Rage in Baltimore: aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death

Rage in Baltimore: the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death

Eljeer Hawkins, Socialist Alternative (co-thinkers of the CWI in the US)

On 26 April, the first black US President, Barack Hussein Obama, stepped to the podium at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to engage in frivolous banter with fellow politicians, corporate media hounds and comedians, dressed in their finest tuxedoes and gowns.

A mere 40 miles away from the White House, the youth in Baltimore, Maryland, exploded in mass rage against the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained while in police custody. His spinal cord was 80% severed and his vocal cords were crushed. He fell into a coma, and died a week later.

The words of civil rights activist Dr WEB Du Bois still ring true for black workers and youth: “A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.”

After months of handwringing in the mainstream media and from leading Democratic politicians, there is no still no serious plan brought forward to address the brutal policing of poor black communities and the lack of a decent future for black youth across the US.

Endemic racism

The death of Freddie Gray, along with so many other women and men in Baltimore, shows the real face of poverty, drugs, official neglect, law enforcement surveillance, deindustrialisation, and endemic racism.

Despite having a black mayor, the residents of this majority black city are the victims of a corporate agenda that places downtown Baltimore above the needs of the Gilmor community in which Freddie Gray lived and died. The example of a dilapidated basketball court in the Gilmor houses, which the city authorities have refused to refurbish for fifteen years despite the community raising the money to do so, tells the whole story.

The police are viewed as an occupying force that is there to oversee, contain and control the black working class and youth. Baltimore law enforcement has a long and notorious record. There have been pleas for federal oversight dating back to the 1980s.

‘Zero-tolerance policing’ has led to mass arrests of people for small infractions to “deter” them from committing more crimes. It has swept a whole generation into the criminal injustice system, destroying families and locking up huge numbers of innocent people for the crime of being poor.

Elite divided

The details of Freddie Gray’s injuries and subsequent death are tragically not unheard of in Baltimore. Freddie’s death comes alongside the killing of Walter Scott in South Carolina and the failure to convict the cop who killed Rekia Boyd in Chicago.

The US ruling elite is in a quandary of what do to about the constant attention being drawn to cases of police violence since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Some in the elite want to bring in reforms but within very narrow margins.

The Ferguson report following Michael Brown’s death described the levels of racism, leeching by city officials on the backs of poor people and outright corruption.

The possible reforms prescribed in the Ferguson report could be a starting point to organise for more serious reforms to address the crisis. But achieving even basic reforms will require a militant, uncompromising, consistent, and national coordinated social movement by the working class and poor.

Crossroads

Black Lives Matter is at a crossroads. After the wave of protests at the end of last year, there is not a clear direction or leadership despite important local links developing in some areas between this movement, the fight for a $15 an hour minimum wage and rank-file union activists. This was reflected in the 15 April low wage worker strikes and the protests against the killing of Tony Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin. The developments in Baltimore are a new opportunity to give direction to the fight nationally.

What is necessary is to forge unity around a programme to end police violence and poverty. This means challenging the corporate political establishment, including its black wing, which has colluded in keeping institutional racism intact through the ‘war on drugs’ and mass incarceration.

But behind the politicians stands the capitalist system, which in the US has always used racism to keep working people divided and which will never agree to the decisive steps necessary to break down racial discrimination. This can only be accomplished by the multiracial working class fighting for a socialist future.

See www.socialistalternative.org for full version of this article and updates