Enforcing White Supremacy: Alabama Pigs Brutally Beat 17-Year Old Black Youth

Updated January 1, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Ulysses KeAndre Wilkerson, a 17-year-old Black youth was savagely beaten by Troy, Alabama, cops on Saturday night, December 23. These pigs inflicted Ulysses with trauma to the brain, swelling of the brain, massive swelling and bruises on his face, and an eye socket broken in three different places.

After the police were done assaulting the teen, he was first taken to a regional facility in Troy, then to the University of Alabama Hospital in Birmingham. When Angela Williams finally got to see her son in the hospital, handcuffed to his bed, she said “I was shocked, horrified, and devastated to see my son this way.” Williams posted horrific photos of her son’s swollen and bloodied face on Facebook, which soon went viral. People in Troy and everywhere that the photos of Ulysses Wilkerson have been seen are outraged, and demand justice and an end to this kind of police brutality. One message on Angela Williams’ Facebook page read: “As a mother, I feel your anger and pain. His crime is evident on his face, He is a young Black man. Nothing he could have done earned him this terrible beating. I pray you get justice for your son. The ‘officers’ who committed this attempted murder should rot in Hell!”

Police claim they approached, chased, and nearly beat the life out of Wilkerson because he was walking out from behind a downtown business Saturday night, and ran when he saw them. Even if this is true, what fucking reason, or right, did they have to approach him, stop him, or chase him? Even they don’t claim he was doing anything wrong. Yet he is referred to by the police chief as “the suspect.”

The Troy police chief said Wilkerson resisted arrest and refused to comply with commands to put his hands behind his back, so “officers had to use physical force to affect the arrest. The force used was reasonable and necessary.” Reasonable to whom? Necessary for what? Reasonable to the enforcers of a system that has enslaved, raped, segregated, lynched, beaten, murdered, and incarcerated Black people since they were dragged to these shores, and while the forms have been “modernized,” the oppression, degradation, and inhumanity have never ceased. Necessary because the message has to be delivered over, and over, and over again—don’t even think about resisting, let alone finally putting an end to this nightmare.

The Pike County district attorney told CNN a different story; that “police said they used force after Wilkerson reached into his waistband for what they feared might be a weapon.” The phrase “reached into his waistband” is pig-speak, used over and over to claim they “feared for their lives” whenever these killers are caught brutalizing or murdering their unarmed target. In this case, the family is supposed to be “grateful” that their son was only beaten bloody—the pigs could have just killed him.

Ulysses Wilkerson is being charged with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental operations, both misdemeanors. The pigs who left him in a hospital have not been charged with anything.

In the face of community outrage, the Alabama State Bureau of Investigations is now looking into the case, but said they will not release any information about the investigation, nor release the body camera footage of the police attack, until their investigation is finished—sometime in February!

At a press conference held by the family on Friday, a pastor and local activist reported that the teenager, who’s been released from the hospital, has few memories about what happened. “He remembers one thing, a big tall white officer kicking him in the face. He remembers that.”

 

 

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