Los Angeles, November 27 — Hundreds  shut down freeways, confronting the LAPD as Progressive Labor Party, friends, and other protesters took the streets following the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the murder of Michael Brown. We maintained that multiracial unity is crucial in the fight against racist police terror.
Starting in the Crenshaw District we marched to the Police Department headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. Along the way, with our banner, signs, and bullhorn PLP helped lead the march chanting “Indict, convict, send those killer pigs to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.”
The march turned militant as protesters begin throwing bottles and rocks. A cop pulled out a shotgun trying to intimidate protesters marching onto the 110 Freeway, a major freeway which passes through downtown Los Angeles. Protesters, however, responded with more bold acts: tearing down a fence and running up an embankment that led onto the freeway where we halted traffic.
Clergy, Politicians = Misleaders
In the days that followed, we participated in these street protests, leading chants in English and Spanish and regularly confronting the racist police. While many of these protests have had a spontaneous character, pastors and other community misleaders have tried steering the politics of these protesters towards passive collaboration with local politicians and the police.
In turn, PLP have stressed the need for multiracial working-class unity and turning these militant street protests into training grounds for revolutionary communist struggle. We have also connected the struggle in the U.S. around police terror to the ongoing struggle in Mexico against state-sanctioned repression of militant students.
PLP helped provide political leadership to these marches, met friends and co-workers in the process, and made some new contacts. We still can do more to encourage others to attend these militant protests with us. With this in mind, we are planning events and actions to connect our friends on our campuses and workplaces to this fightback. Some comrades who visited Ferguson recently are giving talks in classrooms to build working-class solidarity and inspire fightback.
Bring Ferguson to Work and School
We are also planning a rally in the garment district against racist police killings to connect the struggle of immigrant workers and oppressed Black workers in U.S. cities. Connecting these street protests to our long-term strategy for building a revolutionary communist movement in key sectors of society will require us to bring this fight to where we work and study. We will hold a teach-in next month and rally on the relationship between Ayotzinapa, Mexico and Ferguson at a local university. Our objective is to both discuss how to fight growing fascism and how universities are complicit in creating the racist ideology which justifies police repression.