‘Biggest police state in the world’

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SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2015 3 kind of country that doesn’t participate in wars 24 and 7 all year long!

Some people thought that all we needed was the vote, and all we needed to do was get some congressmen and mayors and city council people elected—and maybe a president one day! To get folks into corpo­ rations, and get more generals appointed in the military—and everything would be fine. Black folks would just be regular citi­ zens of the United States.

But they were wrong. Because the folks that we were agitating up until 1965 did not change after ’65. They had allowed us some demands like the right to vote and public accommodations and such—but it was very grudgingly. And they said that if we were not going to stay in our place, then they were going to create a place for us. And that place was the prisons.

Their response to the civil rights move­ ment, to the Black Power movement, to the general movement for economic justice was the mass Black incarceration state. So we go from 1970, when there were only about 250,000 people in the federal and state prisons of the country, to a high point just a little while ago of 2.4 million. We go from a situation in the mid-1960s, when 70 percent of the prison inmates in the coun­ try were white, to a situation in which 70 percent of the prison inmates are Black or Brown.

This is pay back for our movement. And many of our elected officials and our digni­ taries—our rich folks, the folks who many of us would like to look up to and wish we could dress like—many of these folk think that we don’t need a movement, as if they are oblivious to the fact that one of eight prison inmates in the world is an African American.

There are more Black and Brown people in U.S. prisons than in the entire prison sys­ tem of China, when China has four and a half as many people than we have. What does that mean? If you go by the raw numbers, the United States is the big­ gest police state in the world. ... So we need to be going to Newark, just like folks from all over the country are go­ ing to Newark, to not just speak about the conditions in Plainfield but the conditions of our people all over. Thank you. n

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Liz Lynch / NY Daily News and they sparked the modern LGBT movement.

For an in-depth account of the entire five days and nights, see “Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution” by David Carter. Out of the rebellion on the East Coast sprang activist organizations across the country, including the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance.

In 1987, a new generation of activists formed, calling themselves ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Pow­ er), which was driven primarily by gay men and their lesbian allies with the motto, “Silence = Death.” They brought militant activism to Wall Street and the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and shut down the Food and Drug Administration. Their struggle saved lives.

The state-by-state strategy For the last decade, struggles state by state have tak­ en place to fight against homophobic ballot measures and in some states to pass anti-discrimination legisla­ tion to protect the LGBT community.

The national organizations participating in these campaigns were all Inside-the-Beltway lobbying or­ ganizations that had achieved nothing. There was no massive outpouring of the community until February 2004, when the mayor of San Francisco directed citycounty clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. An issue that was not high on most activists’ lists took center stage and galvanized the community.