Justice for justice’s sake
1st June 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Over the past few years, the streets of America have been filled with people protesting the wrongful killing of unarmed Black and Brown people at the hands of law enforcement officers. Among the most oft-repeated chants has been “No Justice, No Peace,” which sends a clear message to the powers that be that until there is equal justice and constitutional policing on U.S. streets, the civil —and sometimes uncivil — unrest will continue.
Given the history of Black struggle in the U.S., that’s a poignant and compelling message. But there’s another equally important and powerful message that those of us who most often find ourselves targeted by the powers that be need to remind ourselves of on a regular basis: No struggle, no progress.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Fast-forwarding a century, in October 1966 the Black Panther Party for Self Defense released its platform and list of demands purported to move Black people forward as free human beings in this society. It reads as follows:
What We Want, What We Believe
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to supper, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
As you can see, the Black Panther Party platform still resonates nearly 50 years later. Revisiting it reminds us all that there is still much work that remains to be done and that struggle is an essential component of our growth, empowerment, progress and liberation as a people.
Don’t be afraid to talk about conditions in the Black community and what it will take to move communities of color forward. Our struggle is with the system of white supremacy, not individual white people. We cannot allow ourselves to get sidetracked or lose focus.
As questions. Share information. Talk about the struggle and be about the struggle.
Get your struggle on. Let’s go.
• How does the mayor get away with boasting about the city having no failing schools but say absolutely nothing about the Recovery School District’s efforts to build a school for Black children atop a toxic landfill, treating George Washington Carver High School students like prison inmates and continuing to play games with the future of John McDonogh Senior High School?
• Why aren’t members of New Orleans City Council standing up to fight for the children the RSD want to build a school for atop a toxic landfill and the elders in the same area for whom they want to build a community center?
• With 70 murders and counting since Memorial Day Weekend and another rash of armed robberies across the city, what grade would you give the mayor and police chief on public safety?
• Why is state legislator Jeff Arnold so anxious to separate Algiers from the rest of New Orleans?
• How much would the percentage of Black voters in New Orleans drop if Algiers is allowed to “secede” from New Orleans?
• Have you ever visited Little Africa in Algiers?
• Why don’t the Recovery School District and the business community want Cohen College Prep to build a new school at its current site in the Garden District?
• In this era of budgetary shortfalls and a constant need to trim city services to taxpayers, why hasn’t the mayor even considered eliminating some of those six-figure deputy mayor jobs?
• Should anyone really be surprised that an employee at a French Quarter restaurant would use the N-word to refer to a Black patron?
• With the Essence Festival and Bayou Classic being controlled and run by someone other than us, what exactly do Black people own and run in this city?
• Exactly when did Black people stop being proud to be Black?
This article originally published in the June 1, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
