On December 13, multinational demonstrators in St. Pete again took to the streets to demand justice for victims of racist police brutality and to grow the movement for Black community control of police.
At 4:00 PM, members of the Uhuru Movement, African People’s Socialist Party, Uhuru Solidarity Movement, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and others rallied in the Akwaaba Hall of Uhuru House before marching into the adjoining, predominantly Black neighborhood. About thirty people marched loudly in formation down 13th Street S, bringing families and children out of their houses in support. After a second rally in Campbell Park, activists went door to door in the Citrus Grove Apartments complex. They invited residents to build the movement for Black community control of police.
At 7:00PM, nearly one hundred activists, including Bay Area Activists Coalition, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, and Anonymous, rallied on the steps of St. Petersburg City Hall. Omega Velez, the mother of Elias Guadarrama, also came to demand justice for her son’s death at the hands of corrupt Bradenton cops in January. Flooding the streets and shutting down the city for a second weekend in a row, they chanted “Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail, the whole damn system is guilty as hell!” and “Which side are you on, my People, which side are you on? We’re on the freedom side!” Activists staged two die-ins. Preceding each was a people’s mic call to artists to serve as the spirit of the growing movement.
A few organizers of the “Protest for Justice” spoke to Liberation about their own experiences as Black men and women, the reality of racism and the actual function of police in targeted communities.
“Police brutality has been happening since the inception of this country,” said Trey Gonzalez, who emceed the protest, “but it’s obviously becoming a lot bigger issue in the eyes of the media. Every 28 hours, a Black person is either shot or killed by police officers. The majority of the time the person is either unarmed or they aren’t seen as a threat to the cops’ lives. That’s what we saw in the Mike Brown situation.”
Gonzalez recounted one of the times he became the target of the racist system.
“One that really sticks out to me,” he said, “was during the summer of 2012. I stopped at a 7-Eleven off of Dale Mabry in Tampa. It was during rush hour so it was packed. So I was like, ‘Hey, you know, I just want to get home,’ so I put down my item and I went to leave the store, and a security guard actually stopped me. He and the cashier were like ‘He’s stealing from us!’ And next thing you know, the twenty people standing in line, the majority of them white, looked at me like ‘How could you do this?’ It felt like my world was collapsing and I was being demonized. This cashier was in my face. I had the security guard holding me. I literally had to take all my articles of clothing and ring them out, shake them out, just to prove to them I had not stolen from them.”
Ashley Green, a leading organizer and member of the newly formed Bay Area Activists Coalition, spoke to Liberation about racism as an institution and profit machine.
“The New Jim Crow is multi-faceted. The ‘War on Drugs’ has bred a new form of disenfranchisement of the Black community where you’ve got policing solely focused on them. And so what happens is you have these communities where a mass amount of people have been incarcerated, and they still have a lot of different burdens when they get out; It’s near impossible to find a decent job, you don’t have access to resources provided by the government, your family’s eligibility for Section 8 Housing can be jeopardized, etc. So a new legal system of disenfranchisement has sprouted up from this ‘War on Drugs,'” said Green.
“What I always found interesting,” she continued, “is that we know the reality of drug use in Florida is not that it’s primarily Black. For me, most of the people who I know use or deal drugs, like marijuana, are white. College campuses are flush with drugs, but the police aren’t focused on those communities. They’re focused on communities of color.”
Green spoke to Liberation about the need to have a real conversation about the actual function of police.
“Part of what made what is happening in Ferguson so insidious is that a middle to middle-low class community in St. Louis had become a revenue stream for the city. They had more warrants last year issued for the city of Ferguson than there were actual residents in the city. So this perpetual cycle that’s bred out of the New Jim Crow, the ‘War on Drugs’ and this prison-industrial comple —arresting people, sending them to prison, charging them exorbitant tickets —is a source of income for a lot of municipalities, including locally. So the function of police is corrupt from the very start,” she said.
“I think we also need to begin talking about more community input and, in a lot of ways, control of the police,” said Green. “Like in Ferguson, you have a police force that’s racially disproportionate to the community they’re serving. On top of that, you’ve got a police force that doesn’t live in the community, they’re not required to be residents of the community. So, in a lot of ways, they start to feel something like an invading force. Right now, I think there’s nationwide a lot of anxiety about the reality of the police.”
Devan Cheaves, an activist from Palmetto in Manatee County, told Liberation about how her family’s experiences have shaped her outlook on police.
“Just over Thanksgiving, my uncles and aunts were talking about how back in the day in Bradenton, they got pulled over and they weren’t doing anything wrong. And the guy almost shot my uncle. My uncle was like, ‘You told me to bring out my ID, I was reaching into my back pocket to give you my ID.’ And the police officer was like, ‘Well, you moved too fast.’ My aunt was there with my uncle and she was telling him, you know, ‘Don’t say anything, don’t do this, don’t do that,’ basically acting almost like his legal advisor, and the police officer looked at her and said, ‘Oh, we got a smart n—–r here.” That’s the kind of mentality that’s passed down from generations when you hear these stories, and it’s kinda like, ‘I’ll keep that in mind,'” said Cheaves.
Cheaves told Liberation her thoughts on the historic people’s uprising in Ferguson.
“I think it’s amazing what’s happening in Ferguson,” she said. “It’s community organizing at it’s best. It’s tragic that Mike Brown had to die for people to really start caring, but at the same time, his death is affecting change. I feel like it’s beautiful how across the nation people are looking to Ferguson. It’s not a metropolitan city like Tampa or Miami or Orlando, it’s almost like a Palmetto. And these people are community organizing at the ground level and are getting ready to take back their city.”
More actions are planned for this weekend. For updates, check out A.N.S.W.E.R. Suncoast.
