[The Los Angeles School Board voted to cut $70 million a year
budget of the Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) by $25
million—35%—and move those funds to programs focused on the needs
of Black students.] [[link removed]]

THE BLACK LED “DEFUND THE POLICE” MOVEMENT WINS GREAT
BREAKTHROUGH IN LOS ANGELES: AN ORGANIZER’S INTERPRETATION  
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Eric Mann
September 21, 2020
CounterPunch
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_ The Los Angeles School Board voted to cut $70 million a year budget
of the Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) by $25
million—35%—and move those funds to programs focused on the needs
of Black students. _

Hundreds of students and community members gather at the Miguel
Contreras Learning Complex in L.A, Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

 

At 11 PM on Tuesday June 30—after 13 hours of public testimony and
board deliberations and yes, years of organizing—the Black Lives
Matter and Defund the Police movement in Los Angeles and nationally
took a great leap forward. The Los Angeles School Board, led by Board
Member Monica Garcia, with the support of board members Nick Melvoin,
Kelly Gonez, and Jackie Goldberg, voted 4 to 3 to cut the $70 million
a year budget of the Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) by
$25 million—35%—and move those funds to programs focused on the
needs of Black students. This reduction in the department’s funds
will potentially lay off 65 armed officers and cut the department’s
overtime budget. We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a
major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material
breakthrough—in this case, Los Angeles City, with 4 million
residents, 650,000 students, and the second largest school system in
the U.S_._

Our campaign was also a major _ideological _victory. It
delegitimized the very existence of police in the public schools and
affirmed the experience and demands of the most militant and conscious
Black students. The LA School Board meeting, with hundreds of
demonstrators outside, 50 people inside the board room at a time with
only board member Monica Garcia in person, and several thousand
supportive viewers on closed circuit TV was a site of the most intense
ideological contestation with the entire system of anti-Black colonial
education. Dozens of angry, articulate, and organized Black
students—many from Students Deserve—testified that _the very
presence of police in the schools was a racist and anti-Black attack
on their racial identity, self-worth, self-confidence, and academic
performance_.

Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-chair of Black Lives Matter L.A., testified
that all three of her children suffered police abuse in the schools
while her son’s first experience of anti-Black police brutality was
at the age of six. She described in painful detail how every aspect of
a Black child’s life is criminalized and why the demand for No
Police in the Schools was a life and death issue for the Black
community.

Channing Martinez, director of organizing at Labor/Community Strategy
Center and a graduate of Crenshaw High School in South Central, told
the board, “The Strategy Center fought for years to end your police
tickets and arrests for Black and Latino students coming to school
late that you called truancy. We fought to end anti-Black ‘willful
defiance’ suspensions and expulsions and to get the LASPD to return
1 tank, 3 grenade launcher, and 61-M16s that had been procured from
the Department of Defense 1033 program. By now it should be clear. The
only structural solution to educational and anti-Black racism is to
end the police occupation of the schools altogether.”

Our political, fiscal, and ideological victory led LASPD Police Chief
Todd Chamberlain, who had only recently been hired, to resign the
following day. Chamberlain, a former LAPD captain, with a bachelor’s
degree in criminal justice and a master’s degree in organizational
management, had tried to put a humanistic face on a militaristic
institution. But he well understood the significance of the
devastating vote of no confidence in his department and chose to exit
rather than try to manage under even further scrutiny.

This was also a breakthrough, if just in the earliest stages, in the
far larger war to protect and expand Black Los Angeles. The Strategy
Center has been trying to build a movement, along with other forces
like the Crenshaw Subway Coalition of which we are a part, for a
counter-gentrification Right of Return of the Black Community to South
Central. We have been working on the formulation of “the right of
return” of Black dispersed populations, based on the Palestinian
demand, that I began to explore in my 2005 and then 2015 edition of my
book, _Katrina’s Legacy_, to imagine and demand the return of
100,000 post-Katrina dispersed Black people back to New Orleans. In
this No Police in the LAUSD Schools campaign we tried to convey the
terrifying reality that Black students—once 25% of the Los Angeles
Unified School District —are now only 8% and under daily attack.
This is situated in the even larger crime that the Black population of
Los Angeles—once 750,000 in 1970—has been forced down to 350,000
through conscious government and societal policies of economic
sanctions, police occupation, and thousands of “you are not welcome
here” public and private assaults. This was reflected in the
federally and Democratic Party driven “war on drugs” “war on
crime” “war on gangs” and as the Clinton’s demonized
“super-predators” and “welfare frauds” the very clear “war
on Blacks.”

Even in this great board vote on June 30, while we won a tactical
victory in the wider war to reverse anti-Black policies, programs, and
outcomes, the LASPD has retained 65% of its budget—$45 million—and
still has more than 300 officers with guns. That is why we have to
turn this breakthrough into a larger and longer offensive. Just
recently Black Lives Matter L.A., Students Deserve, United Teachers of
Los Angeles, Inner City Struggle, Youth Justice Coalition, and the
Labor/Community Strategy Center wrote to LAUSD Superintendent, August
Beutner.

As our communities have experienced centuries of divestment, and with
more budget cuts coming from the state of California, we will need
much more than the initial 25 million dollar redirection from school
police to begin to rectify the harm caused to Black communities. In
fact, now may be the most appropriate time to imagine both what
genuine race-conscious investments look like, and to reimaging what
school safety means as we look for ways to keep all members of the
school community safe in the midst of a global health pandemic.
However, LAUSD must also recognize the precedent that was set when a
Board majority voted to reduce LASPD’s budget by 35 percent – the
District must not reverse course, and all implementation should
reflect the spirit of the movement.

We call on the Superintendent to develop a timeline to phase out both
the need and funding for school police, with funds being redirected to
services and supports for Black students.

ANATOMY OF THE BREAKTHROUGH

The Strategy Center has played a leadership role in anti-racist, Black
liberation, organizing against the colonial and police occupied public
schools in LA for more than 20 years. This recent victory for the
Black and Black/Latinx united front offers such rich practice. Here
are some themes and conclusions I’ll integrate into the analytical
narrative to encourage discussion and debate in the growing Black-led
social justice movement.

* The Centrality of the Black Liberation Struggle to urban and U.S.
revolutionary hope and strategy

* The Strategy Center’s long term commitment to and physical
centering in South Central’s Black community

* The essential role of the most radical, revolutionary, militant, and
left politics to shape the Black and Latino movement.

* The building of a Black/Latinx/Third World united front with an
agreed upon Black priority—and the outreach to the Latino community
for its own independent and supportive voices in the larger united
front

* The synthesis of long-term organizing and revolutionary opportunity
to move decisively under opportune circumstances

* The value of an aggressive ideological challenge to the U.S. white
settler state and its colonial anti-Black educational system

* The value of an anti-genocide frame in which to situate the
suppression and subjugation of Black students, Black workers, Black
women, Black homeless, Black prisoners, Black communities

* For the Strategy Center, the motivating force of our view that Black
people constitute an oppressed Black Nation inside the white oppressor
nation.

* A successful navigating of a complex relationship between social
movements and elected officials that integrates that work into a
larger social justice and revolutionary strategy. In this case, we
rejected on the one-hand, an ultra-left theory of “exposing”
“denouncing” and “forcing” those in power to vote for our
demands and on the other, the ultra-right theory of the “inside
outside game” that is little more than becoming an adjunct to the
Democratic Party. The Movement treated the board members as political
people who would be sympathetic to and supportive of our people, our
program, and our objectives That mutual respect was critical to the
victory

* The victory was rooted in a multi-generational movement inside Black
and Latino communities in which young people and students were the
driving force but older organizers, parents, teachers, community
residents, and board members were understood as part of the solution
not the problem. Contrary to some other theories and practices of
“youth organizing” the Black and Latina students saw The System
not “adults” as the target and the cause of the problem. That was
the product of thoughtful organizing work over years in which student
leaders felt supported and encouraged to exercise leadership inside
student structures but also within a multi-generational community and
movement ones as well.

* The explosive combination of deep ideological framing and grassroots
organizing. Too often, “ideology” is the terrain of isolated
ideologues and “organizing” is reduced to militant, Alinsky-like
reforms inside the existing system with no ideological challenge. In
this case the role of ideology and organizing were integrated in ways
that were critical to the victory

* A generally non-sectarian theory and practice of the united front
inside the Black community, inside the Latino community, inside the
Black/Latinx alliance and inside the movement that allowed differences
and tensions to be negotiated and resolved in ways that strengthened
the movement and was apparent to the LAUSD board members with whom we
negotiated and collaborated.

As will be explained, these are not abstract or tacked on ideological
explanations but political lines that were actively put forth and
gained influence through struggle inside the broad united front that
won this breakthrough. This political perspective will be needed to
protect what we have won and to extend those gains. This independent
ideological perspective is even more critical in the midst of the
Democratic Party’s efforts to shut down this militant moment and
replace it with a manipulative empty appeal to Black voters and a
pacified representation to white voters. The Democrats face a very
real electoral challenge to defeat the fascist right in the 2020
presidential elections. But we can’t also expect them to advance the
interests of the most militant, radical, and far reaching Black and
Latino led social movements. That is our job.

I will of course tell you the story of the organizing and complex
negotiations with the LAUSD Board so that you will have enough factual
information from which to draw your own conclusions and learn from the
narrative not just the analysis.

THE STRATEGY CENTER’S LONG-COMMITMENT TO SOUTH CENTRAL L.A’S BLACK
COMMUNITY

On May 24, 2020 the Strategy Center was a respected organization in
Los Angeles’ South Central Los Angeles based in our Strategy and
Soul Movement Center. We had been fighting for No Police in the LAUSD
Schools for 5 years with little support or movement from the 7 elected
board members of the Los Angeles Unified School District. (LAUSD). One
day later, May 25, 2020 George Floyd woke up to live his life as if
his Black life mattered. Instead, he became the latest of hundreds and
thousands of hundreds of thousands of Black people murdered throughout
U.S. history by the white settler state. But his martyrdom, as that of
with Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, the Four Birmingham Martyrs, and the
rapidly expanding list of Trayvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, Michael
Browne, and Eric Garner who also screamed “I can’t breathe”
sparked a mass Black-led uprising that created the historical
possibility of our victory to cut the LASPD police budget by $25
million. In that this article is trying to explain a methodology that
can explain historical events, I begin with the premise that often,
while new organizations come onto the stage of history, it is the
long-distance runners who also have a cutting edge who are essential
to the structural victories. Each organization involved in this
breakthrough, Black Lives Matter LA, Students Deserve, United Teachers
of Los Angeles, Inner City Struggle, and others can and should tell
their own story of how they arrived at that historical moment. Clearly
I will tell you about their role on June 30, 2020, the day of The
Vote. But let me take you on a journey to explain how, 30 years from
our formation, the Strategy Center, having won many other major
victories, was so fortunate to be part of making history again along
with our dynamic and powerful allies.

