CHICAGO, November 17 — Rekia’s brother led the crowd in, “I am Rekia Boyd!”  Outside the hearing, PLP led, “Racist cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
More than a hundred people protested at the monthly Chicago Police Board hearing against the March 2012 murder of Rekia Boyd, a young Black woman, by off-duty kkkop Dante Servin yet to be fired. We distributed CHALLENGE and a leaflet about the Paris attacks. We exposed how the police terrorize workers to maintain the boss’s system.
Servin fired into a crowd in a West Side alley and killed Rekia. He was found not guilty because Cook County Judge Dennis Porter ruled he should have been charged with murder instead of manslaughter. Rekia’s brother said she would have been 26 years old this month and demanded to know why her killer had not been fired in the three years since the murder.
This case illustrates how the police get away with murder, and especially racist murder of Black and Latin women and men. In just three cases of racist murder, the city of Chicago has paid $8 million dollars to the families of the slain victims.
Some protesters were Black nationalists, who advances the idea that Black workers and students have more in common with Black bosses and politicians than with non-Black workers and students; and therefore should ally with bosses and politicians of the same color rather than their class. Nationalism is a ruling class idea to try to divide the multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class. It is a way to divert the communist internationalism PLP fights for. We will organize more workers to attend the next hearing to expose the racist cops and their nationalists.