African working class without a voice
In the absence of the independent revolutionary organizations that we had, nobody speaks and articulates for the masses of African working and poor people. The only thing that we're getting are statements from the politicians, from liberal and petty bourgeois middle class organizations that lead the charge against the black community.
Now you've got Africans occupying positions of authority to maintain the system of oppression of the African community. They killed off our revolutionary movement, killed off our revolutionary leaders and then raised up black leaders to function for white power.
So the masses of African people are now demonized. You've got drugs and other things imposed in the community. They have demonized the community, called everybody who's in the community a criminal, saying that we bring the conditions on ourselves. We are now the permanent underclass. This has been the problem that we've had.
In the past people recognized that the Black Panther Party had a constituency. It was a legitimate constituency of people with legitimate needs and aspirations that were summed up in their Ten Point Program. They might not have liked the Panthers, but they could not deny that the Panthers had a constituency in these communities.
18 year-old TyRon Lewis (above). On October 24th 1996, TyRon Lewis was brutally murdered by St. Pete police officers, James Knight and Sandra Minor. TyRon was shot at point-blank range through the windshield of his vehicle (right). This incident sparked a city-wide African community rebellion.
But now they've destroyed the people's organizations and then characterized the people as the problem. Any revolutionary organization on the scene has been characterized as some dinosaur left over from the '60s, completely out of tune with things as they are, an extremist manifestation, a marginal thing without any social base. That's how things are in this country today, generally speaking. That's part of what made St. Petersburg significant.
Today, they don't have to listen to black folks. They can let whole communities be wiped out. The devastation in the African community is not explained today as a consequence of the oppression by white people or the government. "They brought it on themselves." Nobody speaks for African workers any more. If somebody's talking this old radical talk it's because they're extremists and they don't have any social base. So they just dismiss it.
It affects whole federal and local budgets. You don't have to spend that money on the needs of the African community now if you can put it in places to shore up white power. You don't have to worry about infant mortality or anything else that's happening to black people. You can create economic institutions to feed white people by putting African people in prisons. You don't have to pay any attention to poverty, to homelessness, because there's no spokesperson. Nobody speaks for the African community.
That makes it easy for the U.S. government to kill people in the streets and not have to explain it. There is a long list of people who've been killed by the police. If these were white people, white people would be armed to the teeth and shooting police in the streets.
Nobody has to pay any attention to the African community anymore. Just lock them up and put them in jail if they don't act right. Put police on the campuses to lock the children up. This is the situation that we have.
They shot TyRon Lewis on October 24th, 1996 in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was not supposed to be a problem because he was a black male, and the black male has been defined as menacing. Young African men now are supposed to be menacing. You can't walk down the street without being menacing. They just haven't figured out why.