The Labor/Community Strategy Center was initiated in 1989 as a
“think tank/act tank” to organize in L.A’s Black and Latino
communities to address “the totality of urban life.” It’s
anti-capitalist, anti-racist politics were initiated in the year of
the fall of the German Democratic Republic, the imminent
disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the triumphalist declaration
of world capitalism—TINA—there is no alternative.

That vision was rooted in my work with the Congress of Racial Equality
in 1964, the Newark Community Union Project, and our close alliances
with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The organizational lineage
continued through the Students for a Democratic Society, Black Panther
Party, and based on my 18 months in prison for militant demonstrations
against the war in Vietnam, the Attica and Soledad Brothers defense
committees.

The immediate predecessor to the Center was my work in the UAW
Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open—an historic struggle of Chicano
and Black workers and communities that successfully forced GM to keep
the plant open for a full decade. Throughout my ten years as a
UAW/Ford and GM assembly line worker, I was also shaped by my
participation in the New Directions Movement, a brilliant, insurgency
in the United Auto Workers, led by Jerry Tucker that took power in the
6 mid-Southern states—including Missouri, Texas, Louisiana, and
Oklahoma. New Directions challenged the racism and class collaboration
of our union. During many of those years I was also a member of the
League of Revolutionary Struggle, a Black/Chicano/Asian/Pacific
Islander majority communist group, all of whose members believed that
both Blacks and Chicanos were oppressed nations inside the borders of
the U.S. with the right of self-determination up to and including the
right to secede from the U.S.

My job, in initiating a new institution, was to synthesize and
integrate all of those histories, philosophies, and organizational
reflections into something new to relate to the time, place, and
conditions of L.A. and the U.S. in 1989. Clearly, the leading role of
the Black and Latino movements and working class in an
internationalist anti-imperialist frame reflected in actual mass
organizing work was the mandate and the challenge.

The first three Strategy Center organizers were Chris Mathis, a Black
autoworker from the GM plant, Lisa Duran, a Latina college affirmative
action officer, and Kikanza Ramsey, a Black recent college graduate.
In 1992 the Strategy Center formed the Bus Riders Union, a
breakthrough movement of Black, Latin@ and Korean bus riders that
generated a multi-racial organization with dynamic tri-lingual working
class culture. After the 1992 Urban Rebellion in Los Angeles our Urban
Strategies Group published _Reconstructing Los Angeles and US Cities
from the Bottom Up—_in which we called for massive re-investment in
South Central and massive divestment from the LAPD—“the social
welfare state not the police state.”

By 2001, when I returned from the World Conference Against Racism in
Durban, South Africa the Strategy Center agreed that we needed a
specifically Black/Afro-centric campaign. Out of a Reparations Study
Group we initiated the Community Rights Campaign to focus on racism,
colonialism, and militarism in the public schools based on a
Black/Latinx united front but within that, a chance for us to give our
work a greater Afro-centric focus. Damon Azali Rojas, Manuel Criollo,
Barbara Lott-Holland, Patrisse Cullors, Carla Gonzalez, Mark-Anthony
Johnson, Ashley Franklin, and now Channing Martinez and Brigette Amaya
are among the many gifted organizers who have led that work for the
past 20 years.

During that same period, the Bus Riders Union became the largest mass
organization of Black/Latino/Korean bus riders in the U.S. and won a
major civil rights court and organizing victory against the Los
Angeles MTA. In the civil rights lawsuit–Strategy Center and Bus
Riders Union vs. Los Angeles MTA we won $2.5 billion in improvements
in the urban bus system including replacing 2,000 dilapidated diesel
buses with 2500 lower-emissions compressed natural gas buses, 1
million hours of new service, and dramatic reductions in bus/train
fares that led to a 20% increase in mass transit ridership.

By 2015 the organization, to effectively give greater focus to the
Black struggle and to better integrate the Bus Riders Union and
Community Rights, merged both groups into our Fight for the Soul of
the Cities city-wide social justice organization and move our offices
to South Central Los Angeles. While we would maintain our Black/Latinx
membership core we agreed to make the struggle to protect and expand
L.A.s oppressed, occupied, gentrified and rapidly declining Black
community our highest priority. We rented, invented, modeled, and
remodeled a four storefront complex at the Corner of King and Crenshaw
in the heart of L.A.’s Black community that we call the Strategy and
Soul Movement Center—the home of our Fight for the Soul of the
Cities and Bus Riders Union membership office and our Strategy and
Soul bookstore and Strategy and Soul Film Theater and Art Gallery.
From there our focus has been organizing Black adults in the
Crenshaw/Leimert Park community and Black and Latinx students in three
Los Angeles high schools through our Taking Action Social Justice
Clubs—Augustus Hawkins and Ouchi O’Donovan in South L.A. and
Roosevelt High School in East L.A. We have provided a
counter-hegemonic programmatic frame through our Campaign for Urban
Reconstruction and it’s five demands—Free Public Transportation,
No Police on MTA Buses and Trains, Stop MTA Attacks on Black
Passengers, No Police in the LAUSD Schools, and No Cars in L.A.

These demands were expanded through the insurgent city council
campaign of Channing Martinez in the 10th City Council District where
we are located–one of the last centers of Black concentration and
even then not of Black majority. Channing ran on the 5 demands but
expanded them to “Cut the Los Angeles Police Department by 50%,”
“50% of all new public and private sector jobs must go to Black
applicants, and Open Borders and Amnesty for all Immigrants-Kick ICE
out Of LA.”

In our work, far more than many, the ideological focus on
“counter-hegemonic demand development” is not abstract,
tangential, or a throw-away line in the organizing process. _It is in
the realm of demand development where the generality meets the
particular and the core politics of the campaign is
reflected._ “Arrest killer cops” and “defund the police”
shaped our struggle and it was that ideological frame that gave the
Black students in particular, the upper hand in the battle of ideas
that turned the tide at the LAUSD board. In our campaign for Urban
Reconstruction, it was situating the demand for No Police in the LAUSD
Schools with No Police on the MTA buses and trains with Stop MTA
Attacks on Black passengers” combined with “we demand the social
welfare state not the police state” and “we want counselors not
cops” reflected in 30 years of organizing and five years of deeper
organizing in South Central’s Black community that gave the Strategy
Center a far better sense of orientation, legitimacy, and influence in
the broad united front that won the victory.

As we have carried out our work, the Strategy Center has always
understood the critical nature of a broad united front against racism
and imperialism and the most principled and mutually supportive
relationships with many allies. We try to fight against any form of
sectarianism or organizational self-importance. We instill in every
member and ourselves time and time again, “There is nothing we can
win by ourselves. The Black/Latinx/Third World United Front and from
there reaching out to people of all races is the only hope for the
world. This is reflected in our close relationships with the Pan
African Film Festival, Black Lives Matter L.A., South LA Food Co-op,
Community Coalition, Inner City Struggle, Los Angeles Community Action
Network, and CADRE. We call it the Strategy and Soul _Movement
Center_ because we see our work as movement-building. We have hosted
PAFF’s annual three-day volunteer film festival, a film showing of
DOLORES—the life of Dolores Huerta—with Community Coalition—and
organized our first Strategy and Soul Community Organizing Fair with
300 attendees. We have worked closely with Dr. Melina Abdullah and BLM
LA at Strategy and Soul to launch of their website, highlight the
testimony of mothers whose children were murdered by police, and host
he showing of Ava Duvernay’s staggering film, _When They See Us._

In the summer of 2019, to get more community support for our Campaign
for Urban Reconstruction, and in particular our No Police in the LAUSD
Schools, No Police on MTA Buses and Trains demands, 8 high school
students—led by Brigette Amaya, Kassandra Soriano, Angeles Soriano,
Sophie Tielemans, and Gionna Magdaleno in our Transformative
Organizers Interns Program— held conversations with more than 2,000
Black and Latinx residents of South L.A. They went door to door over
20 square blocks and spoke to residents at many community events
including the Compton Pride Festival, CicLavía, and the Central
Avenue Jazz Festival.

At first, many people were ambivalent or even opposed to our campaign
for No Police in the L.A. Schools, No Police on MTA buses and trains,
(Stop MTA Attacks on Black Passengers, Free Public Transportation/No
Cars in L.A.) but the sincerity and persuasiveness of the Strategy
Center students convinced more than 350 people to call on the School
Board and LA MTA, to end the police in the schools and on public
transportation.

As late as the fall of 2019, we spoke with several school board
members about getting rid of the school police but even our closest
ally, Monica Garcia was not convinced. She said, “Bring me more
specific complaints from students because I want to focus on police
behavior. You better get more support from parents because many have
been convinced that the police presence is necessary.” Some of our
students who attended were disappointed. They thought we would just go
in, ask for what we wanted, and get it. I explained that Monica was
talking to us as organizers. If we were asking board members to take
on such a powerful institution as the school police and their many
political allies, it was our job to build a stronger movement. It was
a challenge we had to embrace.

We have a long track record of winning victories to change school
policy but at the time, even for us, in the summer of 2019, it was
hard to imagine the balance of forces that would win any cuts in the
school police force let alone its elimination. But the reason we carry
out long-distance counter-hegemonic campaigns is because you never
know what set of events, conflicts, and changes in conditions can lead
to a victory— but you have to lay the groundwork for when that
opportunity arises. On May 24, 2020 we could not see that opportunity.

But on May 25, 2020 brother George Floyd, woke up to just live his
life, and wanted to believe that his Black life mattered. Sadly,
tragically, and infuriatingly, he ended it as a Black martyr. When
white police officer Derrick Chauvin stood on the neck of George Floyd
for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and killed him in cold blood the whole
world exploded— from Minneapolis to South Central to South Africa to
South London. Tens of millions of people, led by the Black community
groups, Black Lives Matter chapters, and joined by Latino, Indigenous,
Asian/Pacific Islander, and white social justice groups, marched,
protested, fought, put their bodies on the line, and pushed history
forward.

