Every city has its police department. No city would be complete without one. It would be sheer madness to try operating an American city without the heat. the fuzz. the man Americans are too far gone, or else they haven't arrived yet; the center does not exist, only the extremes. Take away the cops and Americans would have a coast-to-coast free-for-all. There are, of course, a few citizens who carry. their own private cops around with them. built into their souls. But there is robbery in the land, and larceny, murder, rape, burglary, theft, swindles, all brands of crime, profit, rent, interest and these blase descendants of Pilgrims are at each other's throats. To complicate matters, there are also rich people and poor people in America. There Negroes and whites.
Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Japanese all with equal rights Puerto Ricans, Mexicans. Jews, but unequal possessions. Some are haves and some are have-nots. All have been taught to worship at the shrine of General Motors. The whites are on top in America and they want to stay there, up there. They are also on top in the world, on the international level, and they want to stay up there, too. Everywhere there are those who want to smash this precious toy clock of a system, they want ever so much to change it, to rearrange things, to pull the whites off their high horse and make them equal. Every-where the whites are fighting prolong their status, to retard the erosion their position. In America, when everything else fails, they out the police.
international level, when everything else fails, they call out the armed forces.
A strange thing happened in Watts, in 1965.
August. The blacks, who in this land of private property have all private and no property, got excited into an uproar because they noticed a cop before he had a chance to wash the blood off his hands. Usually the police department can handle such flare-ups. But this time it was different. Things got out of hand. The blacks were running amok. burning, shooting, breaking. The police department was powerless COntrO them; chief called for reinforcements. Out came the National Guard, that ambiguous hybrid from the twilight zone wiete me domestic armv merges with the international; that hypocritical force poised within America and capable of action on either level, capable of backing up either the police or the armed forces. Unleashing their formidable firepower, they crushed the blacks. But things will never be the same again. Too many people saw that those who turned the other cheek in Watts got their whole head blown off. At the same time, heads were being blown off Vietnam. America was embarrassed, not by the quality of her deeds but by the surplus of publicity focused upon her negative selling points, and a little frightened because of what all those dead bodies, on two fronts, implied. Thies and pasta esk comety of ponteris Those corpses began to emerge, dripping with blood, out of the ashes of Watts. The blacks in Watts and all over America could now see the Viet Cong's point: both were on the receiving end of what the armed forces were dishing out.
now the blacks, stung by the new knowledg POLICE BRUTALITY!" From one end of the they have unearthed, cry OUL.
country to the other, the new war cry is raised. The youth, those nodes of compulsive energy who are all fuel and muscle, race their motors, itch to do something. The Uncle Toms, longer willing to get down on their knees to lick boots, do so from a squatting position. The black bourgeoisie call for Citizens Review Boards. to civilian control over the activity of the police. In back rooms, in dark stinking corners of the ghettos, self-conscious black men curse their own cowardice and stare at their rifles and pistols and shotguns laid out on tables before them, trembling as they wish for a manly impulse to course through their bodie and send them screaming mad into the streets looting from the hip. Black women look at their men as if they are bugs, curious growth of ence becomes in crutable waiting loating through the ghettos seeking a black homing pigeon that the police are only an instrument for the implementation of the policies of those who make the decisions. Police brutality is only one facet of the crystal of terror and oppression.
Behind police brutality there is social brutality, economic brutality, and political brutality.
From the perspective of the ghetto, this is not easy to discern: the TV newscaster and the radio announcer and the editorialists of the news-papers are wizards of the smoke screen and the show job.
What is true on the international level is true at home; except that the ace up the sleeve is casier to detect in the international arena. Who would maintain that American soldiers are in Vietnam on their own motion? They conscripted into the armed forces and taught were the wisdom of obeying orders. They were sent to Vietnam by orders of the generals in the Pentagon, who receive them from the Secretary Defense, who receives them from the President, who is shrouded in mystery. The soldier in the field in Vietnam, the man who lies in the grass and squeezes the trigger when a half-starved. trembling Vietnamese pcasall crosses his sights, is only following orders, carrying out a policy and a plan. He hardly knows what it is all about. They have wired-up tight with the slogans of TV and une World Series. All he knows is that he has been assigned to carry out a certain ritual of duties. He is well trained and does the best he can. He does a good job. He may want to please those above um with the quality of his performance. He may want to make sergeant.
or better. This man is from some hicky farm in Snit Creek, Georgia.
