West 4th Street B-ball Champions Remember Sean Bell, Shot 50 Times by Police
| Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Friday, August 17, 2018. The Sean Bell All Stars won Kenny Graham’s Pro Classic tournament trophy after a hard-fought matchup with defending champions BK Stompers. The epic battle took place on a hot summer night at the “Cage” on West 4th Street in New York City.
Readers of Revolution newspaper will recall the name Sean Bell. He was the young Black man murdered by New York City pigs while sitting in a car with two friends on his wedding day in 2006. The pigs fired 50 shots, killing Sean and wounding his two companions. And the murderers-in-blue got off! (See “Outrage in New York: The Cold Truth About the Police Murder of Sean Bell.”)
Sean Bell was an ardent fan of the streetball team when they were known as “D.D.N.—Dats Dem N-----z.” They played with a swagger that bordered on outrageous and took on all comers. After Sean’s execution, the team approached his widow, Nicole Paultre Bell, for permission to name the team after Sean Bell as a way to keep his name alive and she agreed.
Original team star B.J. McFarlan is quoted in a story in the New York Daily News: “I’m sitting there and hoping sometimes. I was hoping they would mention Sean Bell after Alton Sterling, even though it’s 10 years. That they would bring him up, not just the ones that are closest to mind. That’s the way of life. More things happen; other names are brought up. The names bring up your memories of the situation of the people that were close to you. We can’t forget.”
No, we won’t forget.
“That’s the way of life” under this system. Harith Augustus, Stephon Clark, Maurice Granton Jr., Skyler Martin, James Edward Blackmon, Richard Black, Michael Neal, Joseph Santos, Arthur Kenzie Garner, Cynthia Fields—the names go on and on. According to killedbypolice.net, 719 people were killed by pigs between January 1 and July 31, 2018! An ongoing Washington Post project “has found that police have shot and killed 3,309 people since 2015, or more than twice as many fatal shootings per year as the average reported by the FBI.”
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Black people have been kidnapped, murdered, enslaved, exploited, Jim-Crowed, lynched, segregated, rioted against, discriminated against, beaten, scorned and slandered, imprisoned, bitten by dogs, lied to and lied on, soft-soaped with hope and promised and tricked, sold out and shot out and shot down in the streets, and just goddamn brutalized and killed over and over, since day one....
Humanity needs revolution, a real revolution, a communist revolution. There is a way to win and a new world to build, there is a plan for all this, there is a leader—Bob Avakian (BA)—who has shown the way, and there is a party that he leads, the Revolutionary Communist Party.
And get your hands on the strategy for revolution, HOW WE CAN WIN—How We Can Really Make Revolution.
Sean Bell defense denies drive to basket at Kenny Graham’s Pro-Classic championship game at New York’s West 4th Street courts.
There will never be a revolutionary movement in this country that doesn’t fully unleash and give expression to the sometimes openly expressed, sometimes expressed in partial ways, sometimes expressed in wrong ways, but deeply, deeply felt desire to be rid of these long centuries of oppression [of Black people]. There’s never gonna be a revolution in this country, and there never should be, that doesn’t make that one key foundation of what it’s all about.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:19
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