Letter from the US: NY cops 'came ready for war'

September 16, 1998
Issue 

Letter from the US

NY cops 'came ready for war'

By Barry Sheppard

In a flagrant denial of freedom of speech and assembly, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani unleashed his racist police force to harass, then brutally attack, a rally of African Americans in Harlem on September 5.

For weeks, Giuliani refused to grant a permit for a march and rally — called the Million Youth March — charging it was a "hate march" because one of its organisers, Khallid Muhammad, had made anti-Semitic and anti-white statements in the past. The mayor claimed it would be violent, but the only violence came from the police.

The march organisers went to court to force Giuliani to allow the event. The court ruled that a rally, but not a march, could occur in a four-block area in a black Harlem neighbourhood, from noon to 4pm.

Furious at the ruling, Giuliani ordered police to make it as difficult as possible for people to get into the rally.

As people arrived, they were met by thousands of cops, who set up barricades around the rally site. Marpessa Kupenda, who attended the rally, said: "It was immediately apparent that our movements were being restricted in a severe, discomforting way, with barricades popping up at every turn, processing us like objects on a conveyor belt, all forced to move in one direction on one street only.

"Once reaching [Malcolm X] Boulevard, the barricades' dual purpose became evident, as once 'x' number of people congregated at a certain spot, barricades were pushed around them, enclosing them before they could realise what was happening.

"Most of the Million Youth March was restricted to one side of the street only, as traffic continued to proceed and prospective attendees who ended up at the wrong end of the maze of barricades were trapped and not permitted to enter the boulevard at all once the six-block limit had been reached."

Bob Herbert, a black columnist for the New York Times, wrote: "The cops came ready for war. Residents who emerged from their apartments and brownstones at the start of a beautiful holiday weekend were greeted by an army of police officers who had arrived with helicopters, horses, tractor-trailer trucks, buses, cars, vans and motorcycles.

"Police barricades seemed to go up everywhere. Subway stations were shut down, their entrances blocked by yellow tape that read, 'Police line — do not cross'.

"Dozens of blocks surrounding the site of the afternoon rally were closed off. People attempting to go to the rally were treated perversely. The police would tell them they could approach the site from, say, 123rd Street. The people would walk to 123rd, only to be told they would have to go down to 119th. There they would find that 119th was closed.

"'Why are they doing this?', a woman asked me. She was on the verge of tears. Another woman said, 'I'm trying to go to church, but they won't let me'. A woman beside her said, 'I'm trying to go home'. A man who walked away from one of the barricades said, in obvious frustration: 'I can't let it get the best of me. They treat us like we're all criminals'."

Herbert continued: "Rudolph Giuliani would never, but never, treat an entire neighbourhood of white people the way he treated the people in the vicinity of Malcolm X Boulevard on Saturday."

During the rally, police helicopters circled overhead, reminding people of scenes from the Vietnam War. Khallid Muhammad was the last speaker, and wound up his talk at almost exactly 4pm, urging people to disperse peacefully. Suddenly, a helicopter swooped down on the crowd, a terrifying experience. This was apparently the signal for the police attack.

A squad of cops in full riot gear charged the generators being used for the sound system, behind the speakers' stage. Muhammad called on people to defend themselves if attacked by the police. The cops stormed the stage.

During the cop riot, a few in the crowd threw stones and bottles, but almost all were trying to get out through the barricades. This was a dangerous situation, since there were many young children with their parents. But there was no riot, much to the chagrin of Giuliani.

The city authorities have begun a grand jury investigation — not into the police violence but into rally organisers' "incitement to riot"!

Muhammad did not incite the crowd to riot, as Giuliani claims, but urged self-defence. The people remained calm and orderly.

The cops are now saying that they attacked the rally only after they were pelted. That this is a lie was revealed by the police themselves, who were quoted in the newspapers as saying, before the rally had begun, that they were ready to use force to shut it down at exactly 4pm.

While distancing themselves from Muhammad, moderate black politicians in Harlem have condemned Giuliani and the police, and demanded a probe into the police's actions.

Muhammad, in his speech, did make anti-Semitic remarks, calling Jews "bloodsuckers" on the black community. He also attacked whites.

Muhammad accepts the false idea, propagated by some black intellectuals, that Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This lets the real originators of the slave trade, the New England merchants, the British capitalists and the southern plantation owners — with very few Jews among them — off the hook.

Anti-Semitism is wrong, no matter who raises it. Frederick Engels described anti-Semitism as the "socialism of fools" as it directs the anger of workers and the oppressed towards a scapegoat, and away from the real perpetrators of exploitation and racial oppression, the capitalist class, whatever its members' religion.

It is true that historically, blacks in the ghettos have faced landlords, pawnbrokers, lawyers and other white people who are their immediate oppressors, who also happen to be Jewish. This can give rise to anti-Jewish prejudice.

But this shows that Jewish small capitalists do not control the real levers of power. African Americans rarely meet face to face with the real powers that run the United States — the immensely rich, mostly non-Jewish, families that dominate the US and much of the world.

The prejudice of the oppressed is a very different thing to the racism of the oppressors. White racism against blacks and other people of colour is used as a justification for racist oppression. Anti-white sentiments among people of colour is a distorted reaction to that oppression, an expression of anger against it. It can lead to a deeper internationalist consciousness, as the development of the ideas of Malcolm X demonstrated.

While the crowd was in sympathy with Muhammad and against Giuliani's attacks on him, this was not an anti-white gathering. According to my two (white) brothers, who were present at the rally, the few white people who went were in no way made to feel uncomfortable.

The real racists were not the people of Harlem and other blacks who came in part to protest against Giuliani's attempts to ban the Million Youth March, but the mayor and his cohorts in the city government.

Protests against the police riot have been scheduled.

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