Revolution
I always had a feeling the reports were lies, fed to us to keep us quiet. The day I unraveled the string of lies was the day I became a sworn enemy of the web weaved by the government to quietly crush us under its benevolent heel.
I flipped on my TV, looking for something to watch, as a breaking news program came across the wires; a politician stood in front of the cameras addressing the recent execution of presumed criminals of the State. The crimes they were accused of were spoken of in broad terms, their only officially listed charge was “High Treason against the State,” an umbrella term that under the oppressive government regime of the last ten years had come to mean “doing anything other than what we want you to” in the activist circles I ran in. As I listened to the coverage of the incident, the words seemed too measured. As if they were trying to conceal something and promote an agenda. CNN ran down the suspects’ list of prior crimes in an attempt to justify the execution, the only problem with their attempt to smear the alleged suspects was the fact that it seemed more obvious the longer I watched.
“We have compiled a list of crimes that this group was connected with, and it seems that they were not only a danger to the peace, but they were a danger to the country as well. We have here what reads like a laundry list of offenses. In 2055, this group organized a coup against the municipal government of Sacramento, California. They marched up to the Governor’s Office and demanded an audience. According to witnesses, when an audience was not granted, they marched in with guns and held the entire office hostage until they received an audience with the Governor. In 2057, the Federation for the Defense of the People was listed by the FBI as one of the most dangerous groups in America and a supreme threat to the peace and prosperity of the United States.”
I remembered that group and that day well, and that was not an accurate account of what happened at all. I pulled out my phone and said:
“CNN Newsroom offices.”
I thought, as I waited to be connected, that this was a pretty blatant and boldly inconsiderate move, even by CNN’s faulty standards. As the Newsroom answered the phone I told what I assumed was a person on the other end:
“I have sensitive information regarding the report of the group that was executed.”
“What information is that Mr.Shakur?” the voice inquired. I damn near dropped my phone at the mention of my name without any prior identification.
“Your coverage is a series of lies. They did not hold anyone hostage, nor did they have guns.”
I then heard what sounded like some sort of machine say:
“Terminate this line, he contradicts our programming.”
Then the phone went dead. I hurried over to the computer and tried frantically to search on the dark web for any information about the incident. To my surprise, I found no search results that matched my recollection of the events in contradiction to the way CNN had reported them. I felt betrayed by my own country, I felt like America had stuck a knife in my back, didn’t even try to pull it out, and pretended like I dreamt up the entire thing. Nothing could be trusted, if the media and supposedly open sources of information like the Internet were cleaned for any sources of disagreement with the assumed narrative, then nothing was safe. There are no limits to what this government filled with secrets and lies can or will do to protect its own interests, including cleaning the internet and sanitizing media reports of its executions.
I no longer felt safe with my phone on, so I turned it over in my hand and smashed it to pieces, sure that there was a tracer in it, because after all if the FBI could track the Black Lives Matter activists of my youth on social media, surely they could do worse things to me. I walked out my loft and down the stairs, heading toward the internet cafe which over the years of resistance to the growing fascism of the U.S. Government had become a meeting place and central base of operations for local activists. I entered the brownstone building as the fog of cigar smoke hung in the air like the last whispers of forbidden conversation. I walked to the back of the cafe towards the room that we always used. Slid open the peephole as the gatekeeper grumbled “What’s the Password?” “All Power to All the People.” As he slid the peephole back into place, I opened the door and vigilantly locked it behind me. Here, was my safe haven, my sanctuary and base of operations as an activist. In bygone days, it hosted the meetings for the various Black Lives Matter splinter groups via internet connection, back when the police only occasionally shot and killed innocent civilians.
