lot
better where the light is you can still be racist even if you have a “black
friend” or a “white” friend asian or latin it doesn’t matter if you can’t
separate him from them or “where *THEY come from” quoted from juror B37 I’m
a black women who gave birth to a suspicious looking baby excuse me if I
see Trayvon and can’t help but to think of he A boy with a sweet tooth
Greeted with a nasty reality