In Los Angeles, two organizations provided the driving force of the
broader movement, —Black Lives Matter L.A. and Students Deserve, a
Black high school student organization with close ties to BLM/LA.
Still, by May 25, 2020, with the murder of George Floyd and the great
Black led rebellion that was sparked by his martyrdom, the Strategy
Center had become a long-standing and trusted community institution in
the Black community and the Strategy and Soul Center a community asset
for “retreat, repair, reconstruction, rethinking, and resistance.”
As tens thousands of us chanted, “Black Lives Matter/Prosecute
Killer Cops/Defund the Police” the demand “Defund the Los Angeles
School Police/No Police in the LAUSD Schools” vividly illustrated
what every long-distance revolutionary and every Black student knew
immediately, “There is nothing more powerful than idea whose time
has come.”

RADICAL AND REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS NEED COURAGEOUS ELECTED
OFFICIALS TO TURN DEMANDS INTO STRUCTURAL CHANGES

Another building block of the victory was the Strategy Center’s 30
year history of working with, struggling with, sitting in upon, suing
and bringing to court, and successfully negotiating major structural
policy changes with the leaders of the LA Power Structure—the
elected, appointed, and corporate officials in the city. We know that
many new to the movement—experiencing what seemed like an apparent
and rapid cause and effect between protest and a $25 million/35% cut
in a major police force—assumed that mass anger and “street
heat” by themselves, almost like alchemy, turned recalcitrance into
victory at the LAUSD board.

_Yes, to be clear, the mass protests in the midst of a national
rebellion for civil rights and Black liberation were clearly the
driving force. But still, it took years of prior organizing and weeks
of organizing and tactics to get the four votes to deliver the
structural changes we were demanding._

In the first weeks of the rebellion, organizers, members, and leaders
of Black Lives Matter/LA, Students Deserve, Brothers Sons Selves,
United Teachers of Los Angeles, Inner City Struggle, and the
Labor/Community Strategy Center held many conversations to agree upon
a tactical plan. We reached a consensus that we needed a strong board
motion to move in the direction of defunding the entire LASPD budget.
But let’s be clear. Just because a movement demands things it does
not mean that the system is listening or every cares. The same
historical moment and forces tried to win major cuts in the Los
Angeles Police Department (LAPD). But despite thousands of people
marching in front of the mayor’s house, he only put forth a cut of
$150 million out of a $2 billion+ budget and even then, he mainly
withdrew an increase he had proposed. Similarly unsuccessful, despite
the Los Angeles Sheriff’s $3.5 billion, the county, only because of
fiscal problems, only cut it by $150 million or less than 5%. So, to
even get a board member to consider a cut of 25% let alone 50% would
take a miracle. Still, we hoped for at least a motion to cut the
budget by 50% but we also needed a leader on the board to entertain
let alone introduce such a motion.

It became clear to those of us who had spent years working with the
board that the miracle would have to take the form of board member
Monica Garcia. Ms. Garcia had roots in the long history of Chicano(a)
student and educational insurgency in East Los Angeles, and had led
the fight on the truancy tickets, willful defiance, and returning the
weapons. We needed her to step forward again. As a few of us reached
out to her she was already reaching out to us. As we explained the
idea for the 50% cut she said, “I am already there.” (See
Counterpunch, How we got the weapons out of the LA Schools). After
several of us including Maria Brenes director of Inner City Struggle
and myself worked with board member Garcia, reporting back to Brothers
Son Selves and Students Deserve and other allies, Ms. Garcia
introduced a motion to not just cut 50% of the school police budget in
2021, but to extend those cuts to 75% in 2022, and 90% by 2023. The
question became: how could we get four votes out of seven to pass her
motion?

As I reported in CounterPunch (June 26, No Police in the L.A. Schools:
A Great Breakthrough and Victory is in Sight) our first attempt was at
the June 23 meeting. While we got four different board members, at
different times in the debate, to agree to significant cuts in the
LASPD budget, we could not get the four board members to find the will
and unity to push through a common motion. And certainly not enough to
support the visionary plan of Ms. Garcia. Right after the vote, I
reported,

“The anger, pain, and determination of the Black community, the
Latinx community, and all people of goodwill cannot be denied. There
will be other votes and our movement is on the case. Victory is closer
every day. No Police in the LAUSD Schools Now!”

After the “almost” June 23 LAUSD Board vote we had to pivot
rapidly and move our energy to the board vote on the LAUSD budget of
$7.6 billion on June 30, only a week away. Ms. Garcia agreed to
re-introduce her motion, _this time as an amendment to the annual
budget. _She also corrected a significant weakness in the first
motion. Initially the motion called for the first set of cuts to be in
2021. This time we realized that we had to push for an immediate
cut—that is, in the 2020 budget. Otherwise, the school police and
their allies would have an entire year to counter-organize before the
cuts went into place.

In the week preceding the budget vote, organizers from BLM LA,
Students Deserve, Brothers Son Selves, United Teachers of Los Angeles,
Inner City Struggle, and the Labor/Community Strategy
Center—learning from the last board meeting and witnessing the
contradictions inside and among the progressive board members—did
more work to produce a unified voting bloc that could deliver four
votes for the greatest possible cut in the police budget. Our tactical
plan was clear. We would fight like hell to get at least 3 votes for
Monica Garcia’s 50% cut in the 2020 budget and try to get a fourth.
If we could not we would push for the greatest cut in the LAPSD budget
possible upon which four board members (out of 7) could agree. But the
$35 million/50% cut was our goal and that is what people spoke about
all day and night.

In that week the movement groups had engaging discussions with board
members Monica Garcia, Kelly Gonez, Nick Melvoin, and Jackie
Goldberg—all of whom, at one time or another, had voted for at least
a $20 million cut. The discussions were complex and principled and we
were fortunate to have four board members who understood they had some
accountability to our movement and agreed there had to be some
significant cuts to the school police budget.

Even given the limitations on our mass presence by the COVID 19
restrictions (let alone it devastating impacts) we still were able to
bring hundreds of people outside the board room, more than 50 of whom
went inside to testify in person and another hundred who testified
through video. Again it was the Black students, many with Students
Deserve and all of them speaking with clear support for the 50% cut,
that moved the entire process forward. Black students said the very
existence and presence of the police made them sick; the police made
them not want to go to school; the police brought intimidation, fear,
and anti-Black animus into every day in school. And many, in a great
consciousness raising experience for board members and community
members alike, explained in stark detail that _it was not just the
police but the entire school system that was punitive, racist, and
anti-Black_. Each student raised their testimony to a heart-felt,
spoken-word performance.

Still, it was not until the day of the vote that the dynamics of the
board alliances played out. The organizations with the greatest
history of working with board members tried to use every form of
persuasion, negotiation, but also dynamics of mutual respect to forge
a consensus. As the testimony continued we reached out to Nick
Melvoin. Would he continue his vote from the week before for a 50%
cut? Yes, he would! Then we had conversations with Kelly Gonez. Ms.
Gonez said yes as well. As she explained, the week before she had
supported a $20 million cut; but after another 5 hours of listening
deeply to the students, she was convinced that a $35 million/50% cut
was in order. So, by 7 PM we had three votes for Monica Garcia’s
motion. (The week before we had two.) But three votes—without a
fourth vote—would not be able to change anything.

The fourth vote we needed was that of board member Jackie Goldberg.
Ms. Goldberg, a well-known figure in the LA progressive community, had
been on the LAUSD board for many years, went off the board, and came
back through an election in 2016 with the strong support of UTLA. But
as of 7 PM on June 30 she would not move from her $20 million maximum
cut. But when it became clear that we had three votes for the 50%/$35
million cut many people from UTLA and every other constituency had
phone conversations with her and her allies, calling on her to please
be the 4th vote for the 50% cut. Still, even after those
conversations, she indicated she would not move past a $20 million
cut.

Now here was the dilemma. Had Jackie Goldberg drawn a line in the sand
at a $20 million cut it would have forced the 3 other board members,
who were ready to vote for $35 million, to join her motion or lose
everything. That still would have been a step forward objectively but
in terms of the morale and consciousness of our movement, the Black
students, and the 3 board members who had agreed to a $35 million cut,
it would have been very demoralizing as well. For if one board member,
and yes, a white board member, demanded that everyone come down to her
$20 million—even though we had three votes for $35 million,—the
Black students in particular, who were putting their hearts and lives
on the line, would have been profoundly disappointed that their
impassioned appeals did not win the cuts they had demanded.

Then, sometime around 8 PM, we had a breakthrough. While the 3 board
members who opposed any cuts were beginning their long, redundant,
rambling monologues, Garcia and Goldberg negotiated with each other.
They agreed on a $25 million/35% cut. Under this plan, Monica would
introduce her motion for a $35 million cut, knowing she had 3 votes.
Then Jackie would introduce a “friendly” amendment—meaning it
would be accepted by the maker of the motion—to reduce the cut to
$25 million. If the amended motion passed it would replace the initial
motion and would become part of the 2020 budget. The result was that
Ms. Goldberg agreed to cut an additional $5 million out of the LASPD
budget to move up in the direction of Ms. Garcia’s motion—even if,
in return, three board members had to come down from their initial $35
million objective to meet hers.

_And that is what happened. All four board members agreed upon a $25
million/35% cut. _And yes, all the key organizations were aware of
this agreement and enthusiastically signed off on it.)

Then, for at least three more hours, that seemed like an eternity, the
three board members who opposed any cuts—George McKenna, the only
Black member of the board, and white board members Scott Schmereson
and Richard Vladovik, all of whom were former school administrators,
spoke interminably about crime, gangs, danger, and the great
contributions of police. While they knew our side had the four votes,
they were speaking to a large constituency, not just among white
parents but among some Black and Latin@ as well, who supported the
police and who would be needed for their counter-plan that was already
in the works.