We now knew that these were not accidents, but were planned killings intentionally enacted to lull the public into believing that the police were just making mistakes and that these were isolated incidents with “bad apples.” The true insidiousness of it was unveiled with the advent of community policing, an attempt to restore public accountability to the police forces. The police, uninterested in sharing power with civilians, or even with being held accountable, would often patrol and ask these community police for their controlled handgun licenses. They would often radio for backup whenever they found any patrols that had their paperwork on them under the auspices that the patrols were inciting a riot. Given the fact that these were police officers making these accusations toward civilians, and the understood trust of the police in privileged communities, the communities around which these officers patrolled just assumed that the police were on the side of right. Until the community police began to disappear. Once they began to disappear, then the others began to question their allegiance to the police, but because the police were agents of the government, and the communities surrounding the disappearances were terrified, nothing was said. Nothing happened. People kept disappearing, and then President Clinton issued a statement that alarmed everyone in the struggle against this established order: “The police officers represent the will of the government for order. Anyone who disobeys the police, disobeys the government.” We all questioned exactly what the will of the government was for the people who lived in it from that point forward.
I remember being baptized into the fire for social justice early on. I was all of 12, maybe 13 but I remember well the jarring of my consciousness into awakening. During the early phases of the police and government sponsored crackdown on Black Lives Matter, there was a raid and there were all of these stories coming out about how the police shot the activists and subsequently blamed them for their own deaths. They even charged the activists with assault to add insult to death. Because to say injury is to insinuate that they survived. I remember my Twitter and Facebook feeds being awash with #blacklivesmatter hashtags and think pieces on how the police and the government were not to be trusted. I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, nor am I one now, but for me, what was happening was enough to cause me to have a crisis of identity. I had been socialized as early as I could remember to faithfully obey the police, that obedience would drastically lessen the chances of my not coming home in my interactions with the police. The more I read, the more I questioned. The more I came to understand that the police and the media accounts were not to be trusted when it came to Black Lives in this America. Every account I read said that the police came in and despite the activists complying with every order, kneeling down and surrendering to the authority of the badge, that did not earn them the sanctity of their lives. All it earned them was a bullet in the back of the brain, and all it earned me was a period of questioning of the intentions of America for its Black citizens.
I questioned the motives and the thoughts of the police and recorded them every time I came in contact with them. I made sure to watch who I followed on Social Media so I would not be associated with activism because from that early association I made, I had the funny feeling that anybody who was an activist in any Black centered capacity had a funny way of coming up dead. I learned that lesson before I went through puberty. That’s one Hell of a way to mature. I should have been playing basketball, carefree, but no. I had to be awakened to a new way of looking at the world. I questioned a lot that summer, but most of my questioning revolved around the question of why was I born Black into a world which hated and feared me for no other reason but the color of my skin. I was baptized into this life early, I was molded by books about the Panthers and my great grandfather who often told me about George Jackson and Stokely Carmichael (who he ensured I was named after) and Angela Davis and Elaine Brown. I learned that to resist was to be radical and that radicalism was not as dirty of a word as the media and public schools wanted us to think it was. Over that summer, I learned exactly what resistance could demand of me, and I learned that the price of silence was a slow death. I would rather pay the price of instant death than to be silent about what slowly killed me. Over that summer, I learned exactly what it took to be a real and true activist, one who did not have a price for my silence, but who demanded to tell truths. Even at the cost of everything I held dear, everything was a bargain.
I walked down the stairs into the basement where I met Huey, our communications specialist. Huey stands about six feet tall, roughly the same height as me and always keeps his hair in kind of a mini afro, he’s a little on the bright side of the Black rainbow, and I’ve known him since the third grade. We’re tight.
“ Huey, we have a situation.”
“What’s that, Stokely?”
“You didn’t catch the latest attempt at slandering the activists they just killed?”
“Nah, I haven’t watched any programming lately. Don’t want to be lulled into unconscious belief.”
“Well, the media is saying that they held up the Municipal Government in Sac Town and held people hostage. They really working overtime to pull the wool over people eyes and trying to convince people that resistance is dangerous.”
“This wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve had it up to here with the bullshit of America and its media coverage. I even had to smash my phone before I came over here, cause you never know when they’re tracking you. I remember how they watched Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie’s social media activity at the onset of the war on us.”
