One important movement focus is memorializing past victims of police/ or vigilante murder, as the t-shirt reads: “Emmet & Amadou & Sean & Oscar &Trayvon & Jordan & Eric & Mike & Ezell…” This listing of past victims isn’t intended as a mere respectful exercise for the dead; it educates about the violent racist continuum that marks the U.S.’s past and present. As for the future, the t-shirt’s informed ellipsis “…” suggests that the problem is so large it will no doubt continue until racist policing is abolished. (It didn’t take long after Brown’s murder for St. Louis to see its next murder-by-cop victim, 18 year old Vonderrit Myers, Jr.) What complicates the inexhaustible list of those murdered by police is that with every new generation the evidence against policing mounts. As each generation resists racist police practices, this resistance incites police to further entirely unjustified–and now disturbingly “preemptive”–violence. We are witnessing this dynamic in the police/military build-up before the impending announcement of Ferguson officer Darren Wilson’s likely acquittal for Michael Brown’s murder. We have already seen the state’s severe repression/murders of past militant anti-racist organizers, especially the Black Panthers, including the Party’s first victim by cop, Bobby Hutton, Jr.– or “Lil’ Bobby.”
“As each generation resists racist police practices, this resistance incites police to further entirely unjustified–and now disturbingly “preemptive”–violence.”
On July 1, 2005, in Sacramento, California, I was part of a small group who interviewed Eugene Jennings, one of only two black police officers who witnessed Hutton’s murder in Oakland, California on April 6, 1968. Many are already quite familiar, not only with Hutton’s story, but with the surveillance and violence used to repress the Panthers. In “Justice Undelivered: Open Letter to the Grand Jury,“ we summarize the events leading up to Hutton’s execution based on Jennings’ description in our interview. At the time his deposition was suppressed, it never made it to the Grand Jury, and he was called a liar, harassed – even at gunpoint – by fellow officers. Here we describe Jennings’ version of events: