The following is the text from a speech at a January West Wednesday rally in Baltimore, given by a member of Progressive Labor Party. Tyrone, 44, was murdered by Baltimore kkkops on July 18, 2013. The family and the West Coalition have been protesting every Wednesday since.

Tyrone West was an early casualty of World War III. Now, why do I say that?
Let’s take a human relationship, a loving relationship between two people. There are always difficulties that arise. And if you can put your finger on the main difficulty, and solve that, everything else kind of falls in line.
Now, in the world, there’s one conflict that is the main conflict at the moment, and it influences every other development in the world. The main conflict in the world today is the rivalry between the major world powers, to see who’s gonna be top dog. The U.S., China, Russia—the major powers all want the same three things.  They want cheap labor. After all, Nike spends about two dollars and fifty cents a day for their workers in Indonesia to put the shoes together. They want cheap labor. They want markets to sell their stuff. And they want raw materials like oil and everything else.
And sooner or later, as the U.S. declines as a world power, and other powers rise—due to the law of uneven development—sooner or later another power is gonna challenge the U.S. You know how China, in the South China Sea, have taken over these coral reefs that were under water, dumped sand on them, and created seven islands. And on each island now they have a military-grade airport, anti-aircraft missiles. And they’re not messing around. The U.S. keeps sending warships through there, challenging their control of the South China Sea. Thirty percent of the maritime trade in the world goes through the South China Sea.
Obama is now sending the Third Fleet to Asia to join the Seventh Fleet, which means sixty percent of the U.S. military is gonna be in Asia for the first time, ‘cause the ruling class knows that’s the likely place where the major challenges are gonna come to the U.S. empire.
Now let me take us back to World War I. In the U.S. there were a lot of people opposed to that war. They said, just like the upcoming war, it was a war between gangsters who want to control the world for their own profit. And what did the U.S. ruling class do? They had the Ku Klux Klan knock on your door if you didn’t want to join the military and agree to conscription. They terrorized people.
In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of police, and hundreds of thousands of troops have been used time and again to break strikes, to put down prison rebellions, to put down uprisings like the one from Freddie Gray. And so we’ve seen again and again how organized violence has been used against us.
But on a day-to-day level, they have a need to try to intimidate the working class. And the leading section of the working class, the most bold, the strongest, is the Black working class in the U.S. And that’s why, in this country, if you’re Black, you’re five or six times more likely than a white person, to be unarmed and killed by a cop. Because the ruling class knows who the main leaders are gonna be in the upcoming struggles, and they want to put fear in the hearts of people, and try to stop that.
As they gear up for war, they’re gonna do that more and more. And that’s why I say that Tyrone was an early victim of World War III, and the preparations for that war, and that direction that the world is moving.
Now we can do something about this! When that period arises, and we see a major conflict developing, we have to take the nuclear trigger out of the hands of the ruling class, and minimize the casualties to humanity. That’s our responsibility. It’s not an easy task, but that’s our responsibility.
And in order to do that, we’re gonna need a much larger communist movement. We need more people to seriously read Challenge, to join the Progressive Labor Party and think about dedicating their lives to destroying this system, and building a sisterly, brotherly world where there will be no more people treated like Tyrone West!
And in the new Challenge there’s an article on West Wednesday on page three.  I’d like to encourage everybody to read that. And in the long run, we have to win this struggle, but even more important, we have to prepare to win bigger and bigger struggles in the future!