Then finally, at 11:45 at night, almost 18 hours after some dedicated
people had arrived at 6 AM to reserve seats for student speakers, the
board finally voted. And yes, we won by the 4 to 3 vote we needed.
Then the board voted to adopt the entire LAUSD $7.6 Billion budget.
And when that passed, the $25 million cut in the Los Angeles School
Police Department was locked in. _And yes, while not the 50% we had
hoped, the 35% cut that we won, is the largest percentage cut we know
of in any school police force and any police for period during this
period of urban rebellion_.

In the midst of COVID 19, we could not have the in-person hugging and
crying that most of us would have wanted. But in the bizarre new world
of remote viewing, at least several hundred people watched all 14
hours and we estimate that at least another 1,000 more watched the
final vote on the School Board website. Those who braved the day had
the pleasure of laughter, affection, and hugs. Others of us had to
celebrate through the most beautiful texts, emails, calls, and zooms!
Everyone knew they were watching history being made by organizers and
organizations right before their eyes.

It is great being an organizer. Many days are long, many leads do not
pan out, many tactics do not achieve their objectives and many weeks
turn into months turn into years. But then, if you are lucky, there
are the magical moments of victory. Organizing is for the
long-distance runners but also for those, often young, who rise up,
take leadership, and speak with the revolutionary truth of their own
experience. We all saw with our own eyes the great young revolutionary
Black and Latinx students who opened up their hearts and souls,
changed minds, changed policy, and changed history. We also felt
validated that the very long-term work of constituency development in
the high schools, long-term relationships with board members, and long
history of winning so many structural reforms in the practice of
policing led to this victory as well.

We also understood that for the four LAUSD board members who voted for
this historic measure–Monica Garcia, Kelly Gonez, Nick Melvoin, and
Jackie Goldberg—they were part of the movement. They had to exercise
their own agency, their own political judgment, and their own battles
with powerful countervailing forces to deliver the votes and the
victory for the people.

The Countermoves continue and the Movement needs to stay on the
offensive making an accurate assessment of your opponent’s tactical
plan. Their superior force is always part of the reality and should
not be a cause of despair; instead, it is a basis from which to
develop a planned and conscious character to our resistance rooted in
the actual conditions on the ground. If any movement wants to keep the
political momentum it has to grasp the full power, danger, and
tactical plan of its adversary so that it can develop a tactical plan
based on that assessment. S_ure enough, almost from the minute we won
those who support a police/punitive school system went on the
counter-offensive._

CONSERVATIVE TEACHERS COUNTER-ORGANIZER

United Teachers of Los Angeles’ outgoing president Alex Caputo-Pearl
and incoming president Cecily Myart-Cruz were forceful advocates for a
full divestment of all police in the schools. The union’s House of
Representatives voted by a 154-56 margin to support their position.
Predictably, shortly after the LAUSD vote conservative elements in the
union began pushing for a “full membership vote”— normally
reserved for contract ratifications—to overturn the union’s
position and as a vote of no confidence in the leadership. As Strategy
Center organizers have attended and worked in the L.A. high schools
for 30 years, we well understood that there is a substantial force of
teachers, many white but also Black and Latinx, who see their students
as dangerous and the police as their friend. We also saw so many UTLA
teachers take a stand to be on the right side of history in this vote.
This referendum will be a fight for the soul of the union. Its outcome
is so important it will involve not just UTLA but many students,
parents, and community groups who were instrumental in the LAUSD board
victory to support teachers who are challenging colonial, anti-Black
education. This will be a campaign with its own tactical plan—a
campaign we have to win.

THE STRUGGLE AT THE SCHOOL BOARD CONTINUES

The LAUSD board meets every month and there will be many future
votes—some to dismantle, some others to preserve, and some to expand
the authoritarian, militaristic, punitive, and racist public school
system. There will be debates about innovative forms of security and
safety led by students, teachers, and community organizations. Many of
us are moving to educate and mobilize the community for the full
removal of all police in the schools. And there will be new motions to
allocate far more than the $25 million cut from the police budget to
fund Black students and schools with significant Black concentrations.
This is where protracted long-term organizing comes into play. _The
vote we won is just a moment in time and now the struggle
continues._ We have to find the will and resources to play the
long-game and not allow the other side to wear us down or for us to
self-sabotage through complacency and self-congratulation.

WORKING OUT RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE NEW LEADERSHIP OF THE LASPD

The LASPD has a new police chief, Leslie Ramirez, a graduate of LAUSD
and a 29 year veteran of the school police force. Her job will be to
protect the existing funding of the school police and to ask for the
funding cuts to be restored. There will be decent police with whom we
have already worked saying, “Give us a chance to do better.” It
will be a challenge to work with the existing police, and a Latina
police chief, as we try to restrict their abuses, reach agreements
with them on specific behaviors, and at the same time call for their
entire budget and role to be eliminated. The police are real people
and real political forces and we engage them all the time through
protests, conversations and negotiations. As one example, in May 2016,
four years before this vote, the Strategy Center negotiated with
former LASPD chief Steven Zipperman, a very decent person, to return
the weapons—1 tank, 3 grenade launchers, and 61 M-16s—to the
Department of Defense and issue an apology to the community—which he
did. And yet, how did he have the power and the will to have ordered
those weapons in the first place? And can you even imagine a white
school district having procured those weapons in the first place?

Now, when the police are recalcitrant and won’t negotiate it is easy
to be in complete opposition to them. But when they approach you and
say, “OK. I know you want to get rid of us but right now we exist
and you exist so we better sit down and figure out if there are
agreements we can reach” it presents a tactical conundrum. In most
cases, the Strategy Center would agree to those conversations and
possible negotiations for specific improvements because that is our
fundamental approach. We feel responsible to oppressed communities and
our members are part of and represent those communities. People
understand if you go into negotiations in good faith and come back to
say the offer was tokenistic, manipulative, and even harmful. While
they will still want to hear the details we have gotten great support
because people trust that we did not reject the conversation out of
hand. That does not mean that others cannot reach different tactical
decisions and yes, we have also turned down meetings we felt were
manipulative on their face. But in this case, as just one tactical
dilemma, the LASPD will be here for at least a year and most likely
more in some, hopefully reduced capacity. And what if board members
who have voted to cut their funding also ask us to negotiate with them
to further restrict their authority and actions? The specifics are for
each group to work out in their particularity. But our experience has
indicated that for us, when in doubt we engage. For us, it is the
clarity of the demands, the building of an independent base around a
radical, structural program, building a broad united front to support
those proposals, close ties with our members and the broader
community, and the constant pushing for the most radical solutions
that can give community-based revolutionaries the upper hand. So in
this case, yes, our ongoing negotiations with the police, still shaped
by the specifics of when and how and in consultation with our allies
to have a clear and agreed upon tactical plan, are part of our “No
police in the LAUSD Schools” campaign.

UPDATE ON THE BOARD AND LASPD STRUGGLES

At the last LAUSD board meeting on Tuesday August 4, the
counter-movement counter-organized in the most predictable but also
substantial form. As Channing Martinez reported,

_“_A group of teachers, administrators, and students from Building
Blue Bridges, at Crenshaw and Dorsey High Schools, the last high
concentration Black high schools, spoke against the cuts in the LASPD
budget. BBB is a police initiated program, in the long tradition of
Police Athletic Leagues, (“PAL”) to portray the police as part of
the counseling and even therapeutic services of the school. More than
20 people spoke for an hour and half saying that the cuts in the LASPD
budget would require cuts in their program. They argued that Building
Blue Bridges takes students on field trips, assemblies, and seminars
with police officers. ‘We do not believe that most police are brutal
or racist and in fact, if you just give them a chance to get to know
the students better these problems can be solved.’ A group of
organized Latinos were very critical of Black Lives Matter by name.
They argued that LAUSD used Black Lives Matter protests and the death
of George Floyd to carry out policies that were very harmful to
Latinos. They told stories about gang violence (both Black and Latinx)
and argued that the School Police protect them and make them feel
safe. My conclusion is clear. Just as we predicted “the other
side” is mobilizing.

This is all the more reason that our movement has to organize for
every board meeting, bring more speakers, rebut hostile speakers, and
constantly try to win and shape the terms of the debate. There are
some who think we can just come to each board meeting and ask for
another motion to further cut the police. Yes, that should be part of
the plan. But the board is not going to take another vote to make
further cuts for many more months or even until next year’s budget
vote. It is the fine-grained day by day organizing and active
participation in each LAUSD board meeting that can create the
conditions for the next major offensive on our part and the next
opportunity for another round of cuts. And yes, to create the
framework for when the next visible instance of police abuse generates
the next mass upsurge that can help us win greater cuts.

THE POLICE AROUND THE COUNTRY ARE ORGANIZING A WHITE AND RIGHT
BACKLASH

The United States has more than 850,000 paid and armed police who,
through police unions, police political associations and police
contributions to and threats against elected officials are a political
army to fight for police political power. Police and their many allies
will use every incident of Black self-defense or aggressive and
pre-emptive self-defense, or Black people attacking each other, or
Black people violating the system’s laws most of which were passed
to arrest Black folks in the first place to prove to an audience that
already hates Black people that the Defund the Police movement is a
threat to their psychological, cultural, and physical safety. In New
York City, Black people are 24% of the population but 50% of the
arrests—another mathematical proof of genocide—even after stop and
frisk has allegedly been overturned. And yet, the _New York
Post_ recently showed a picture of two unarmed Black people
“putting a policeman in a chokehold” with the headline, “So you
want to defund the police?” Now in fact the officer was not injured
and in many instances he would have murdered the Black people not just
arrested them. But the point is the system is on the ideological
counter-attack. So yes, again, we have to expand agit-props, political
education and the war of ideas as another front to build up our forces
and to combat any loss of momentum from our victory.

TRUMP IS TAKING OUT ADS ATTACKING THE DEMOCRATS AND THE “DEFUND THE
POLICE” MOVEMENT

Trump’s ads, in the tradition of Leni Riefenstahl_, _show
demonstrators, many white, throwing objects through windows in protest
against U.S. racist practices. The voice over says, “This is what
happens when you defund the police.” The ads offer visual incitement
to Trump’s base to support his “if you loot we will shoot”
movement.