Huey nodded his agreement and then went towards the back of the basement, leaving me and my thoughts standing in the area that functioned as our lobby. I wonder if anyone’s told Angela, I don’t feel safe and nor are any of these computers. I know they have that Stingray active. I walked towards the direction that Huey had left in when I heard a commotion outside our door. Panic seized my mind as I immediately understood the police had already been tipped off as to my call into the Newsroom’s offices earlier and that they were hunting me down because of it, guns drawn, ready to shoot me on sight. I cautiously crept over to the peephole in an attempt to see some of what was going on. Absolute chaos. The police were ripping out computers in the cafe, and appeared to be demanding answers from the owner of the cafe, holding him at gunpoint.
I made a break for the back of the basement after bolting the door with a heavy metal beam, calling for Huey in that way you do when you’re trying to be loud and quiet all at the same time. I didn’t hear him answer so I went around the corner towards the exit thinking that maybe he had went in that direction. No Huey. Really not the best time for him to pull a disappearing act, but I heard the telltale loud and heavy thuds of a battering ram and with every thump of the door came new courage, or perhaps it was only the adrenaline of my self-preservation.. I made a beeline for the emergency exit that lead to a nearby alley, and as I popped out the alley, I was looking around for police patrols when Huey grabbed me and pulled me into the shadows. He put his hand over my mouth and gave a shrill “shhh” and pointed with his left hand in the direction of the Police kicking, beating and shooting the owner before dousing the place in gasoline. We were officially on the run now, no real physical base and enemies in every direction. We headed to a nearby manhole, removed the oppressively heavy cover and lowered ourselves into the sewers. Funny that the pigs never came where the rats lived, I guess they thought they were better than the trash that they were. We walked about half a block before I saw some others using the underbelly of the city like a highway. We weren’t the only ones on the run from the authoritarians above ground.
“Alright man, here’s the plan. We lay low, stay out of sight, and we’ll rendezvous with some of the others underneath the city as soon as we can.” Huey laid out the plan to me, but I had questions. “How do they-”
“I contacted them last week and told them we might get hit, because the police had been accelerating their patrols and getting even more aggressive. But this is far beyond what I anticipated, I thought we might get some sweeps and- What the fuck did you do, man?”
“I called the News Room and they-.”
“Dammit, Stokely. That explains all the heat on us. We gotta get deeper in, before they catch up to us.”
We headed down a corridor and I spotted a familiar sight, Angela out in front, leading the discussion and the organization efforts. Angela has a stature that belies her immense spirit. She isn’t very tall, maybe about 5’4 and pretty slim. She has these beautiful locs which she normally keeps in a bun and skin the color of honey with eyes that seem to look through your soul when she fixes them on you. Ever since our days together on the hills of Howard University, I had a distinct feeling about her and her passion for the movements we were both involved in. She was instrumental in keeping alive the spirit of the Black Lives Matter protests and was a prominent figure in efforts to organize our community’s first patrols to hold the police presence in the area accountable. I stood near the edge of the small opening underneath the arches that formed a sort of amphitheatre below the city.
“The things that I have warned us about from the beginnings of these strategic movements by the police have now come to pass. We need to organize and we need to organize now! This is no longer just a Black problem or just a minority problem, but this is a problem on a nationwide level. Our National government sees no worth in our lives or our human rights. They openly violate the natural rights of humanity in order to enforce their vision of law and order. They think nothing of wasting our blood either on the street or inside our homes. They have been slandering our purpose in the media for decades now in order to justify this accelerated and increasingly militant state. Look around you, they have driven us underground like insects, and we are forced to gather in secret to preserve our freedom. We need to take action, and we need to take action now! There is no shame in using what power you have within you to defend yourself from the tyrannical actions of this government. We have to defend ourselves.”
There was a raucous roar of approval at the last words of Angela’s speech. This was a crowd that knew all too well the truth with which she spoke. As Angela stepped down from the makeshift stage, I called her over.
