Racist Crackdown in Milwaukee

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a starkly segregated Rust Belt city on the shore of Lake Michigan, has become the latest stage for horrific street executions of black people by the police, igniting bitter protests by besieged black youth that have drawn national attention. On August 13, a black cop gunned down 23-year-old Sylville Smith after a traffic stop. The police narrative is that Smith, who had a “lengthy arrest record,” fled the scene, wielding a stolen handgun. Authorities have refused to release video from the cop body cameras, and no independent video has emerged. As word of the fatal shooting spread, small crowds of protesters quickly took to the streets. A police cruiser, a bank branch and a gas station in the black neighborhood of Sherman Park went up in flames, and rocks and bricks were thrown at police.

Although the protests, which flared up over two nights, never grew much larger than 200 people, black Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke—who starred at the Republican convention denouncing Black Lives Matter protesters while lauding racist demagogue Donald Trump—and Republican governor Scott Walker decided to activate the National Guard. But police chief Edward Flynn refused to bring the militia out of the barracks, preferring to show everyone that his cops in riot gear, with their armored vehicles and heavy weapons, were quite adequate for intimidating and repressing demonstrators. A 10 p.m. curfew for youth has been imposed, underlining once more how young people, especially if they are black, are denied the rights of free speech and free assembly that the population is supposed to have.

At a midnight press conference convened by Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat, to try to calm the city on the first night of protest, black alderman Khalif Rainey condemned Milwaukee as “the worst place to live for African-Americans in the entire country.” Rainey pointed to the hideous conditions of daily life for black people in Milwaukee for having spurred the protests, as much as the killing of Smith did. Ludicrously, after the second night of disturbances police chief Flynn announced that outsiders (supposed “communists”) from Chicago, all of 90 miles away, were the instigators, stirring up the supposedly otherwise contented local residents. This redbaiting recalls the denunciation of “outside agitators” during the civil rights movement.

The truth is that no more was required to spark protest than one more instance of a wanton cop slaughter of a black man added to the pervasive poverty and unremitting racist oppression. In June, a suburban Milwaukee cop shot dead 25-year-old Jay Anderson while he sat in his car in a park because he allegedly had a weapon in view. In 2015, 19-year-old Tony Robinson, a biracial high school graduate about to start college in Milwaukee, was shot five times and killed by a cop in the liberal university bastion of Madison because he was behaving “erratically.” Robinson had merely eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms. In 2014, protesters hit the streets to insist that “black lives matter” after Milwaukee cops killed Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed 31-year-old man with a history of mental health problems.

In Milwaukee, as much or more than anywhere else in the country, every statistic says that the capitalist rulers don’t give a damn about black lives. Milwaukee is the nation’s second poorest major city, and Wisconsin has the highest black unemployment rate in the country. Jobs are concentrated in the lily-white suburbs, made inaccessible to black people by a long-established public policy of funding freeways and starving public transportation. Forty percent of black Milwaukeeans live below the poverty line, barely able to eat, much less pay for a car; over 30 percent live in “extreme poverty.” In the decrepit and highly segregated public schools, only 17 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math; only 15 percent in reading. Fully 43 percent of black students were suspended during the 2011-12 school year. Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation—in a nation where locking up young black men is an industry and a defining feature of life.

The economy of this country was founded on the bedrock of black slavery; today, black oppression remains of inestimable value to the ruling class to divide and weaken the working masses. The cops are the enforcers for the capitalist profit system. They exist for one reason: to ensure that the brutal exploitation of labor and the forcible segregation of the mass of the black population at the bottom of society continue, unchallenged. It is this system alone that they “protect and serve.”

This was true in 1958 when Milwaukee cops pulled over 22-year-old Daniel Bell in a traffic stop eerily like the one involving Sylville Smith. After gunning down Bell, the cop who killed him shrugged it off: “He’s just a damn n----r kid anyhow.” The case marked the beginning of the civil rights movement in Wisconsin. In the South, that period of accelerating protest brought an end to formal Jim Crow segregation. But such official segregation laws were never a prerequisite for the crumbling housing, impoverished schools and cop attacks that blacks had to endure in the Northern cities, and still endure today.

It is a good thing that the shooting down of black youth by the cops continues to be met with outrage and defiance. But the activists of today need to be won to the understanding that only the overthrow of the capitalist system itself by the revolutionary action of the working class leading all of the oppressed can put an end to the racist violence of this state and its hired guns. It is because of the extreme bankruptcy of the existing leadership of the working class that such a perspective seems remote and far-fetched. The bureaucrats at the head of the trade unions today are open defenders of the profits of American industry. Refusing to defend their own members against multi-tier contracts, health care cutbacks, non-union subcontractors and other attacks on living standards, still less do they fight against the broader social oppression of minorities and immigrants. We communists are committed to the fight within the unions for a new, class-struggle leadership.

A leadership of labor that does not take up the fight for the most oppressed layers of the working people is hamstrung in advance. Wisconsin is an appropriate example of leadership in the negative. The state is a former labor bastion whose unions are now hemorrhaging members, after Governor Walker stripped public-sector unions of the right to bargain for their members and pushed through a “right to work” law. In 2011, a huge demonstration of unionists against the law at the state Capitol was organized by the AFL-CIO as a carnival with Democratic Party politicians on the podium. The labor tops derailed any possibility of strike action, instead urging a recall campaign against Walker and his cronies and, of course, the election of more Democrats. Now Walker himself, still in the governor’s mansion, in his own way underscores the link between labor and blacks (he evidently hates both) as he threatens Milwaukee’s black community with the National Guard coming in to insult and provoke people some more, and perhaps worse.

Nationally, a labor movement truly worthy of the name would mobilize its forces in demonstrations against cop terror, ensuring that at least the black youth would not stand alone. But the tremendous potential power of the working class cannot be brought to bear unless the workers are mobilized independently of all the political representatives of the capitalist class—Republicans, Democrats, Greens. In the absence of a perspective looking to the working class, the demands of today’s anti-racist militants, despite good intentions, can be reduced to the idea that some other part of the capitalist government needs to restrain the cops, retrain them, investigate them, indict them, take away their excessive weapons, etc.

To weld the righteous anger of the ghetto together with the power of the working class in a fight to smash capitalism demands the leadership of a revolutionary party. Only on the basis of the active fight for black liberation can the workers of all races and nationalities be united in the fight against their common oppressor to make a socialist revolution in this country.