The Democratic Party wants to divert the Defund the Police Movement to
a moderate and ineffective appeal for “racial justice” that it
hopes can turn out the Black vote without turning off the white vote.
The just concluded Democratic Convention spoke about “inclusion”
of Black people into the party, inclusion of Black women into the
party, ending “private prisons” when it is the public prisons that
are the main danger, and “criminal justice reform” that cannot
threaten the police or prison guards because no one even knows what it
means. Meanwhile Joe Biden has rejected any efforts to defund the
police. He does defend “peaceful protest” but will not defend the
righteous militancy of a life and death movement with anything like
the vehemence with which Trump is denouncing us. How does our movement
keep winning the battle of ideas in a society that is a racist police
state? How do we push the Democrats to go beyond cooptation of Black
Lives Matter?

The core of our problem is that the police state is not a reflection
of “The Right” or “Trump” but an integral part of the
formation and perpetuation of the U.S white settler state into which
progressive Democrats of color are trying to integrate—often as
simply the best choice they believe is historically possible. In every
major urban center it is the Democratic Party that is the political
apparatus of the police state. Throughout U.S. history the police were
armed settlers murdering Indigenous peoples nations in the way of
their land grab hysteria, the police were the armed forces on the
plantation and the white poor slave catchers organized at their
periphery; the Klan and the police so integral that in the civil
rights movement we said they were “blue by day and white by
night.” In CORE and SNCC we knew that the Southern racist Democrats
and northern Democratic liberals were joined at the hip. So today, in
Los Angeles and among all of our allies in the Police Out of the
Schools Movement, as we push beyond our important but short term
victory, the larger strategic question is even more imposing: How do
we “defund the police” when the police and the U.S. army are the
institutionalized enforcement arms of the U.S. white settler police
state?

AN ORGANIZER’S INTERPRETATION OF SOME LESSONS FROM THE DEFUND THE
POLICE/NO POLICE IN THE LAUSD SCHOOLS CAMPAIGN

I understand that all organizers assert some relationship of cause and
effect to prove or validate their theories. So will I. In my work with
the Strategy Center and my role as an historian of social movement I
give great emphasis on what I call “theory-driven practice,
practice-driven theory.” Based on our collective sum-up of our own
practice, the practice we observe of others, and a deep reading of the
history of revolutionary movements and revolutions, in the end all I
can say is, “These to us, are the lessons we have drawn from our own
work and a broader reading of history.” I hope it can inform your
own organizing work and again lead to discussion and debate.

As I repeat for myself and my readers every time, “There is no such
thing as “history” only the battle over the interpretation of
history.” While I have written this article as a participant in a
Black-led united front trying to represent the views of its leading
actors in the end any article reflects the politics and conclusions of
its author.

_Re-asserting Black Power, Black self-determination, and Black focus
and priority to drive the larger movement was critical to our
victory._

The pro-Black movement to fight anti-Blackness won the day. We won the
ideological victory. While many of our groups are all Black, others
all Latinx, others Black and Latinx, others multi-racial, and others
virtually all white, we all agreed this was a Black moment in history
that were fighting to expand. Every group with whom we worked
including our own Latina members and many overwhelmingly Latinx
groups, wanted to punctuate that virtually all the martyrs of our
movement including George Floyd are Black. In the testimony before the
board, besides many Black students, it was deeply moving that many
Latina students spoke of their own suffering and oppression but then
said, “But you treat the Black students even worse and I am here in
solidarity with them.”

Within the broader social justice movement, some Latinx groups have
asserted it is a Latinx/Black or “people of color” alliance but
have not prioritized the special oppression of Blacks to the grave
detriment of the Black community—and in our view, their own work.
Some Latinx organizers, aware that Latinos are entering the labor
market as Blacks are being driven out, moving into South Central as
Blacks are being driven out, have replied, “It is not our fault or
responsibility. These are the “objective factors” of capitalism
that we can’t control.” Other Latinx organizers, not just in the
Strategy Center but throughout the U.S. have argued that it is the
Latinx working class and community that must rally to the side of the
Black community to address its special and egregious oppression at the
hands of the white settler state. Every organizer can control the
political line, the political narrative, and the ideological argument.
At the LAUSD school board, it was the powerful line of Black priority
set by Black Lives Matter L.A. enthusiastically supported by UTLA,
Inner City Struggle, Labor/Community Strategy Center, and so many
Latinx students that carried the day This time the battle to give
focus and credit to the Black movement that has fought so hard for
every oppressed group did not liquidate the experiences of Latinx
people but in fact amplified them.

_Reconstructing the Latinx/immigrant rights, Chicano movement force in
the long battle against the police in the schools and the police
state_

In our work and in this campaign, in that many of our high school
members are Latina, but also because those are our politics, we have
also argued that Latinx people, Mexican immigrants, and Chicanos are
oppressed peoples inside the borders of the United States with the
right of self-determination. As early as 1994, in our opposition to
the racist, anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in California, the Strategy
Center wrote and published, Immigrant Rights and Wrongs—to fight for
open borders and human rights for immigrants that superseded any U.S.
racist laws. Our initial history was shaped by Center founder Rodolfo
Acuna in his book _Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. _The
dilemma now is very deep in the organizing process that goes beyond
facile assertions of Black/Latino unity. There are deep fears and
conservative instincts inside the Black and Latino communities. There
are many families who support and defend the police out of their own
experience but also the 24/7 barrage of pro-police propaganda that
shapes the entire U.S. ideological field. If our movement loses its
Black priority we will lose our moral and political edge. If we
minimize or liquidate the specificity of Latino oppression, the
courage of the Dreamers, the militancy of Latinx youth who have their
own fights with the system we will also lose our strategic power. This
complex navigation how to build a powerful Black/Latinx movement that
goes beyond a mechanical coalition is beyond the scope of this
article. But I can assert that in the battle against the Los Angeles
School Police we found that note, that lyric, that symphony that
captured everyone’s imagination. The challenge will be to keep
reconstructing it as new conditions develop and new forces in both the
Black and Latino communities take us on.

_We situated the fight against school police in the larger frame of
the public schools as colonial instruments in which “education” is
code for socializing, subordinating, and breaking the will of Black
and Latinx students_.

During our last 20 years of organizing in the L.A. public schools, we
have seen that every abuse of the rights of Black and Latinx students,
and always, with by far the worst impacts on the Black students,
reflected the deeper abuses of colonial education. When we fought to
stop the ticketing of students as they entered the school for
“truancy,” at the instruction of the School board, when we stopped
administrators, at the instruction of the school board, use the
racially constructed violation called “willful defiance” (meaning
Black boys expressing any form of life) as a pretense for their
suspension and expulsion we developed and even deeper understanding of
the school as a jail. The school system imposes a culture of
surveillance, passes, disciplinary proceedings, verbal reprimands, and
school police on the students. Black students, often young women,
testified that from the minute they walk in to school they are a
suspect. Their every behavior is monitored, criticized, controlled,
and disciplined. As more one Black student said, “After so many
interactions with the school police, I wake up in the morning and do
not want to go to school” For those working on uplifting the
academic performance of Black students the “school as jail”
formulation points to a radical dismantling of an entire spider web of
repressive institutions and behaviors toward Black students. We
rejected the politics of close-to-the-Democratic Party community
groups who speak about “education reform” “racially
disproportionate impacts” and “implicit bias.” Instead, we
indicted the public schools as anti-Black and settler colonial and the
school police as a military arm to enforce racist policies—not an
aberration but a necessity.

In the Strategy Center’s June 1, 2020 letter to the LAUSD School
board and Superintendent Austin Beutner, we wrote,

“The entire concept of “school police” is a reflection of a
colonialist and racist worldview. Today, the public schools, even with
their best efforts, continue the pattern of “Indian Residential
Schools” in which the goal or at least the outcome is the breaking
of the spirit, subjugation, and humiliation of Black and Latinx
students to bend them to the will of an oppressive white society. We
know there are many who do not believe they are perpetuating those
pernicious impacts, but we look to the best intentioned supervisors,
teachers, and board members to fight for the end of “School
police” in order to stop inflicting pain and racial abuse on Black
and Latinx students and families. While we can of course enumerate
specific abuses of the LASPD we are arguing that _the daily
experience of Black and Latinx students being patrolled by armed
police creates a terrible and terrifying sense of normalcy that is in
itself cultural and racial assault on their development as full human
beings and has profoundly traumatic impacts._”

In an empire based on the dominating ideology of “one nation,
indivisible” the subordination and integration of the Black and
Latinx child into the ideology and institutions of the white settler
state is the central role of public education. In this case, students,
parents, teachers, and board members took a small but significant step
to challenge and discredit the ideology and institutional power of
colonial education.

A_fter decades of confronting the racist policies of the school system
and school police the Movement, with great leadership from Black Lives
Matter L.A., escalated the criticism that the police by their very
existence are racist._

United Teachers of Los Angeles president Cecily Myart-Cruz, who was a
middle school teacher, said, “What is a Black child supposed to
think when they see a policeman with a gun and pepper spray?” Others
asked, “and what happens to their soul, their confidence, their
academic achievement? Again, the reality of police state trauma is a
direct factor in depressing and suppressing Black student academic
performance and self-esteem. The police by their very existence are
racist. Their intimidation and threats while also deeply impacting
Chicano(a) and Latinx students is imposed at a far higher level and
ferocity against Black students. This is rooted in the slave ship
police, the plantation police, and the white racist police constructed
to capture, torture, and return the runaway slaves.

_The very demand to dismantling the police and the police state,
reflected in Defund the Police movement, is a major breakthrough in
history_ _and a challenge to the Democratic Party and Civil Rights
establishment._

In the midst of the mass rebellions in response to the police murder
of George Floyd, every urban police chief, every Democratic Party
elected official, every member of the civil rights establishment tied
to big city mayors spoke with studied sincerity to call for laws to
prosecute police and limit their immunity, and laws and contracts to
give more authority for police chiefs to remove the unbearably
clichéd and omnipresent “rotten apples.” In the midst of the new
growth industry of media selected Black talking heads with no ties or
accountability to social movements the goal of the establishment was
clear—to create a new class of commentators whose interests were to
promote their careers while consciously deflecting and rejecting the
movement to dismantle the police altogether. (And yes, movement people
must fight so that the leaders of social movements are the
spokespeople who represent their demands to the media— another front
in the endless war.) Today Joe Biden refuses to defund any police
while Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti made a deceptive and tokenistic
reduction of no more than $150 million from a $2 billion police force
while retaining all 10,000 armed officers. The U.S. still perpetuates
more than 1,000 police killings per year in which Blacks are murdered
at 300% times their percentage in the population. Our movement broke
through the deceptions of the Democratic establishment including many
in the Black community who issue the endless and hopeless calls for
body cameras and other superficial restrictions on an armed army that
is a law unto itself. Our victory in an actual defunding that led to
an immediate lay-off of armed police sets the tone for a larger defund
the police movement.

