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	Workers Vanguard No. 1101	2 December 2016

Mount Greenwood, Chicago

Racist Mob Cheers Cop Terror

On the afternoon of November 5, 25-year-old Joshua Beal was shot and killed by two off-duty cops as he and other family members and friends were returning from burying Beal’s cousin. The funeral procession was set upon simply because it was a group of black people driving through the white, cop-infested neighborhood of Mount Greenwood on the far southwest side of Chicago. After an off-duty firefighter accused the mourners of blocking a fire station, a fight broke out and several off-duty cops rushed to the scene. In the ensuing melee, the cops fired 14 shots, killing Beal. Tiffany Boxley, Beal’s mother, cried, “Chicago police gunned my baby down like a vicious animal.” Moments later his brother Michael was arrested on charges of attacking an officer. Outrageously he was held for five days on a punitive $500,000 bail. Drop the charges against Michael Beal!

What made this killing even more grotesque was the white mob that immediately mobilized in defense of racist cop terror. Black Lives Matter activists who went to the scene to comfort and assist the Beal family were met with a much larger crowd of local racists chanting “N----r go home!” “Get the fuck out of here!” and “Blue lives matter.” This ugly scene was repeated two more times in the following days when protesters returning to the scene were confronted by racist mobs of hundreds. Threats of violence forced activists to cancel another protest at a local high school. One commented that the mob “showed that a black man can be killed by police, and they were overjoyed about that.” He added, “It really felt like we were back in the ’60s.” Indeed, the racist mobilization was reminiscent of the horde of thousands who attacked a 1966 march for open housing led by Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago’s Marquette Park neighborhood.

This is not the 1960s—but Chicago in 2016. Mount Greenwood is notorious for being an overwhelmingly white, racist enclave, infested with cops who are required by law to live within the city limits. It has a long history of racist reaction. In 1968, when the local all-white elementary school was forced to accept eleven black students, hundreds of racists mobilized to protest the presence of the black children on their first day in school. In 2008, when seven of those black students returned for a 40-year reunion, they were again confronted by a howling mob and a swastika painted on the school’s front door. Protests met the integration of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s when the school was slated to include more minority students. Five years ago, an integrated couple’s home was vandalized by white youths screaming racial epithets.

Not surprisingly, Mount Greenwood was one of the city’s few bastions of support for Donald Trump in the recent election. But it has been the Democratic Party that has run Chicago for 80 years and has made it “Segregation City.” Racial and ethnic divisions, long used to divide the working class and prop up capitalist class rule, are enforced through a machinery of cop terror. It was Democratic Party mayor Richard J. Daley who presided over the 1969 cop raid that killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. It was the Democrats, including Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, who ran the city when, for almost 20 years, notorious police lieutenant Jon Burge and his henchmen in the Violent Crimes Unit tortured black “suspects” to extract confessions. And it was the Democrat Rahm Emanuel who covered up the video of the killing by Chicago cops of Laquan McDonald, sparking outraged protests last winter.

Joshua Beal is the latest in the long list of black victims of the killer cops in racist capitalist America. Black Lives Matter activists have joined in the call for “community control” of the cops, sowing the dangerous illusion that the rulers can be pressured to cede control of the police to the very people the cops are paid to repress. Among police “reform” measures pushed by liberals and a host of reformists over the years have been residency requirements such as that in Chicago. As the experience of Mount Greenwood demonstrates, such reforms do nothing to restrain the capitalist rulers’ thugs in blue.

The bitter reality is that in a country whose economy was founded on chattel slavery, black lives don’t matter to the ruling class. The cops are the armed enforcers of a system in which workers are brutally exploited and the mass of the black population is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society. This is why the fight against racist cop terror must be linked to the fight for the working class to overthrow this whole rotten, capitalist system through socialist revolution.

The workplace and factory floor remain rare pockets of integration in this increasingly segregated society. Chicago has a significant multiracial labor movement—including auto workers, city workers, transit workers, teachers and Teamsters—with tremendous potential social power. Class struggle for the common class interests of black, white and immigrant workers can help break down racial divisions and advance the fight against this racist capitalist system.

As we wrote in “We Need a Multiracial Workers Party,” (WV No. 1081, 15 January): “All the raw material is there to launch a class-struggle fight that could fuse the power of labor to the anger of the ghettos and barrios. But sitting on top of this volcano are the trade union bureaucrats.” Those union misleaders have long shackled labor’s power by subordinating the interests of the working class to those of the capitalist exploiters, primarily by tying workers to the capitalist Democrats. What is needed to unleash this potential power is a class-struggle leadership, based on the political independence of the working class. Workers need a party of their own, not an electoral vehicle, but a revolutionary party that seeks to lead workers and the oppressed in struggle against racial oppression and for a workers government. For black liberation through socialist revolution!