Before recent days, the place name of Ferguson, Missouri, was unknown to most of us, because of what happened there; the brief but intense experience of state repression. Its name will be transmitted by millions of Black mouths to millions of Black ears, and it will become a watchword for resistance like Watts, Newark, Harlem and LA. But Ferguson wasn’t 50 years ago. It’s today, and for young Blacks from Ferguson and beyond, it was a stark, vivid history lesson and also a reality lesson. When they dared protest the state murder of one of theirs, the government responded with the tools and weapons of war. They assaulted them with gas. They attacked them as if Ferguson were Fallujah in Iraq. The police attacked them as if they were an occupying army from another country for that, in fact, is what they were. And these young folks learned viscerally face to face, what the white nation thought of them; their claimed constitutional rights, their so called freedoms, and their lives. They learned the wages of Black protest: repression, repression and more repression.
They also learned the limits of their so-called leaders, who called for peace and calm while armed troops trained some machine guns and sniper rifles on unarmed men, women and children. Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens. There are weeks when decades happen.” For the youth, excluded from the American economy by inferior substandard education, targeted by the malevolence of the fake drug war and mass incarceration, stopped and frisked for walking while Black, were given front row seats to the national security state at Ferguson, after a friend was murdered by police in their streets. Ferguson may prove a wake -up call. A call for youth to build social radical and yes, revolutionary movements for change. From imprisoned nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
