Defender 1

On Memorial Day weekend, George Floyd, a 46-year old African-American bouncer, unemployed since COVID-19, was detained by Minneapolis Police outside Cup Foods on 38th St & Chicago Ave in south Minneapolis for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Mr. Floyd was put down on the street - right where a #5 bus stops - and murdered by a cop pressing his knee into Mr. Floyd's neck while a crowd of onlookers pleaded for the police to stop.

38th & Chicago is an important intersection in south Minneapolis - especially to poor and working-class folks who attend church, update their cell phones, get Chinese, do laundry, or fill up their tanks on that corner. The intersection brings together four neighborhoods:  Bancroft, Bryant, Central, and Powderhorn - and is the heart of the historic and resilient southside Black community.

The lynching of George Floyd tore open the facade covering white-suprenmacist capitalist rule in Minneapolis and neighboriong communities - it brought people out in the streets and at 38th & Chicago - the people hacve stayed. Building barricades, painting murals, memorializing those murdered by police, serving meals, playing music, squashing beefs, booting fascists, and holding ground.

The interviews here are from two people from the Community who have given over big chunks of their life to the struggle to hold and defend George Floyd Square . . . 

You probably have things on your phone you wouldn’t want a fascist or a cop to see: comrades’ contact information, loved ones’ addresses, logged-in social media accounts, and text messages, to name a few. While you can’t make it impossible for them to get into your phone, you can make it a pain. With every security measure you add, you make it more difficult for police/fascists to get your data.

Hundreds of members of Minnesota's Oromo community took over I-94 on July 1st, and 1,500 took 35W ten days later, in powerful protests against the assassination of Hachalu Hundessa in Ethiopia. Hundessa was an iconic Oromo musician, activist, and former political prisoner closely associated with the struggle for democracy in Ethiopia and for the rights and freedom of the Oromo people.

The horrendous murder of George Floyd - and the powerful Uprising that followed, inspired action from some Twin Cities workers. On June 16th, workers at the Seward Co-op Grocery store on East Franklin Ave staged a brief walk-out in the parking lot to demand Justice for George Floyd and the abolition of the police department.  

"The fight against racism is a human and universal cause that affects us all.” These are the words of artist Aziz Asmar, who along with his friend Anas Hamdoun painted a tribute to George Floyd on a destroyed building in Binnish, Syria.

Reforming and regulating the police is not what we want. We can do much better than prolonging the life of this doomed, repressive institution, but to do better, we need to plan how to do better.

On June 27th, Sophia Rashid, a Muslim woman, took her four-year old daughter out to eat in Stillwater, a town on the St Croix River about 20 miles east of St. Paul. Stillwater has two main industries: bars & entertainment - and the Stillwater state prison. The prison, where human beings are forced to work at twelve cents an hour and face punishing medical neglect during the pandemic, is a breeding ground for both multi-racial solidarity against state-sponsored slavery - and segregation and white supremacy. That night downtown Stillwater would be made unsafe by bikers with ties to a white supremacist prison gang - sparking a strong reaction from Stillwater workers and residents.

In the wake of the George Floyd Uprising, many neighborhoods began to organize themselves. Mass meetings were held in parks across the city. In most places the main concern was community safety - and in many neighborhoods this was reduced to typical and reactionary concern for the property of homeowners. But in several neighborhoods, there was serious conversations about fighting racism, not relying on the cops, and allying with the protest movement.

The role of police in society is clear— to protect the rich and powerful and preserve the status quo. This is why Black police chiefs, training programs, and civilian oversight have never made a real difference: the underlying purpose of the police is still the same. When you know the history of the police in the United States, from the Slave Patrols to the deputized thugs who harassed and intimidated the immigrant working-class, to today’s riot police and assassins— it all starts to makes sense. The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) is not on our side and never could be. We should focus on building the capacity of working-class communities to resist the police and defend our neighborhoods, not tweak the existing repressive apparatus.