_Counter-hegemonic demand development is critical to give content to
the Defund the Police movement and avoid tokenistic and cooptive
maneuvers by Democratic Party and civil rights establishment forces.
Our 50% cut, 75% cut, then 90% cut and then phase out the school
police altogether demand and movement can shape the defund the police
movements in the U.S_.

Why are there very few movements calling for a 50% cut in the police
departments? Why are there very even fewer to even conceptualize a
50%, 75%, and then 90% cut in police funding—which is tantamount to
completely phasing out the police? I worry that there is not enough
tactical unity in the movements challenging the police state. So even
when people say, “Defund the police” there is little agreement or
will to turn that into an actual long-term campaign. The “Defund the
Police” movement is still vulnerable to cooptation until it can
agree in each city as to how much money will be defunded, how many
police let go, and how fast they can win the actual changes. The No
Police in the L.A. Schools Movement’s demand for a 50%, then 75%
then 90% cut is one that other organizations and movements should
consider. And our actual victory of 35% could be a baseline of
expectations in an actual struggle that won. And despite the normal
tensions inside our united front, those contradictions were resolved
through very principled struggle so that we all were really fighting
for the largest cut possible. The unity of our forces was a decisive
factor in the actual vote by the school board.

_The dialectical alliance of youth, new forces, militant long-distance
runners, and sustained organizing work was key to the victory._

In every social movement, it takes new forces, new people, new energy,
often new organizations, coming from Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and
Third World youth, and white youth following their leadership, to
provide the driving force of historical change. It was Black Lives
Matter and Students Deserve who provided that great driving force in
Los Angeles supported by Inner City struggle high school students, BSS
students, and high school students from Strategy Center Taking Action
Social Justice clubs. While there was great leadership by youth and
students, _many of them participated and provided leadership inside
multi-generational organizations _with long track records and deep
community ties that had the influence and muscle to win the day. Black
Lives Matter L.A. began in 2013. Students Deserve has been in the
schools for more than a decade. The most progressive leadership of
UTLA has fought since the Coalition for Educational Justice for more
than 15 years. Inner City Struggle has struggled for 20 years and the
Strategy Center has strategized for 30. Many of the people providing
leadership at the board meeting had a long history of struggle and
agreements with board members that helped shape the final breakthrough
vote and many students learned that demonstrations, social media,
preparing testimony, testifying, and direct conversations with
community leaders and board members are part of an integrated tactical
plan.

Inside the social justice movement in which many young people are
providing leadership there are debates about the politics of what is
now called “youth organizing.” The Strategy Center, having
recruited, trained, retained, and encouraged hundreds of Black,
Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander organizers, and a few white organizers
as well, has chosen create school based youth/student forms but also
integrate “youth organizing” into a larger multi-generational
strategy of a Black/Latin@/Third World alliance. Our student leaders
share that perspective and have often fought for it. We have seen some
views in the movement that identify “youth” and “youth
organizing” in ways to overestimate and even exacerbate generational
contradictions inside Black and Latinx communities and to
underestimate the many different political perspectives between and
among students. Even today, when more than half of our most active
members are Black and Latinx high school students, inside the Strategy
Center it is our multi-generational strategy and tactical plan that
attracts the students who have the greatest political unity with us.
We are presently working with more than 200 high school students in
three Los Angeles High Schools all of whom, based on the inevitability
of the laws of evolution, are getting older every day. It is our
appeal to them as future college students or entrants into the job
market and from there long distance runners, and their direct
experience in working with people of all generations that gives them
hope that their lives, and those of their families, can be part of a
long-term and unified national liberation struggle.

In Los Angeles, we have, for the most part, avoided the pitfalls of
over-stated generational conflicts inside Black and Latinx community
organizations. Obviously if older members of an organization try to
dominate or dismiss the energy and initiative of young people or fear
their anger and militancy then they place the entire future of the
organization at risk and will bring many of the problems down on
themselves.

We are also deeply concerned that some political lines inside “youth
organizing” lead to a caricature, rejection, and dismissal of the
achievements of Black, Chicano, and Third World revolutionary
organizations throughout U.S. history —and those of only a few years
ago. That is why we teach, “Study history, interpret history, and
make history” through our Strategy and Soul Revolutionary Organizers
Film and Book Club whose members are from 12 to 95. Many of our
leaders are high school students who also reach out to their parents,
families, and teachers. Inside the No Police in the L.A. Schools
campaign, the energy and initiative of youth was palpable, welcomed,
and given great room to breathe. But in turn, the students gave great
respect to parents, teachers, family, movement veterans, and yes,
LAUSD board members, who were critical to the victory. In our
struggle, it was a multi-generational Black led, Latino supported,
multi-racial united front that won the day. We did not attack each
other. We kept our eyes on the prize. We focused on the system, our
demands, and the victory.

_Our movement had greater power and greater multi-racial unity by
situating the No Police struggle inside the larger catastrophe of U.S.
attacks against Black people. Inside that united front the Strategy
Center situated our broader educational work in the frame of the Black
community as an oppressed nation inside the borders of the United
States. No one wanted to or chose to debate with each other the
specificity of our structural analysis of Black oppression but we all
shared and expressed the egregious, outrageous, unacceptable, and
systematic nature of the system’s attack on Black people._

The Strategy Center, as one group in this broad united front, carried
out our own independent political line to guild our work and
contribute to the larger debate and discussion. For us we use the term
“Black Nation” to describe and analyze the reality of Black
experience and nationality formation inside the U.S. imperialist white
settler. In my own study, I am deeply influenced by
the _Comintern’s 1928 and 1930 Resolutions on the Afro-American
National Question_ and Komozi Woodard’s discussion of Black
national formation in _Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black
Power Politics_. In the present, Channing Martinez and I use it
frequently on our radio show, Voices from the Frontlines and explore
it at public events at Strategy and Soul with professors Akinyele
Umoja and Robin D.G. Kelley. And contrary to stereotypes of groups
that have a private revolutionary and public reformist discourse we
use those concepts, based on time, place, and conditions, in public
testimony at government agencies and in discussions with elected
officials.

We use the concept in the broadest sense of an oppressed people with
the right of self-determination whose dire circumstances allow them to
bring human rights charges against the government of the United
States. We elevate the work of Malcolm X who said, “To be clear, I
am a Black nationalist.” On the other hand, we have worked to
distance ourselves from the sometimes bitter infighting inside the
Black movement as different groups have confronted each other over
their particular views as to what is a Black nation and which is the
group best able to lead the struggle—often with the result that a
possible united front is destroyed.

In our work we center discussions of Black revolutionary nationalism
around the very concrete and historically determined efforts of
William L. Patterson, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X who
brought the plight of Black people in the U.S. to the attention of the
United Nations. Under international human rights law and practice,
they could only do so by arguing that Black people constitute a
racially and nationally oppressed people inside a hostile and racist
nation state.

At the Strategy Center, our perspective that Black people are an
oppressed nation suffering genocide at the hands of the U.S.
imperialist white settler state is the larger frame that has given
greater power to our grassroots organizing in South Central Los
Angeles and throughout the 4 million person city and 10 million person
county. For us, it has been critical as to why and we retain members
and organizers for 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 and more years.

As late as March of this year, this perspective was most clearly
articulated in the Channing Martinez for City Council race. Martinez,
who described himself as a Black, Garifuna, queer, civil rights and
climate justice revolutionary won 2400 votes, overwhelmingly from
Black voters, and 5% of the total. His influence at the dozens of
large community candidates’ forums was far larger than his vote.
Martinez ran on a counter-hegemonic platform that began with the
Strategy Center’s 5 core demands—No Police in the LAUSD Schools,
No Police on MTA buses and trains, Stop MTA Attacks on Black
Passengers, Free Public Transportation, No and Cars in L.A. But during
the campaign that just ended in March 2020 (and a run-off from which
with the two highest polling candidates will be in November 2020)
Channing expanded his program to calling for a 50% cut in the funding
of the LAPD and 50% of all new public and private sector jobs going to
Black applicants. He put forth the entire set of demands, including
Open Borders for all immigrants and U.S. hands off Venezuela, China,
Russia, Iran, Cuba, and the world as part of an anti-genocide
campaign. These four months of the most intense door to door, person
to person organizing put us in conversation with thousands of
potential voters, 1,000 of whom signed petitions to allow him to get
on the ballot and 2400 of whom voted for him. This campaign, only
three months before the June board votes, gave additional support for
the Strategy Center’s participation in the No Police in the LAUSD
Schools campaign and confidence that our call to “Stop U.S. Genocide
Against the Black Nation” could, with art and thoughtfulness, be
helpful to our work and the larger campaign. And in terms of political
theory we learned even more than we understood before the campaign
that for the Black community and most people in the U.S.,
“politics” still is best understood as “electoral politics.”
The idea that we ran a “revolutionary community organizing
campaign” validated our highest hopes. Somehow, when a young Black
man, from Crenshaw High School and Otis College of Art and Design, is
on a panel with 4 other substantial candidates, including Mark Ridley
Thomas, a Democratic Party powerhouse, says he wants to cut the LAPD
budget by 50 percent or end all police in the schools, people seem to
listen better to the ideas. And when Channing said, “If I am elected
I will spend 90 percent of my time in the community and 10 percent at
the city council, and MRT said, “If you do that they will eat your
lunch” it was a great and thoughtful debate about the role of
community organizing and elected officials. And it wasn’t again
right or wrong as much as the entire discussion raised the
consciousness of the Black community, and all of us on the campaign.
All of this work created a far strong base for the Strategy Center
going into the No Police in the Schools votes of June 2020.

In our political education classes, we have given great attention the
brilliant work of William L. Patterson—_We Charge Genocide: the
Crime of the U.S. Government against the Negro People_—presented to
the United Nations in 1951 and re-issued in 1970 with a chilling
introduction by Ossie Davis.

