Vol. 79/No. 18      May 18, 2015

We join in celebrating the filing of criminal charges May 1 against six Baltimore policemen for the killing of Freddie Gray. We call on workers, farmers and youth to press for their vigorous prosecution.

Join the demonstrations in Baltimore. Help initiate actions where you live to protest this and other cop brutality.

Killings of African-Americans at the hands of police are nothing new. Black lives matter! What is new is the growing refusal of working people — Black, Caucasian, Latino, all of us — to accept these moral outrages without a fight.

Political representatives of the capitalist rulers — Democrats, Republicans and “independents” who trail after them — aim to divide and weaken our struggles and corral us into bourgeois politics. Obama scolds us to fight the “right way” and smears workers as “thugs” and “criminals.” So does Baltimore’s mayor, labeling protesters “outside agitators” to boot.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the explosion in Baltimore was “a shattering of the peace.” But there is no peace anywhere cops kill and brutalize workers with impunity.

The way to stay the hands of killer cops is to build a powerful, disciplined working-class social movement. As we do, we will transform ourselves, recognizing through struggle our own worth, our own dignity. We’ll gain confidence together.

More and more working people will see the need to break from the bosses’ parties and build a labor party based on the unions. A party to unite workers and our allies fighting cop brutality, for $15 and a union and against capitalism’s wars and social catastrophes.

We can look to the example of the Cuban Revolution, where ordinary men and women, workers and farmers like us, took power out of the hands of the U.S.-backed capitalist rulers, changing themselves in struggle, and reorganized society based on human needs not profit.

Today the fight to keep the spotlight on the prosecution of those responsible for Freddie Gray’s death builds on battles against the killings of Walter Scott in South Carolina, Eric Garner in New York City and many more. The protests draw support from those demanding higher pay at McDonald’s and Walmart, from rail and oil workers fighting to impose safe conditions on the job and in surrounding communities.

Each new battle reinforces others. Join us!
 
 
Related articles:
Baltimore: 1,000s march, celebrate as cops charged
Protesters press for vigorous prosecution
Protests erupt after police beat Ethiopian Jew in Israel
Join the fight against police brutality! (PDF)
 
 
 
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