“Dope speech, as usual sister. I’m a little worried about this next step. You know how some of our staunch traditionalists are. There’s this fear of extreme resistance, especially in the aftermath of the 2014 Baltimore uprising. I don’t think we can afford to be timid this time around. This time around, there has to be a strong show that we will not go down quietly.”
Angela and Huey considered my words for a brief moment before Huey broke the silence.
“There you go again, sounding just like your damn namesake.” We all laughed heartily at his wisecracking before Angela interrupted the laughter of the moment.
“ I definitely hear what you’re saying, but we have to be smart about it. If we go down this route, we all know there is no walking back. Either we are all in for this idea of armed resistance, outside perception be damned, or we go the more conventional route and probably miss our window to actually make something happen on a major scale as well as attracting media attention. I mean, let’s be real, the media doesn’t give a damn if we march in peace, but let a damned CVS burn down.”
‘Absolutely. I’m just so sick and tired of having to protest in a respectable manner when this oppression does not respect our inherent humanity. Like what kind of sick in the head ass country are we living in where there is infinitely more onus on the oppressed to be civil than is ever placed on the oppressors to respect the rights of all of their civilians. Maybe I’m just blinded by passion and desperate for change, but we either act decisively for our freedom and create a revolution or we are doomed to fall back into the cycle of one sided violence. I’m not going to sit here and watch America kill us for resisting without the threat of violence for violence.”
There was confusion among the general congregation of people about where we would get any weapons with which to fight back with, confusion about whether or not it was ethical or not to use violence to obtain our necessary results, confusion about what outside observers would think about our method, and confusion about if destroying the community would help. Ultimately we came to the conclusion that the risk was worth whatever trepidation we felt about breaking into stores and burning property. I, however had no such fear of the response to the burning down of their command post. After watching the actions of the Police continually escalate, we did not owe them an appeal to any kind of sensibility.
This was a literal war on us, and there comes a time in a war where you must engage in guerilla tactics. There comes a time when you have to remind yourselves of the long list of names laid to rest due to rampant police brutality. There comes a time when you have to remember that riots work, riots get attention. People don’t think that riots solve anything, but in the early decades of the 21st Century, riots led to job creation, riots led to legal persecution against some officers and riots led to the community being heard loud and clear by the establishment. In my estimation, riots and targeted answers to wanton violence with a crafted violent counter argument was the only response we had left.
There was no reason in my mind to simply resign to appeal to our oppressors, we had to take swift and decisive action against their occupation and the destruction of our community, otherwise they would just pretend to change things. Martin Luther King once said that a riot is the language of the unheard. I intended on being heard loud and clear.
We laid out our plan of concentrated attack, we would break the windows of chain hardware stores, grab anything heavy and anything that would hold gasoline. Another group would go get matchbooks from the Hotel on Watts Street which ran parallel to the command center which dispensed the police throughout the community. Another group would pre-pay and negotiate for gasoline at the gas stations so that those who smashed and grabbed containers for gasoline would not have to hassle with trying to get cash arrangements figured out.
We thought that we also needed a diversion tactic, so we agreed that half of us needed to go and loot and burn inside our community to draw the police out of the command center so that we could hit them with molotov cocktails with impunity, the same way they had been brutalizing our community. I went with the group that would strike a blow at the police command center because though I understood the necessity of diversion, I also understood the greater necessity of destroying the command center and thought that was of the utmost importance. They deserved this violence they brought upon themselves, measuring out violence as if they could not be meted out the same response.
I went up the steps behind the makeshift auditorium which lead to a ladder to the street above and I emerged in an alley adjacent to the store which the police had burned out earlier. I searched in the burned out rubble for a glass bottle, a rag and something I could throw that would break a window. I picked up the bottle, the rag and stuck them in the pocket of my jeans. I looked down and I saw a good sized piece of brick so I picked it up and stepped over the glass which guarded the door. I walked out and headed towards Watts Street where a crowd had already begun to form.
