October 1997

Giuliani attacks Black youth march

By Ray McKay and Anne Jaclard

New York-Mayor Giuliani violently attacked the Black community of New York before, during and after the Million Youth March Sept. 5, and protests against his racist and illegal imposition of a police state in Harlem are still going on.

The mayor declared war on Black self-determination by denying a permit to hold the event in Harlem, and when a federal court said he could not, he had 6,000 cops "lock down" Harlem that day. Those people he had not scared into staying away by his predictions of violence had difficulty reaching the rally. The closest subway stops were closed, and the streets were barricaded from 116th to 125th streets. The police misdirected people as to which streets were open, forcing them to walk long distances to get to the rally and preventing some from getting there at all. In the end, perhaps 20,000 attended.

Then the police buzzed the rally with dangerously low-flying helicopters and finally rushed the stage before the legal time for the rally to end. The leaders fled in cars, but many people were prevented from leaving by the cops, who were obviously trying to provoke a wider melee.

The next day, a whole neighborhood of Brooklyn was "locked down" by 100 cops while they arrested an organizer of the event for "inciting violence" at the end of the rally, when the cops attacked the stage.

By using so much power of the state to try to stop the march, the mayor gave a lot of publicity to Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the anti-Jewish, anti-white hatemonger who initiated the event. Capitalism's ideologues want to make us choose between Giuliani's racism and Muhammad's, but many at the march refused such false alternatives.

One Black woman told N&L: "I went to the march just to give out flyers about the Haiti/Disney anti-sweatshop campaign. I wouldn't stay because I don't support those racists. I heard later that Khalid Abdul Muhammad made a very racist speech. At the end he told the crowd to go home and treat each other with love. He also said if the police attack, take their guns and shoot them, ram their sticks up them (a reference to the police assault on Abner Louima). But when the police attacked the people, the speakers left in Mercedes Benzes. I heard there was no provocation for the police to attack people.

"I won't put up with attacks on Jews; if one group is attacked, then always the next one will be too. I know a lot about racism from experience. It is not one group, but many, who are responsible for racism."

Another Black activist reported, "It was difficult to get there, to say the least. The march itself was only a few blocks long. The number of cops was overwhelming. I believe there were more people than the official count. It was a very beautiful day in terms of the people who showed up, many mothers and kids.

"I was there for four hours and heard about 30 speakers. Most were careful in what they said because no one wanted the situation to blow up. Many Black politicians and people running for office were there, but most of them were from out of town. Rev. Al Sharpton stated that he was neither homophobic nor anti-Semitic. A Native American speaker expressed unity with Black people reaching back to slavery time, when Native Americans harbored escaped slaves.

"The turn-around came when Khalid Abdul Muhammad spoke. The cops started to close in, and when a helicopter flew over, people began to get upset. There is a new paradigm, in that young people are not about nonviolence any more. The chopper set people off against the police-state conditions and the storm troopers raiding the stage. People had been leaving before then, but when that happened they went back."

The outcry against this police-state terror has been loud and is not limited to the Black community. In response, the mayor put out three different versions of why the police rushed the stage, and he refused even to meet with Black elected officials to discuss it. But Giuliani is feeling the heat; he had to promise to fire three cops and a fire fighter who partic ipated in a racist prank in the Broad Channel, Queens, volunteer fire department Labor Day parade. They were part of a float and skit in black face that mocked the dragging death of James Byrd in Texas. These same men had participated for years, as a standard part of that parade, in parodies that attacked Jews, Asians and others, and nothing was ever done to them before.

Several groups are now calling for a Working People's Tribunal to publicly indict the mayor and police chief "for their illegal imposition of martial law by a racist police-state army of occupation."

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