Los Angeles Refuse Fascism Encampment and the MLK Day Parade

January 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From readers:

Monday, January 16, MLK Day: Los Angeles City Hall, and the Refuse Fascism LA encampment there to stop the fascist Trump-Pence regime is the base from which a beginning, diverse grouping of people are cohering Refuse Fascism forces and reaching out into society to gather thousands more who can reach and lead millions with the objective of preventing Trump from ruling.

Encampment plans include daily and nightly outreach to districts and hubs; high schools and colleges; neighborhoods of the oppressed and middle classes; events, concerts, and protests.

Today was MLK Day, and a group from the LA City Hall encampment took Refuse Fascism to tens of thousands of people, especially Black people, who lined the parade route on Martin Luther King Blvd. and the Crenshaw District.

Refuse Fascism LA ran into a great desire to see Trump’s whole regime stopped. At the same time, hundreds asked “how?” “How could that happen—the inauguration is four days away?”

We boldly challenged them with the objective of people descending on DC in a crescendo this week, and millions more in major cities and small towns hitting the streets and declaring their intention to stop Trump and Pence. We said: “People, millions, need to hit the streets, now; they need to ‘rise up’—it is up to us.” That could force a political “crisis of rule” and legitimacy at the highest levels of this system... and challenge tens of millions more... and force the various factions of the U.S. power structure to respond to us, the millions and tens of millions.

And, as the group put it—”that means you...” taking this up now, spreading the materials from Refuse Fascism in your neighborhood, at your school and workplace, where you hang out.

We ran into a number of people who’d seen recent TV coverage of our protests and the Refuse Fascism encampment in LA. We called people to the encampment at 4 pm. We sent people to the refusefascism.org website for orientation.

This Refuse Fascism group, which included people who’d not been in a situation quite like this before, agitated with a bullhorn from one end of the parade to the other, and distributed 14,000 fliers calling people to LA City Hall at 4 pm every day, 3,300 of the Refuse Fascism Call to Action (which was very important and cut right to people’s questions and posed the challenge for them to take this up), 5,000 NO! stickers, 800 bilingual NO! posters, and some NO! T-shirts too.

The group met people who took up Refuse Fascism on the spot—at the parade and later at the MLK event in Leimert Park; for example, high school teachers who gave donations and took large numbers of materials for class sets. These teachers were encouraged to help their students walk out, to shut it down... this week! We did run into some students who said “we already tried that” (walk-outs) right after Trump was elected in November, so we got into it with them—the importance of those walk-outs, but also how ousting this fascist regime is going to take, yes, perseverance, but most importantly, ACTING right now, this week.

855 (735 English and 120 Spanish) copies of the recent issue of Revolution newspaper were distributed by a small team at this MLK Day Parade. This issue if Revolution is an extraordinarily important issue and we encourage everyone to do all they can to both bring it into the mix of protest marches and spread it broadly in society, amongst those most oppressed and targeted by Trump-Pence fascism, as well as very broadly amongst those in the middle strata of society, at this key moment.

 

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