Six Baltimore police officers will face criminal charges over the death of 25-year-old African American man Freddie Gray, who died in police custody, prosecutors announced on May 1.
Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who said the charges will include manslaughter and murder, added that Gray had committed no crime and was "illegally arrested".
The announcement of charges was met with cheers by onlookers. It came amid ongoing national protests against police brutality that demanded justice for Gray, who had his spine nearly totally severed due to injuries he sustained in the back of a police vehicle. He had been arrested after he made eye contact with police, then began running.
Despite the charges, TeleSUR English said on May 1 that protests were continuing, marking 14 straight days of protests since Gray's death. The day before, protesters marched in more than a dozen cities across the US.
An overnight curfew has been imposed by on Baltimore by authorities after riots on April 27 sparked by Gray's death, Democracy Now! said on April 28.
The explosion of rage came after thousands of mourners and supporters descended on Baltimore's New Shiloh Baptist Church for the funeral of Freddie Gray during the day. A banner reading “Black lives matter and all lives matter” hung in the church, which was packed with about 3000 people, TeleSUR English said that day.
On the night of April 28, police in riot gear fired tear gas at hundreds of protesters who defied the curfew when it began at 10pm. At least 10 people were arrested.
TeleSUR English said on April 29 that Baltimore protesters were calling on police to "release" prominent student civil rights activist Joseph Kent after footage was aired live on television that appeared to show his abduction by the National Guard with no obvious motive for his arrest.
Social media users said Kent, a 21-year-old Black activist, was targeted by police while he was peacefully organising and addressing protesters.
Thousands of forces, including National Guard troops, have been deployed throughout the city. TeleSUR English said more than 200 people had been arrested, dozens of cars set on fire, and many buildings badly damaged.
Below is an editorial from US Socialist Worker on the explosion of protests and riots in Baltimore, in the context of the growing “Black Lives Matter” movement that has spread since the murder of Black teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson in August.
* * *
It turned out to be Baltimore.
Ever since the African American residents of Ferguson, Missouri, took to the streets for weeks and months of defiance, the question hasn't been whether their resistance would spread, but when it would, and where it would appear.
Ferguson cast a spotlight on the epidemic of racist police violence, committed with impunity, that plagues communities across the country. But the response from government officials in charge of keeping people safe — particularly from the women and men who are supposed to “serve and protect” — has been, at best, all talk and no action.
At worst, the response from the political and media elite has been scapegoating and demonisation of the very people suffering the brunt of the abuse and violence.
There has been some talk in Congress about the absurd militarisation of police departments that now deploy state-of-the-art military technology distributed from the Pentagon's massive arsenal — but no action to take the tanks away.
US President Barack Obama's Justice Department issued a strongly worded report criticising the Ferguson Police Department for its bias — but it could not be bothered to press charges against the cop who murdered Mike Brown.
Thus, the only action to come from officials of the state has been the police — and we know what that has produced. Since the start of the year,
">law enforcement officers have killed 381 people as of April 28 — a horrifying rate of more than one murder every eight hours.
One of these murders was bound to produce the next social explosion — which, of course, was presented in the media as senseless “rioting”.
There were signs in Madison, Wisconsin, where anti-racists responded within hours to the March killing of unarmed 19-year-old Tony Robinson in his friend's apartment. This was followed by days of demonstrations, often led by high school students after a walkout from classes.
The pot continued to simmer a month later when the entire country watched a South Carolina officer fire eight bullets into the back of a fleeing Walter Scott.
And then the lid blew off in Baltimore after police chased and tackled Freddie Gray for a 21st century version of a Black Code violation: making eye contact with a cop and then running. Gray was “folded up like origami”, in the gruesome words of one eyewitness, and by the time he emerged from a police van, he had a nearly severed spinal cord and crushed voice box.
Thousands of mostly Black people in Baltimore took to the streets during the week after Gray died. But it was the provocations of the Baltimore police that prodded protesters into physical confrontations that reportedly caused injuries to 15 police officers.
