Black Friday Protest Against Killer Cops Rocks St. Louis

November 27, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Shoppers at the Galleria Mall outside St. Louis had their routine broken by powerful chants on November 25: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, killer cops have got to go.” The protest included clergy as well as a Black Missouri state representative, who was among at least seven people arrested.

A woman who was at the mall shopping posted on Instagram a video and a description of how the pigs treated peaceful protesters: “I came to the Galleria to do some Xmas shopping. Everything stopped for a moment, because people were exercising their right to peacefully assemble and protest. While I was waiting for the police to reopen the stores, and let us resume shopping I witnessed a kid who wasn’t even part of the protest get slammed against a glass wall, and thrown to the ground by multiple officers. I can say from first hand experience today the people were protesting peacefully, and it was the police who antagonized, and facilitated the violence...THEN THIS HAPPENED.”

In September, a judge ruled that the cold-blooded murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, a 24-year-old Black man, by a St. Louis cop was “justifiable homicide.” Hundreds of people went into the streets of St. Louis in righteous protest. Since then, Black people as well as white people have continued to take to the streets day after day despite mass arrests and vicious police assaults, including pigs pepper spraying and brutalizing of a clergyman and a city council member. About a month ago, some “faith and civic leaders” called for an economic boycott, which, while using blustery phrases like “they kill our kids, we kill their pocket books,” was aimed at channeling the protests into tamer and ineffective channels.

In early November, the Al Jazeera America news service ran an article asking if St. Louis has become the Selma, Alabama of our time—where Black people demanding basic rights are met with police running amok. But today, the centuries of vicious oppression of Black people in Amerikkka is being taken in a new, genocidal direction under the Trump/Pence fascist regime and the Department of INjustice headed by Jeff Sessions, which have given an open green light to murder and brutality by pigs around the country.

In this light, protests like resistance on Black Friday in St. Louis is ever more important and should get support from justice-loving people everywhere. These protests need to continue and go further—and they can and must become an important part of the movement of millions to drive out the fascist Trump/Pence regime. As the Call from Refuse Fascism says in part:

Every outrage committed by this regime must be met with greater and greater resistance. We must ORGANIZE: working with all our creativity and determination toward the time when millions of people can be moved to fill the streets of cities and towns day after day and night after night, declaring this whole regime illegitimate—Demanding, and Not Stopping, Until the Trump/Pence Regime Is Driven from Power. If this happens, then the whole political landscape would be dramatically transformed, every faction within the established power structure would be forced to respond—and all this could lead to a situation in which this fascist regime is driven from office.

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