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Vol. 78/No. 46      December 22, 2014

 
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago
 

December 22, 1989

MIAMI — On December 7 a Dade County jury convicted Miami cop William Lozano of two counts of manslaughter for the January 1989 killing of two young Black men. Lozano shot them while they were riding a motorcycle in the community of Overtown on Martin Luther King Day. Clement Anthony Lloyd died of gunshot wounds and his passenger, Allan Blanchard, died from injuries in the crash that resulted.

The verdict was welcomed by many in Miami, especially in Black communities where the news of Lozano’s conviction brought cheers. Horns were honked and people danced in the streets of Overtown.

More than 200 people rallied in an Overtown park after a march led by People United for Justice.

Right-wing Cuban and Colombian radio stations are raising the funds for the appeal.

December 21, 1964

NEW YORK, Dec. 14 — An overflow crowd of about 1,500 cheered Malcolm X, Dick Gregory and Sheik Abdul Rahman Muhammed Babu, a leader of the January revolution in Zanzibar, at a rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. The audience responded with rousing applause to a message of solidarity with his “brothers and sisters of Harlem” from Cuban leader Che Guevara. Speakers at the rally demanded: “Hands off the Congo!”

Malcolm X began his remarks with an attack on the press. He pointed out that “the press is so powerful … it can make a criminal look like the victim.” The Congo is a good example of what the press does, he explained. U.S.-supplied planes are dropping bombs on villages in the Congo — blowing up defenseless women and children — and the press makes “mass murder — cold-blooded murder — look like humanitarianism.”

December 23, 1939

Swiftly putting teeth into last week’s action of the League of Nations against the Soviet Union, the Allied Supreme War Council, in a three-hour session Tuesday, decided — in the words of Associated Press — “to give all moral and material aid possible to Finland without weakening its own war with Germany.”

The decision means virtually war against the Soviet Union except that, as with so many of the wars in the last two decades, it is not officially declared.

With “poor little Finland” as a pretext, and immeasurably aided by Stalin’s cynical and obviously false alibis for the invasion, the imperialists have moved against the Soviet Union with a brazen boldness which scarcely would have seemed possible a month ago.

This move by the imperialists was however, projected long before they found a pretext.  
 
 
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