Murder by Police Must Stop!

Chicago Sox Park: Taking a message to the Family Day baseball game

May 25, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From a reader:

On the day after another killer cop was cleared of involuntary murder charges in Cleveland, people attending Sunday’s Family Day baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins got more than they expected. They were greeted by the large Stolen Lives banner, prominently featured on CNN and Huffington Post coverage of events in Cleveland. They were treated to a message calling for an end to police murder and a crew of revolutionaries, Revolution Club members, and SMIN supporters. The banner prominently featured the pictures of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, shot 137 times by Cleveland police in 2012 after a crosstown car chase conducted by more than 60 police cars and 100 cops.

We brought the banner and a sound system to the game and a message that murder by police must stop, that there is an epidemic of police murder and brutality and called on them to stand against it. It was very close quarters with 100s of Sox fans streaming out into the Cellular Field. Agitation on the sound system was drawn from Carl Dix’s new statement.

Beforehand, nobody knew how this was going to go, as Sox fans are not widely regarded as a progressive bunch. But we thought it was important to take this message out to this mainly white, middle of the road crowd. There were people from the Black community who stopped to take pictures of the banner, as well as white people who made a point of taking the Carl Dix flyer from a Rev Club member. We found that the backward in the crowd did not feel they had the initiative, and there were as many ‘thumbs up’ as there were snickers from the backward. One of the agitators spoke to this section of the crowd and asked what they would have done back in slavery days or as Jews were being shipped off to concentration camps. One white person made a point of coming back and thanking us. There we also a number of Black people who walked by and thanked us for doing this.

I got into a back and forth with a young white guy who demanded to know why there were no pictures of cops on the banner. I continued to go to each photo and tell their story. This got pretty loud and heated. While this was going on an older Black guy on a wheelchair shouted out that the young guy should take his story out to the Black community and see what their experience with the police was.

 

 

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