He only knew whom to kill after passing through boot camp. He could just as well come out ready to kill Swedes. He will kill a Swede dead, if he is ordered to do so.
Same for the policeman in Watts. He is not there on his own. They have all been assigned They have been told what to do and what not do: They have also been told what they better not do. So when they continually do something in every filthy getto in this shitty land, it means only that they are following orders.
It's no secret that in America the blacks are in total rebellion against the System. They want to get their nuts out of the sand. They don't like the way America is run, from top In America. everything is owned.
verything is held as private property. Someon las a brand on everything. There is nothing lef over, Until recently, the blacks themselves were counted as part somebody's private property, along with the chickens and goats The blacks have not forgotten this, principall because they are still treated as if they are part of someone's inventory of assets-or perhaps, in this day of rage against the costs of welfare, blacks are listed among the nation's liabilities. On any account, however, blacks are in no Poston to institution of private property. What they want respect or help maintain the is to figure out a way to get some of that property for themselves, to divert it to their own needs. This is what it is all about, and this is the brutality involved. This is the source of all brutality.
The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the American social order. A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the black and the police. It is not American social order. A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the black and the police. It is not them. It pays good. And there are numerous fringe benefits. The real problem is a trigger-happy social order. MUST HAVE SOME LAND!" "SOME LAND The Muslims OF OUR OWN OR ELSE! " Blacks in America shrink from the colossus of General Motors. Thicket of common stocks, de thred stocks. see how to wade through that bonds and debentures. They only know that General Motors is huge, that it has billions of dollars under its control, that it owns land, that its subsidiaries are legion, that it is a repository I vast powers The blacks want to crack the ut of General Motors. They are meditating o it. Meanwhile, they must learn that the police take orders from General Motors. And that the accounts, only bills to pay. The only way they know of making withdrawals from the bank is at the point of a gun. The shiny fronts of madness. skyscrapers intimidate them. They do not own them. They feel alienated from the very sidewalks on which they walk. This white man's country, this white man's world. Overflowing with men of color. An economy consecrated to the succor of the whites. Blacks are incidental. The war on poverty, that monstrous insult to the rippling muscles in a black man's arms, is an index of how men actually sit down and plot each other's deaths, actually sit down with slide rules and calculate how to hide bread from the hungry. And the black bourgeoisie greedily sopping up what crumbs are tossed into their dark corner.
There are 20,000,000 of these blacks in America, probably more. Today they repeat, in awe, this magic number to themselves: there are 20,000,000 of us! They shout this to each other in humiliated astonishment. No one need tell them that there is vast power latent in their mass. They know that 20,000,000 of anything is enough to consideration. They know also that they must get some recognition and harness their number and hone it into a sword Motors also knows that the unity of these with a sharp cutting edge. White General 20,000,000 ragamuffins will spell the death of the system of its being. At all costs, then, they will seek to keep these blacks from uniting, from becoming bold and revolutionary. These white property owners know that they must Keep the blacks cowardly and intimidated. By a the ghetto.
We experience this system of control as So that Leonard Deadwyler, one of these 20,000,000 blacks, is rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital and is shot dead by a policeman. An accident. That the sun rises in the east and sets in the west is also an accident. en design. The blacks are up in arms. acks ane America to the other, blacks are outraged at this accident, this latest evidence of what an accident-prone people they are, of the cruelty and pain of their lives, these blacks at the mercy of trigger-happy Yankees and Rebs in coalition against their skin. They want the policeman's blood as a sign that the Viet Cong is not the only answer. A sign to save them from the deaths they must die, and inflict. The power structure, without so much as blinking an eye, wouldn't mind tossing Bova to the mob. to restore law and order, but it knows in the vaults of its strength that at all costs the blacks must be kept at bay, that it must uphold the police department, its Guardian. Nothing must be allowed to threaten the set-up. Justice is secondary. Security is the byword.
Meanwhile, blacks are looking on and asking tactical questions. They are asked to die for the System in Vietnam. In Watts they are killed by it. Now-NOW!-they are asking each other in dead earnest: Why not die right here in Babylon fighting for a better life, like the Viet Cong? If those little cats can do it, what's wrong with big studs like us?
A mood sets in, spreads across America across the face of Rahvion
The Black Dearf 2sth Feb 1969