I looked around for the group with the gasoline and found them standing over by the curb. We waited about 30 minutes for the police to rush out of the precinct towards the other side of the city before we began our assault on the outpost. I threw my brick right in the front glass of the door before throwing my now lit molotov cocktail in. It landed and exploded, setting the front desk ablaze. Infused with bloodlust, I grabbed a gasoline can, ran inside and doused everything I could see in gasoline before running outside and grabbing matches from our match team which had just arrived. I went back in and threw it in the direction of the gasoline I had just poured. Instantly it caught ablaze and I joyfully escaped the outpost so I could admire the flames licking the building.
At that point, the police came racing back, and we scattered on sight. I ran as fast as I could to an opening that led to the sewer near the old chemical plant on Watts. As I slid down the ladder leading beneath the city, both my heart and mind were racing. I wondered what was next for the Revolution, since the police had to know now that they had retaliation to fear and what their response and retribution would look like. I went deep into the catacomb like sewer and waited for others to arrive. Minutes felt like hours, anxiousness extending the wait. I waited, a human ball of nerves and emotions until I was finally relieved to see Angela round the corner after about 35 minutes of nervousness accelerating my heartbeat like a shot of cocaine. .
I quickly asked her with a tinge of nerves infecting my voice, “So what do you think their reaction will be?”
“Well, they’re pissed and have no base to operate from, so my bet is on violence. They’re betting this will squash our resistance, but we cannot let them take our will to fight back.”
“What if the others disagree?”
“What choice do we have?”
I walked step for step with her for a little while until we reached a small alcove.
“You’re absolutely right. Once we lose our hope and our will to fight, we are already dead. We have to keep the fire burning.”
We reached a ladder and climbed up out of the sewer, moving the manhole which felt as heavy as the hopes of our freedom into absolute bedlam. Angry Police swarming the city since they were left with no central hub of activity, they were everywhere at once. We crouched behind a dumpster until we were sure it was safe to pop from behind the building that flanked the alleyway. When we emerged from the alley, the city was ablaze. The bank, pawn shop, old Mr. McGregor’s storefront, everything on Watts Street was a burned out shell, places that held significant memories for our mostly Black community were now reduced to meaningless rubble. We split up here, with her going towards Watts Street and me heading towards Ferguson Drive.
I surveyed the scene before running down the street and hanging a left at the stop sign going back up towards my loft. I remembered that I left my 45 caliber Smith & Wesson in my gun locker and a memory stick in my laptop and I figured I needed to get the files off of it so we could prove our side of the story. I remembered how the media was prone to slander our sides of the story, being Black and radical hadn’t changed at all over the years, in fact it may have gotten worse. As I approached the loft I looked around for the cops, and when I didn’t see any of those pigs I ducked in and dashed up the stairs.
Fumbling with my keys, I dropped them on the wooden floor and my heart dropped along with my keys making a cold thud on the floor. Slowly panicking as I picked them up, I quickly looked around as I picked them up and rattled them in the lock. I was uneasy. As soon as I opened the door and whirled around to lock it, I put a chair from the kitchen underneath the handle. I walked down the hall to my room, popped open my gun locker, grabbed my laptop, charging cable and memory stick and heard the familiar boom-boom of a kickdoor job by the Police on my door.
“Shit.”
I was on the third floor and the only way out was the window. Pulling all the sheets off my bed, I secured them together in tight knots and rappelled down the side of the building. Halfway down I glanced down and saw the Police were beginning to surround the building, so I tucked my laptop in my right hand and jumped. Tucking and rolling so I could pop up and run seemed to be prefered to being shot dead in the street, except I didn’t exactly stick the landing. I tucked and rolled alright, but I didn’t exactly pop up and run. It was more like a slow crawl.
Once I was on my feet, adrenaline kicked in, and I tucked my laptop under my arm like a football and was off, down the street like I was a bullet from my gun. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, taking pained breaths, I looked around me to get my bearings and I was standing on Watts Street, next to what used to be the Bank. I slowly made my way to the nearest alleyway, composed myself and since there was no way to find anything with an outlet, I made my way back below ground to bunker in for the night that was fast approaching.
