Reports from the Revolution Club Summer Project, Los Angeles

Protesting Supreme Court Decision on Abortion/Birth Control
July 3 protest in LA against the Supreme Court decisions restricting access to birth control and safe access to abortions. This protest was called for nationwide by Stop Patriarchy and organized in L.A. by Stop Patriarchy and the Revolution Club on a busy street corner that borders an oppressed neighborhood and is also the location of organizations that provide access to birth control. It involved feminist students and others, and several people passing by from the neighborhood stopped to talk, many wanting to find out what this was all about, and some expressing their own anger about the decisions and the treatment of women overall.

Going Out to Summer Night Lights
Summer Night Lights is an anti-gang city program in LA where dozens of city parks stay open until 11 pm four nights a week during the summer. Along with food and music, in at least some neighborhoods there is a heavy police presence—to reinforce the authority and violence of the police in the neighborhoods while at the same time working to build up snitch networks. Revolution Club Summer went to one of these and did a "pig mask skit" with the youth—ridiculing the violent and vicious pigs, and popularizing blowing the whistle as a form of mass resistance to police brutality and harassment.

The BET Experience
The BET Experience "Free Fan Fest" at the end of June was a weekend of basketball games, shoe sales, concerts and more brought out thousands of Black people in LA including thousands of youth. The Revolution Club, Stop Mass Incarceration Network, and BA Everywhere Committee all went out to it to reach people in a big way—to raise money, build for the "What to the slave is your fourth of July?" picnic, and meet and involve new people in building the movement for revolution. Some of the young women and young men took up and put on the sticker "Women are not bitches or ho's or punching bags. Women are full human beings."

At the Crenshaw Mall
Street-corner protest at the Crenshaw Mall on June 26, the day after LAPD shot and killed a man who was hiding in a garage after police chased him with dogs from the Crenshaw Mall. Police say he tried to shoplift from a store and then started shooting when security tried to grab him—and the mall was on lockdown for several hours. Several youth, who are used to being harassed by security for just hanging out at the mall, stopped to join in the protest for a few minutes and find out about the movement for revolution.