Freedom for Black Lives Matter Organizer Jasmine Abdullah!

California “Lynching” Conviction
Is a Threat to All!

Mobilize Labor/Black/Immigrant Power – Only Revolution Can Bring Justice!

We reprint below an Internationalist Group leaflet distributed at the June 7 sentencing hearing for Black Lives Matter organizer Jasmine Abdullah. At the hearing, where over 300 people came out to support her, Jasmine was sentenced to 90 days jail time.

LOS ANGELES – On June 1, 28-year-old Black Lives Matter organizer Jasmine Abdullah (Richards) was grotesquely convicted in near-by Pasadena under a California law that until recently was known as “felony lynching.” This is a blatant case of political persecution in which she faces up to four years in prison. At her trial, an entirely non-black jury accepted the prosecution’s outrageous claim that Jasmine’s non-violent effort to protect a young black woman from police brutality was a crime legally equivalent to participating in a KKK lynch mob for the purposes of murdering that woman. As Jasmine’s attorney Nana Gyamfi put it on the Democracy Now (2 June) TV/radio program:

“[T]o take this law, that was used allegedly to protect black people from being lynched, and to turn around and use this law against a black person who is actually speaking about the lynchings, the serial lynchings, that are going on at the hands of police, not just in Pasadena, but all over this country, is more than ironic, it’s disgusting.”

Jasmine was targeted by the capitalist state for being an outspoken activist capable of mobilizing outraged black youth in active struggle against racist police terror. After participating in a “freedom ride” to Ferguson, Missouri to protest the 2014 police murder of Michael Brown, she founded a chapter of Black Lives Matter in her hometown of Pasadena. There she worked to expose the heinous murder of unarmed 19-year-old Kendrec McDade by the local police, among other victims of racist cop terror. In an on-line video last year, Jasmine explained:

“[T]here’s been a lot of youth that have been killed by the Pasadena police…. Since I was a child, these police have scared me…. I know their first and last names. I felt like we needed a group out here that stood up to that injustice.”

In August 2015, Jasmine was leading a protest in Pintoresco Park in Pasadena when police moved to arrest a young black woman, unrelated to the protest, who had allegedly not paid for her meal at a restaurant across the street. The protesters stood up for the woman in a failed attempt to protect her from the brutality they have seen so many of their brothers and sisters face at the hands of the murderous capitalist state.

No arrests were made of protesters during what was later falsely dubbed a “riot.” It was only three days later that the cops began to cite this incident as justification for pursuing their political vendetta against Abdullah. While a host of other ridiculous charges (including “child endangerment”) were dropped, the prosecution falsely branded Jasmine as a “felon” on the bogus charge of attempting to take a person from police officers in a supposed “riot” (a charge formerly called “attempted lynching”) which could mean years in prison, depending on the results of the upcoming sentencing, scheduled for June 7 at the Pasadena Courthouse.

Black Lives Matter Los Angeles chapter organizer and California State University professor Melina Abdullah noted on the BLM web site:

“Obviously, the police, District Attorney, and entire system are trying to make an example out of Jasmine, using this outrageous conviction to intimidate other organizers from fighting for an end to police terror and other forms of state violence against Black people…. It won’t work.”

While political persecution, particularly of radical black activists, is nothing new in racist capitalist America, Jasmine’s conviction sets a new precedent for the criminalization of protest activity, and is a threat to all those who would speak out against injustice. The state is asserting its “right” to imprison protesters on felony (not just misdemeanor) charges for opposing police attempts to arrest them or others as they exercise their right of free speech. Earlier last year, other protesters had been charged with, but not convicted of, “felony lynching”, such as Sacramento Black Lives Matter organizer Maile Hamilton, who was arrested after trying to pull a fellow protester away from police. Tiffany Tran was charged with lynching herself by yelling “help” as the police arrested her at an Occupy protest in Oakland.

These cases set off controversy over the absurdity of dubbing such actions “lynching,” and the charges were dropped. There ensued a move to change the law to remove the word “lynching.” State Senator Holly Mitchell (Democrat, Los Angeles), who authored the measure, presented it as a progressive correction to an archaic law. But as Jasmine’s case shows, removing the word “lynching” while retaining the substance of the law has enabled the capitalist state to more easily obtain a felony conviction of any protester who “participates” in any way “in the taking by means of a riot of another person from the lawful custody of a peace officer” – including if they were trying to protect that person from lynching by the police.

For us as revolutionary Marxists, as well as for any class-conscious worker or defender of democratic rights and fighter against racist repression, removing a victim of police repression from the clutches of the capitalist state is no crime. Only those who would keep black people forcibly segregated at the bottom of society, those who claim that undocumented immigrants have no rights and who deny workers the right to use their power to fight against exploitation, can claim it is criminal to assist a potential victim to be wrested free of the armed enforcers of capitalist rule.