Black men were brought to this country to serve an economy which
needed our labor. And even when slavery was over, there was still a
need for us in the American economy as cheap labor. We picked the
cotton, dug the ditches, shined the shoes, swept the floors, hustled
the baggage, washed the clothes, cleaned the toilets—we did the
dirty work for all America—that was our place, the place where the
American economy needed us to be. But a revolution of profoundest
import is taking place in America. Every year our economy produces
more and more goods and services with fewer and fewer men. Hard,
unskilled work—the kind nobody else wanted, that made us so welcome
in America, the kind of work that we “niggers” have always
done—is fast disappearing. Even in the South—in Mississippi for
example —95 per cent and more of the cotton is picked by machine.
And in the North as I write this, more than 30 per cent of black
teenage youth is unemployed. The point I am getting to is that for the
first time, black labor is expendable; the American economy does not
need it any more. What will a racist society do to a subject
population for which it no longer has any use? Will America, in a
sudden gush of reason, good conscience, and common sense reorder her
priorities?—revamp her institutions, clean them of racism so that
Blacks and Puerto Ricans and American Indians and Mexican Americans
can be and will be fully and meaningfully included on an equal
basis? _Or, will America, grow meaner and more desperate as she
confronts the just demands of her clamorous outcasts, choose
genocide?_”

In 1989, forty years after the publication of _We Charge Genocide_,
the Strategy Center published the historic work of Professor Cynthia
Hamilton, one of our founding members—_Apartheid in American City:
The Case of the Black Community in South Central Los Angeles. _In her
terrifyingly prescient description

“The larger unspoken malady affecting South Central stems from the
idea that the land is valuable but the present tenants are not. This
‘Bantustan’ like its counterparts in South Africa serves now only
as a holding space for Blacks who are no longer of use to the larger
economy. Today, South Central is 75% Black with 280,000 Black
residents. It is a wasteland with few jobs, no industry, and few
functioning services.”

Now, 70 years after the publication of _We Charge Genocide_ and 30
years after the publication of _Apartheid in an American City_, the
genocidal policies of the U.S. government have been further
instrumentalized.

In 1970, there were 200,000 people in U.S. prisons, at least 25% of
whom were Black. At the time we thought that number was an outrageous
reflection of U.S. racism and police force—which it was. Today there
are 2.3 million people in prison almost 1 million of whom are Black.
In 1970 there were less than 200,000 people in U.S. prisons. Today
there are 200,000 women! In U.S. prisons. And while Black people are
13% of the population Black women are 30% of all the women in
prison—a factor of almost 300% more than random and even more
compared to white underrepresentation.

The astronomical, predictable and consistent measurement of Black
overrepresentation in every index of pain, suffering, and
misery—imprisonment, homelessness, death by police, unemployment,
death by COVD 19—at ratios of 200%, 300%, 500%. 600% over
“equal” or “random” experience of is a central mathematical
proof of genocide.

So, today, we situate the struggle to eliminate all police from the
LAUSD and every school in the U.S. as a central component of the fight
to stop and reverse U.S. genocide against Black people. Look at every
major urban center in the U.S. There is a systematic policy, carried
out by Democratic Party big city mayors, to drive Black people out
of _every major city, every major job market, out of any area of
Black concentration and Black political power. _The miseducation and
mistreatment of the Black child is tied to an even larger and
nefarious plan to brutally punish Black people, the Black community,
the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Liberation Movement, for its
leadership of the Great Revolution of the Sixties. For those of us who
were there and saw a revolution with our own eyes, for those
Indigenous, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander and white movement people,
it was unquestioned that the Black Liberation Movement’s provided
essential political and moral leadership to every oppressed group in
the U.S. and a significant movement of anti-racist, anti-war white
folks. We saw and participated in the Black occupation of key urban
centers, in its mass rebellions organized and spontaneous. We saw the
Black anti-war, anti-colonial leadership of the anti-Vietnam war,
anti-Apartheid movement. We saw Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. King,
Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Harry Edwards, Ruth Turner,
and thousands of Black leaders oppose every U.S. coup, invasion, and
mass murder. We also saw The System turn on any Black leaders who went
beyond “integration” into challenging the U.S. Empire and the
ferocious and punitive backlash against SNCC, the Black Panthers, Dr.
King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and any other Blacks against empire. The
systematic white backlash reflected in driving Black people out of any
centers of political power today is rooted in the system’s fear and
hatred of Black rebellion since the first enslaved African was forced
onto the first white European slave ship.

_The fight to get Black people back to their previous areas of
political concentration— the “right of return” of Black people
to New Orleans, Harlem, and South Central— has been a growing focus
of our work and the No Police in the LAUSD Schools campaign_

In Los Angeles, the school system’s crimes are reflected in
terrifying statistics—Black children, once 25% of the public school
population, now comprise only 8% of the LA public school population.
No system of this magnitude and power can have an outcome it did not
plan. It is clear the city, the ruling class, the Democratic Party,
does not want a large Black population and neither does it school
system. As we judge all people by the consequences of their actions,
the LAUSD, as an institution, does not want Black children to feel
comfortable, confident, and welcome and has to understand that the
result is Black students have great difficulty in reading,
mathematics, and every other measurement of performance. This is an
intentional and racist outcome. In fact, despite its protestations to
the contrary, the public school system does not want Black children
and their families at all.

The “Right of Return” is a demand associated with the Palestinian
people’s struggle for self-determination and national liberation. It
can also shape the most engaged programmatic conversations about how
to significantly increase the Black population of the LA schools and
every urban center in the U.S. We have to begin by protecting and
prioritizing the 50,000 remaining Young, Gifted, and Black students
who remain. But we also need a real plan to bring 350,000 missing
Black people back to Los Angeles, 100,000 Black people back to New
Orleans, and 100,000 Black people back to Harlem so that “the right
of return” is a demand tied to a tactical plan. The occupied,
colonized, and terrorized Black children in the L.A. school system
cannot be made free and whole without that larger frame, that larger
struggle to protect and expand their families and communities.

CONCLUSION—BRINGING OUR MOVEMENT ONTO THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
STAGE—DEFEATING DONALD TRUMP IN THE 2020 ELECTIONS, BRINGING A BLACK
AND THIRD WORLD LIBERATION CHALLENGE TO BIDEN/HARRIS AND THE
DEMOCRATIC PARTY

As we move to build on our victory to expand the Black Liberation
Movement and the Black/Latinx/Third World Alliance the Strategy Center
is paying greater attention to the forthcoming presidential
elections— where a fascist president encourages right and white wing
thugs to run rampant north and south and threatens to cancel the
election or refuse to leave office if he is not re-elected. While some
legalistically argue “he can’t do that” Trump is already
signaling to his forces that if Biden is elected there will be an
armed, right-wing uprising that will of course target Black and
Mexican people to keep him in power.

Under these circumstances, there is an urgent need to build a united
front against fascism in alliance with the Democrats and work for the
election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But to be clear, there are
also many fascists who live inside the Democratic Party. As Biden and
Kamala Harris threaten war with China, Venezuela, and Iran, the
election of the Democratic Party of war and racism will produce its
own profound challenges for our movement. Rather than talking about
what to do “after the election” the momentum from the Black Lives
Matter/Defund the Police/No Police in the LAUSD Schools victory has to
be brought directly into the national and Democratic Party debate. To
be clear, none of the proposals below are being articulated by Biden,
Harris, or the Democratic Party platform. We also reach out to our
friends in every formation, Movement For Black Lives, Black Futures
Lab, Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, who share
these concerns to use their influence to support these demands as part
of their own agenda for pushing the Democrats to the Black, to the
Brown, and to the Left.

_Cut all funding for federal, state, and local police forces. The call
to “Defund the Police” and our call for “the social welfare
state not the police state; climate justice state not the warfare
state” goes to the heart of what the United States is, not just what
it does._

As our researchers, Taylor Bentzen and Joseph Seyedan, worked to
document the full institutional extent of the police and military
state their work also exposed their many connections and
interpenetrations of the federal government and local police forces
into one unified dictatorship. As our movement fights for no police in
the schools, no police on the trains, on the buses, in the streets, in
the communities, in the workplaces and on the roads it’s a true
miracle that we were able to defund any part of any this repressive
web. So now, how do we extend that discussion to cut the funding for
ICE, the FBI, the CIA, and the COPS program, and other federal
enforcement and intervention program? As just one example, the
Strategy Center was able to convince the LA school police to return
weapons to the Department of Defense 1033 Program that provides
military grade weapons to state, local, and school police forces. But
how do we shut down the entire program? In 2016, in the last year of
the Obama administration, the Strategy Center, along with many other
national civil rights groups, called on the administration to close
down the program altogether. Instead, they sided with the police
chiefs and were moving to relax the small restrictions they had
already placed on the program.

In every federal funding bill there are hundreds of millions and often
billions of dollars to fund federal law enforcement programs that are
often more punitive and onerous than the already racist and repressive
local police departments. We call on the Biden/Harris team to shut
down the federal Community Oriented Policing Services program (COPS)
established as part of the 1994 Bill and Hillary Clinton Crime Control
and Law Enforcement Act— that increased the federal penalties for
many crimes, including adding new offenses that can be punished by
death. The Department of Justice, which oversees the COPS program, has
provided $14 billion since its inception to hire and train local
police involved in community policing. Job Biden has pledged more than
$300 million a year to this pacification program. He must drop that
demand and shut down the program altogether.

Another federal atrocity is the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants that
were started as a part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to give more
funding, and more ties to the federal government, for $435 million
each year. Ironically, former president George W. Bush tried to end
the program but was overruled by both parties. _Those trying to
reform the Democratic Party and those of us working to defund the
police should demand the end to the COPS, Byrne JAG, and DOD 1033
programs._

_Quadruple the funding of the Department of Justice Civil Rights
Department. _The Justice department, as the federal agency that
oversees local and state police departments, does far more harm than
good. Still, the enforcement powers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act fall
under its purview and some very good people choose to work at
“Justice” with the hope to fight against police brutality and
local and state racist practices. The federal consent decree imposed
on the Ferguson Police Department, with all of its limitations, was
the type of federal power that a strong Department of Justice can use
on the side of more radical and structural demands by civil rights,
Black, Latinx, and human rights organizers.