As for how many people the cops “reportedly” injured, we cannot say because there is no “reporting” on that.
The first major clashes started at Mondawmin Mall, the gathering point for a social media call for high school students to protest. The cops showed up in full RoboCop riot gear, closed the local transit station so the students could not get home, and then confronted the youth with mace and Tasers. No surprise that rocks got thrown.
Now there is frantic talk in the national media about “violence” in Baltimore. That was missing for the past five years as Baltimore police killed 109 people, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Just in the past four years, the Baltimore Police Department paid out US$5.7 million in brutality and civil rights settlements. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed an assault, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.
In this context, the media's frantic depictions of rock-throwing as an “outbreak of violence” in Baltimore can only be described as obscene.
As Atlantic</i> correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: “When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.
“When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.”
And yet Obama, the first African American president in a country founded on slavery, presented himself as the con artist-in-chief when he denounced protesters as “criminals and thugs”.
“They're not making a statement,” the president chided. “They are stealing.
“One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way have been lost in the discussion.”
For Obama to join the sanctimonious chorus condemning those who took to the streets in Baltimore is another slap in the face for a community facing “heaps of violence”.
The president's words ignore the anger of thousands of people who demonstrate in the supposed “right way”, yet still see unaccountable police unleashing violence against Black communities on a daily basis.
The eruption in Baltimore is not a repeat of the resistance in Ferguson. It represents an expansion of the struggle, and its evolution onto new terrain.
Baltimore is similar to Ferguson in that both have a majority Black population that suffers abuse and violence at the hands of police, while enduring rising inequality.
The Baltimore metropolitan area has the 19th largest economic output in the US. Yet a Johns Hopkins University study found that youth in poor neighbourhoods face conditions similar to their counterparts in Nigeria and India.
As Dan Diamond wrote for <i>Forbes</i>: “Black infants in Baltimore are almost nine times more likely to die before age 1 than white infants. AIDS cases are nearly five times more common in the African American community …
“'Only six miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Hollins Market,' interim Johns Hopkins provost Jonathan Bagger said last year. '[B]ut there is a 20-year difference in the average life expectancy.'”
That's how Baltimore is like Ferguson. It is <i>unlike</i> Ferguson in that it is a major urban centre in the heart of the Northeast Corridor and an hour's drive from the nation's capital.
It is run by a Black political establishment and is, as one Socialist Worker</EM> contributor wrote on social media, “fully integrated into the post-civil rights landscape — a landscape that includes massive levels of segregation, intense concentrations of poverty and astounding brutality alongside a new Black middle class and political class.”
Finally, thanks to shows like <i>The Wire</i>, Baltimore is probably second only to Detroit in its infamy as a city whose Black working class has been decimated by de-industrialisation.
When <i>Jacobin</i> associate editor Shawn Gude described the scene in West Baltimore after a riot, he wrote: “[T]he most salient thing wasn't the destruction wrought by protesters — the cop car demolished, the payday loan store smashed up — but by capital: the decrepit, boarded-up row houses, hovels and vacants in a city full of them.”
These conditions that form the backdrop to Gray's murder will force many activists in the Black Lives Matter movement to confront — as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both did in another era — the intersections of racism and capitalism.
As King said in a speech less than a month before he was assassinated in 1968 — words that were repeated many times on social media over the past week: “I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
“And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the [Black] poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.
“And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
Opponents of injustice today face the task of building on the bitter anger and the desire to fight for change demonstrated by the eruptions in Ferguson, Baltimore and beyond.
We need to challenge the hypocrisy and lies about what happened this week on the streets of Baltimore, to organise toward some measure of justice in the here and now — starting with the indictment of the cops who murdered Gray, just as surely as if they pulled a trigger — and to put forward the vision of a different world worth fighting for, built on solidarity, democracy and justice.
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