As Jasmine was hauled off to jail following the “lynching” verdict, she led her supporters, who had packed the courthouse, in repeating the words from Assata Shakur which have become a well-known chant at Black Lives Matter protests:

“It is our duty to fight for freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love and protect one another.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Assata was a class-war prisoner targeted in the U.S.’s war on black radicals in the 1970s who escaped and fled to Cuba where she was granted asylum. Shakur must be defended, and the attempts by the Obama government to get the Cuban government to extradite her must be vigorously opposed.

As we have seen time and time again across the country, this latest drive in California to further repress black activists on behalf of the capitalist rulers is spearheaded by a black Democrat: Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacy. It’s no accident either that the mayors of Pasadena and Los Angeles are Democrats, as are the mayors of most large cities in the U.S. as well as the Obama administration in Washington. But from the outset of the 2014 mass protests against racist police murder, various leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have sought to “play ball” with the Democrats. DeRay McKesson, a prominent BLM spokesman on social media in the St. Louis area during protests of the cop killing of Michael Brown, ran for mayor of Baltimore in the Democratic primary this spring.

Across the country there has been a push to draw Black Lives Matter activists into the electoral circus of American capitalism, and the Democratic Party in particular. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders hired BLM activists to coordinate “outreach” to anti-racist youth. They (along with some reformist leftists) peddle the absurd notion that the police can cease being racist. “But by creating illusions that the police could somehow ‘serve the people’ the result is to divert struggle into a dead end of attempts to reform the unreformable” (“Bad Apples, Broken Windows, and Other Myths About the Police,” The Internationalist, February 2016).

The cops – white, black, Latino and Asian – are the enforcers of racist repression that is and has been at the core of American capitalism since the days of slavery. And as we have emphasized, from City Hall to the White House, “Democrats Are the Bosses of the Racist Killer Cops” (The Internationalist No. 42, January-February 2016). Illusions in the Democratic Party have long been a roadblock standing in the way of a powerful class struggle against racist oppression. There is massive outrage around the U.S. at seeing over a thousand people, overwhelmingly African American and Latino, cut down every year by the police. What’s needed is to break the ties binding labor, African Americans, Latinos, immigrants and young anti-racist activists to this capitalist party responsible for enforcing ruling-class “law and order.” 

Southern California has always been rife with racist police and state terror, from the racist attacks known as the “Zoot Suit riots” in 1943 in which sailors and Marines assaulted Latinos, to the 1970 murder of Reuben Salazar by Los Angeles County sheriffs, to the 1991 racist attack by LAPD on Rodney King, to the 2015 police murder of a homeless man known as Africa on L.A.’s Skid Row. At the same time, from the ports of Los Angeles-Long Beach to the L.A. garment district, the Southern California workers movement with its heavily immigrant labor force has the power to shut down production in response to racist police terror. But it must become aware of its power to wage a successful struggle against this system. We seek to demonstrate this power in action through labor-black-immigrant mobilizations.

As an example, on May Day 2015 International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 shut down San Francisco Bay Area docks and marched on Oakland City Hall at the head of thousands demanding “Stop Police Terror” (see “May Day Oakland Port Shutdown Against Racist Cop Terror,” in The Internationalist No. 39, April-May 2015). That same day, Class Struggle Workers – Portland organized a multi-union contingent in the May Day protests there, marching under the banner, “Labor Against Racist Police Murder.” (The CSWP is a tendency in Portland, Oregon-area unions that is politically supported by the Internationalist Group.) As we wrote in The Internationalist No. 42:

“These are small examples of what needs to be done, but they point in the right direction. The idea that justice could be obtained by pressuring the courts and capitalist politicians to investigate, ‘reform’ or prosecute the racist police on which capital depends is a dangerous illusion. We must look to using our own class power to put an end to the bloody lynch law system that has taken so many of our brothers and sisters from us.”

Most fundamentally, it is vital that those who would wage an effective fight against cop terror understand that this is part of a system – capitalism – and so long as society is ruled by the capitalists, racist repression and oppression will persist. What’s key is to build a revolutionary workers party that acts as the tribune of the oppressed to rally the population behind the social power of the working class to smash the capitalist state through international socialist revolution. Looking to the example of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 that ripped power out of the hands of the exploiters and established workers rule, we can open the road to a classless, egalitarian society that can put an end to the nightmare of racist police terror once and for all.■

For a video of the brutal August 2015 arrest by Pasadena cops, see here.