Under the Civil Rights Act each federal department, along with the
DOJ, has the power to cut all federal funding for the programs it
funds if it finds racially discriminatory practices—Department of
Education, Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and
Urban Development, Department of Health and Human Services. The
federal government, even under the weakened 1964 Civil Rights Act, has
the power to cut off all funding from every school board, police
department, hospital, city, and county that is found guilty of
discriminating against Black, Latinx, and other oppressed minorities.
It still has the power to under the legal standard of “disparate
impact” in which plaintiffs would only have to prove that a specific
policy “disproportionately” harms Black students. If that could be
proven the federal government would have the right and power to cut
off all federal funds. While the federal government only provides 8
percent of all local school budgets the loss of federal funds for
public schools could be a powerful weapon. The more structural problem
than the Supreme Court restrictions is that Democratic Administrations
have rarely chosen to exercise that power against racist Democrats in
urban and rural centers since it would require convicting fellow
Democrats of violating civil rights. (The Strategy Center and Bus
Riders Union, after extensive federal filings by the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund and Public Advocates, got the Department
of Transportation on three separate occasions to accept a
discrimination complaint against the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Transportation Authority–in itself a significant breakthrough. And
yet, in each case, two under Obama and one under Trump, the Department
of Transportation Civil Rights Department and Department of Justice
took a dive and capitulated to the Democratic mayors—Villaraigosa
and Garcetti—rather than cut off MTA funds and support the rights of
500,000 Latino and Black bus riders. For those organizers in the
Movement for Black Lives, for the supporters of Sanders and Warren,
for The Squad, we need a major intervention in the 2020 election to
get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to pledge that they will make major
investments in the DOJ and Civil Rights Departments of each federal
agency and prosecute cities and states, even under Democratic mayors
and governors, including cutting off funding from government agencies
convinced of racial discrimination. Right now, no one even understands
this as a real demand and we need those who have greater access to the
Democratic Party to push these demands as a structural response to the
mass uprisings over the murder of George Floyd. You know as well as
we do that the party is focusing on visual diversity more than
anti-racist policies and our Movement needs your help.

We are also reaching out to many prominent, independent movement
people, who like us, are supporting Biden and Harris, to push beyond
their line, “vote for them because they are better than Trump and
can allow us to organize” to the demand, “which is why we need to
organize now! during not just after the campaign.

_Pass new federal amendments to the Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act that explicitly reinstate the legal right for civil rights groups,
called “private parties” to bring civil rights suits against
employers, institutions, and government with the same “disparate
impact” standard now available to the federal government._

When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, it clearly allowed civil
rights groups to bring their own cases whether or not the Department
of Justice or the Department of Transportation or any federal
department chose to bring them. As late as 1996 the Labor/Community
Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union, represented by the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund brought a civil rights case against the
Los Angeles MTA charging them with violating Title VI of the 1964
Civil Rights Act. We charged the MTA with violating the civil rights
of 500,000 bus and train riders by dramatically raising the bus fares
and cutting out the monthly bus pass causing “irreparable harm” to
Black and Latino riders. Back then, while we also argued that the MTA
was practicing intentional discrimination against Black and Latino
riders, our core case to seek a temporary restraining order was to
prove the high probability that we would “prevail on the merits of
our case” once we went to trial, that MTA policies created
“irreparable harm” to Black and Latino very low-income riders, and
the burden of proof was to show that MTA policies had racially
discriminatory “disparate impacts.” We did not to prove MTA
intentions only that the consequences of their policies were
discriminatory. Based on our legal filings, and brilliant court-room
advocacy by NAACP/LDF attorney Connie Rice, federal district courts
judge Terry Hatter issued a temporary restraining order against the
MTA preventing them from eliminating the monthly pass. Truly
miraculously (and captured in Haskell Wexlers’s film Bus Riders
Union) Judge Hatter’s order on September 1, 1994 forced the MTA to
reprint new bus passes that is had cancelled on the spot! Out of that
legal victory we negotiated a ten year consent decree with the MTA in
which we won $2.5 Billion in bus improvements for the oppressed class
of bus riders.

In a direct response to that and many other legal victories, a
reactionary Supreme Court, in 2001, issued a decision in _Sandoval v.
Alabama_ that overturned 37 years of legal precedent since the
passage of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a 5 to 4
decision, the court ruled, “There is no private right of action to
enforce disparate-impact regulations promulgated under Title V.” In
the case, Ms. Sandoval claimed that she was denied the right to a
Spanish language exam by the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles. And
yet, the court ruled, 5 to 4, in a decision it had already decided to
make, that the larger question was that she and her attorneys did not
have the right to bring that case in the first place. The courts, as
they usually do, just made up a new legal theory. They argued that
Congress never intended civil rights groups—that is “private
parties” —to be able to bring civil rights law suits unless they
could prove intentional discrimination. This decision has been
devastating to Black, Latino, civil rights groups who see
discrimination right in front of their face in Black and white. But
now the courts have imposed such restrictive criteria for bringing the
case that most of the time, the groups under legal advice, decide to
not even try. To be clear, this decision was made in 2001. President
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and for 2 years, had a Democratic
majority in both the Senate and the House. He never campaigned on this
issue, never raised this issue, never explained to people why
restoring the “right of private parties” to bring civil rights
suits under the disparate impact standard was so critical to Black and
oppressed groups. And yes, it does raise questions a as to why Beltway
Civil Rights Groups did not place those demands in front of him in the
most militant and urgent manner. Today, the Democrats must campaign,
popularize, and implement a plan to go back to Congress to pass new
legislation locking in the right of civil rights groups to bring civil
rights cases and reinstate “disparate impacts” as more than enough
proof to demand penalties and remedies. In Los Angeles, and yes, every
city in the country, when Black people are only 8% of the school
population but receive 25% of the tickets, 9% of the population but
50% the homeless, 20% of the riders on buses and trains but 50% of all
who are ticketed and arrested all of these “disparate impacts”
could lead to new civil rights challenges. And if the Democrats say
that they do not have a congressional majority, tell them they did not
need it when Obama was in power for 8 years because they could have
enforced the hell out of the law that still gave them the power while
making “re-instate the civil rights act” a national campaign. Do
not make hollow gestures about John Lewis, Dr. M.L. King and the
Edmund Pettis Bridge. Pass a new civil rights act! And don’t blame
the Republicans. Do what Trump does best. He fights for what he wants
and builds a base around it. We need a new national civil rights
movement, based in the path-breaking work by grassroots groups on the
ground, driven by the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter period in
history, and aggressively supported by Beltway Civil Rights groups who
have too often been part of the problem, to push the hell out of the
Democrats now! Don’t make hollow references to a civil rights
movement of old. Fight for that legacy by passing a new, powerful
civil rights act now!

_Demand that Biden, Harris, and the Democrats pledge non-interference
in the internal affairs of the People’s Republic of China, the
Republic of Cuba, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Russian
Federation, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and all other
nations in the world._

The United States military has a $750 billion budget, 1.2 million
armed soldiers, and 800 military bases all over the world to prevent
any third world nation or any nation that challenges its hegemony from
breathing. In Defund the police and No Police in the LAUSD Schools
campaign we described the public schools as centers of colonial
education begun in the horrific denial of the slaves’ right to read
and the Indian Residential Schools. But speaking for the Strategy
Center, we have to give far more attention and resources for campaigns
to support the right of self-determination of people all over the
world who are in constant threat of sanctions, military interventions,
CIA plots and coups, and even nuclear attack by our government. At the
height of the civil rights and Black Liberation movement and the
height of the Vietnamese people’s struggle for self-determination
and independence the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist frame was led by
Black organizers. From SNCC’s Hell No We Won’t Go to Vietnam to
Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam to Dr. King’s Beyond
Vietnam speech the anti-colonial rhetoric was backed up by aggressive
anti-war actions. Today, as both the Republicans and Democrats compete
for the most belligerent, racist, and militaristic rhetoric and policy
I worry that many people working for Biden and Harris will focus on a
“domestic” civil rights battle and conciliate with or even enable
their cold-war, hot war belligerence to win tactical victories and
enhance their self-image as movers and shakers. Throughout the
Democratic Convention the Democrats from Colin Powell to Barack Obama
told us that Donald Trump is “soft on dictators” but Joe Biden
will not be pushed around. Great! Pushed around by whom? It is the
U.S. that is threatening the world, terrified of China’s growing
economic and technological strength, and along with Israel, trying to
destroy any independent political forces in the Middle East such as
Iran. We can’t call for “No Police in the Schools” or even “in
our community” if we don’t make clear that “our community is the
world.” We began with Dr. King’s courageous strategic observation,
“The United States, my government, is the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world.”

As always it will be the Black movement and yes the Indigenous,
Latinx, and Arab movements with strong support from anti-racist
anti-imperialist whites who have to push the Democratic Party where it
does not want to go—and when needed take the party on frontally. The
Movement cannot give unconditional support to the Democrats and cannot
be complicit in their war crimes. As many of us with deep ties to the
Black and Latino communities form tactical and enthusiastic alliances
with the Democrats to defeat Trump we need to provide the most
principled, militant, and open struggle with any Democratic Party
efforts to impose racism and colonialism on any people inside or
outside the United States.

_Finding hope in the daily struggle of the Black community and the
lifetime journey of the revolutionary organizers_

In my organizing work, as I interrogate myself and train others, I
have a very sober understanding of The System’s power and the many
limitations of my and our organizing work. I do not want to raise
false hopes or contribute to self-congratulatory and self-serving
ideological deviations among our organizers and our organization. I
repeat to myself many times a day, the great frame by Amilcar Cabral,
the brilliant African leader from Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde
Islands “Tell no lies and claim no easy victories.”

But I tell you with all my truth and this is no lie. The people’s
victory, the Black victory, on June 30, 2020 to cut the LASPD budget
by $25 million and 35% was a damn hard fought and wonderful victory
that the whole movement should celebrate, propagate, and emulate. For
those who have taken the time to go with me on this organizers journey
I hope this work can push you to new heights of creativity,
insurgency, and victory.

_Eric Mann is a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality and the
Newark Community Union Project where he worked closely with the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He is honored to be among
the many hundreds who tell their stories on the Civil Rights Movement
Veterans website (crmvet.org [[link removed]]). He is
presently director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center working in
South Central Los Angeles at the Strategy and Soul Movement Center. He
and Channing Martinez co-host Voices from the Frontlines—Your
National Movement Building Show on KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles. He
welcomes comments at [email protected]_

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