As soon as my feet touched the pavement, I heard broken radio chatter. Bad sign. I looked around quickly for a recessed corner I could stash my laptop at, and luckily one was less than five feet from the ladder.The voices got louder, which only meant that I was closer to standing face to face with the police. My heart jumped in my throat and my breaths came short, panicked and I felt asphyxiated.
“If we catch one of the motherfuckers, all bets are off, we’re fucking ‘em up on sight.”
This did nothing for my increasing panic. I tried to stay hidden, didn’t want to run because I was all too well acquainted with what happens to Black people who run from the police. Bullets and a smear job on the News were the only rewards for a martyr. So I just had to hope they didn’t hear me. I waited, hidden in a recessed alcove, hearing the pounding of my heart ring in my ears. My mouth went dry, a lump rose in my throat, it was so hard to breathe. I prayed that they wouldn’t find me, because God knows I didn’t want to die as so many have at the hands of these executioners. My body betrayed my location eventually, I couldn’t hold in a sneeze.
Shit.
All four of the officers were now in my space, asking me if I knew anything about the firebombed precinct or the thief at the apartments. I did not reply.
“Oh we got a deaf bastard huh? I got something to open your mouth!”
The officer to my left punched me in the face, and it felt like I had been hit by a brick. My knees buckled and I struggled back to my feet.
“Talk, motherfucker!” the officer in front of me demanded.
“Tell us what the hell you know or by God we will beat the life out of you, boy!”
I spit out some blood and offered up a weak “Officer, I don’t know nothing.”
The female officer to the right of the officer who hit me pulled out her nightstick. Well, this was quickly going from bad to worse.
“Tell us what we want to know or we will beat the hell out of you.”
“What do you want to know?” I said slowly
“We want names, plans, locations.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I don’t know any names.”
I closed my eyes as she raised her hand and let her nightstick fly and cracked me across the face with her weapon. The blood flowed from my nose like water from a faucet. This is what I was afraid of. This is what I didn’t want to happen. The other officers moved in and began kicking and beating me with their nightsticks. The pain radiated from my body. First, I felt the crack of about three ribs, then I felt a punch to my face before it went numb. There were blows to my legs from the nightsticks and a conversation about breaking my legs before they decided not to break my legs, but to keep everything above the waist. The sheer volume of punches and kicks I endured was enough by my count to shatter several more ribs and to break my jaw.
“Next time I bet your ass will talk.” Was the last thing I heard before I blacked out.
By some small miracle I was alive. I guess that was what mattered. When I opened my eyes I was in a makeshift infirmary in what I could only assume was an old military bunker deep beneath the city.
Huey was there as soon as I opened my eyes.
“Damn man, I don’t know how you survived that beating. Looks like they took out all their
frustration on you. But they had to come down here before long, that bombing exposed us.”
“D-did you g-get i-it?”
“Get what?”
“M-my l-lap-top.”
” Oh, yeah we found it. Somehow they didn’t trash it. We found your drive in your pocket, but it was smashed to Hell.”
Well I couldn’t win it all. I tried to adjust my position in the makeshift bed, but was quickly defeated by the pain shooting up both my sides. My face clenched in a grimace, I adjusted to a relatively comfortable position and waited on whoever was acting as my nurse to update me on my condition. I heard my name being called and blinked my eyes a couple times before glancing over and seeing that it was Angela.
“I didn’t know you were a nurse?”
“Well, I’m not, but I had to learn fast once everything went to Hell.”
“They really did a number on you, we tried to ease it with painkillers.”
“Painkillers? It was more painful?”
Angela smiled and looked at me before continuing to detail exactly what was broken and concluding with a snarky “So you tell me?”
Angela. Living up to that name at least at the moment. She could be fire contained or she could be fire loosed. It depended on who you were in relation to her, friend or adversary. I was thankful that in most of my dealings, she could contain her fire. She told me that the Doctor, Toni, was coming in to check up on me and to administer treatment.
