Jazz Shaw:
The large scale protests in Missouri are back in force as people take to the streets in what’s being variously called the Weekend of Protest or Ferguson October, depending who you ask. And the media is once again out in droves.
Tense but peaceful protests over Michael Brown’s death and other fatal police shootings in Missouri and elsewhere stretched across the St. Louis region Friday as organizers urged hundreds of participants to avoid arrest so that they could return for a weekend of demonstrations.
The four-day event called Ferguson October began Friday afternoon with a march outside the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office in Clayton and renewed calls for prosecutor Bob McCulloch to charge Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson officer, in the Aug. 9 death of 18-year-old Brown, who was black and unarmed. A grand jury is reviewing the case.
A variety of groups, both local and imported, have shown up in the streets leading to some tense encounters. The video footage running pretty much non-stop on CNN today includes a few images which seem to indicate a not terribly subtle shift in the message. One of the ones which really stood out to me was a group of marchers holding a banner which read, “Smash Racist Cops with Communist Revolution.”
Where did that come from? I noted one protest leader interviewed by CNN which might give us a hint.
“We are here to demand the justice that our people have died for,” chanted protest organizer Montague Simmons of the local group Organization for Black Struggle. “We are here to bring peace, to bring restoration, to lift our banners in the name of those who’ve been sacrificed.”
A quick check online will show that Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) is hardly a “local group” as is being reported. They’ve been around for decades, and their web site lays out their chief goals, beliefs, objectives and methods. Among their founding documents is the Black Freedom Agenda, introduced with the Black Radical Congress in 1998. Among a litany of various objections and objectives, it includes the following principle.
” Black Freedom Agenda” Does the ‘agenda’ also include ‘freedom’ from our Tax dollars in the form of entitlements and redistribution???? If so I am all for that kind of ‘Freedom’…. I’d like to keep more of mines…