“How you feeling?”
“Well, I feel a lot less like I was hit by a train, and more like I had a really hard workout.”
“Good, good. So you’ll be able to leave in a few days, but we won’t let you leave until we’re sure that you can use your full range of motion without any adverse effects.”
About a week had passed since I was first brought to the shelter so they had given me the okay to begin my workout that served as a field test for my range of motion and fitness.
“One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.”
Sweat was dripping down my face as I finished my workout to prove I could leave the bunker that served as our “hospital.”
“Ok. You’re clear. There was no noticeable hindrance in your range of motion. In the times we are in, there is no room for you to have anything slowing down your movement.”
I wiped my sweat with a towel from the cabinet and headed out, down the hall to try and get the rundown from either Angela or Huey. I ran into Huey. He stuck his finger in my chest and launched into me, full force.
“You need to be more gotdamn careful. You took a helluva risk to get that laptop and you lucky as hell to still have that damn gun. The fuck were you thinking?”
“I was thinking, that I could either protect us or myself from the constant threat that is the Police. That’s what I was thinking. You know why I didn’t pull that piece when I got jammed up by the Police. I wouldn’t be here. You know what they do to us when we reach for anything out their line of sight. Automatic execution.”
“Well you’re right about that, it was still risky as Hell man. You gotta be smarter than that. I hear that there’s gonna be a rally today on Watts Street to protest the Police takeover and burnout of our neighborhoods.I think it starts at noon.”
“Bet. I’ll be there. Hey. Thanks for caring man. I know that’s your way of showing your concern, and i appreciate it.”
“Yeah, whatever, whatever.”
I walked down the hallway, and made my way to the nearest ladder. I emerged on Ferguson Street and headed East towards Watts Street. There was a certain chill in the air, I had a feeling that must be what they call deja vu. The closer I got to Watts, the louder and clearer the various chants became:
“You’re not Kings, We live here!”
“You burned our buildings, we live here!”
“You don’t live here, We do! This is our neighborhood!”
“You can’t take it over like an occupying army! All Power to the People!”
As soon as we had finished chanting, the Police brought out the riot shields, their armed tanks and started throwing tear gas at us to get us to disperse. Not a new tactic, so we picked up the canisters and flung them back over their riot shield wall. As they closed ranks to engage us as though we were the insurgent force of some foreign country they were attempting to occupy, we all locked arms and stared down the police. It felt like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, directly into the cold hard eyes of our deaths.
A shot rang out. None of us were armed. The police had guns. And they had started a war. They started a Revolution. Rocks clashed against shields, officers were tackled, innocents were shot, but the struggle never stopped. The police soon realized that the will of the people to fight was greater than their will to oppress and we chased the police from Watts all the way over to Washington Street. Before we left them alone, they knew the balance of power had shifted, and any act of oppression would be met with a swift and feverish response. They had started a Revolution, but the people would finish it.
Unbeknownst to us, this had been broadcast live, all over the world. In the coming weeks there were cameras, calls from the United Nations, several other influential international coalitions and human rights groups to dismantle the oppressive regime that had allowed the Police to run amok over the rights of the people. Politicians and even the President got lead from their seats of power in chains and shackles into the very jails that they poured money into to expand. But We the People fought for and won our God given freedom. We the people of the Revolution.
I’m writing this to you, in part to preserve our legacy, in part to control our narrative because if there is anything we have learned from history, it is that the victors do not always write the history books. I’m writing this to you because you should know that the true freedoms and the true equality that you enjoy today should never be taken for granted, as they came at a great peril and a great sacrifice to those of us who were there on that day to fight for a brighter future than the present Hell that we were living in.
I’m writing this so you know that a small and dedicated faction of the population can spark off a Revolution and literally change the course of a nation. Today you live in a country which actually lives up to the words in its Constitution that all men, or people, are created equal; and I am writing you this so that you may never forget that there were plenty of times in the history of this country when it did not care to live up to those words etched into its driving document.
-Stokely Shakur
