Sonya Massey: None of us is Free Until All Are Free here ♦ Port Chicago -US Rulers Rightfully Fear Mutiny here ♦
TEXAS (USA), March 21— A thousand asylum seekers, displaced by capitalism, gathered at a US/Mexico border gate on the Rio Grande. About 425 broke away, crossed the wire fence, and lunged at members of the National Guard. They were stopped at another fence. Authorities arrested 221 of them on serious charges of rioting and assaulting a public official. Capitalism unleashes attacks and aggression daily against the international working class. Exploitation, starvation, war, genocide, and more. This inhuman system cannot continue. Join the International Communist Workers’ Party and mobilize the masses of the world for a communist world without borders or nations. Read our Pamphlet: Fight for the Day When No Workers Will be Called Foreigner here
None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free
Cincinatti (USA) July 2024
Sonya Lynaye Wilburn-Massey, 36, was a Black woman, churchgoer, daughter, and mother. Early on July 6th, she called the police, fearing a possible intruder. Officers soon arrived, moved into Massey’s house, asked for her identification and about a vehicle in the driveway. While she searched for ID, the deputies asked her to turn off the stove. Massey complied. She went to remove the pot of water she had boiling.
The deputies stepped back, as if she had suddenly become a threat. Massey, confused, uttered a phrase often used in the Black church when one feels a situation has gotten out of hand. One deputy took offense and pointed his gun straight at her face. Within the time it took for her to say sorry for something she wasn’t sure she did, Massey was shot thrice.
The officer that killed Massey had been on six different police forces in the past four years. He had two DUI’s, for which he had been ejected from the US Army. Perhaps that’s why he is one of the few officers charged with murdering an innocent Black person to be immediately fired. But he will likely be one of the many to receive a lighter sentence because he “feared for his safety.”
Yes, Massey’s killer was fired and arrested. But why was someone with his history even allowed on the force? The sheriff declined Massey’s father’s call for him to take responsibility and resign.
Black people are still being killed by the police. We still hear about people reaching out to the police for help and ending up dead. The removal of one bad cop is not enough. That’s why people across the US continue to protest Massey’s murder.
The fact is that the officer that shot Massey was White, male, armed, and twice her size. He still found a way to make a scared Black woman standing behind a counter with a pot of water seem dangerous enough to shoot on the spot.
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” (Fannie Lou Hamer, 1971) Such phrases are prominent in the movements for Black Lives and for the abolition of the current US “Justice” system. Many revolutionaries and radicals have extended it to include Palestine, the global south, and every people interrupted by US capitalist interests.
In the US, the oppressors’ obsession with victimhood is understood by most who cannot be mistaken for white. In Palestine, it’s understood by innocent men, women, and children called terrorists for simply trying to live on the land not yet stolen from them by Israeli settlers and soldiers.
This mutual understanding is strengthened by the fact that the US government funds the killing of Palestinians by the Israeli government. It’s made stronger still when people realize that police forces all over the USA are trained by the same Israeli forces that shoot, kill, and imprison Palestinians for simply existing. This shared suffering is cause for solidarity. That’s why calls for a free Palestine could be heard at vigils in honor of Sonya Massey.
People at such protests recognize that the problem is deeper than one bad cop or a few bad soldiers. It is a problem for ordinary people because the systems of power do not protect the masses. Instead, they protect the interests of those already in power.
People mobilize because deaths like Massey’s and the genocide of Palestinians are considered inconsequential and normal to those in power. At the very minimum, Black Americans and Palestinians can unite in the interest of staying alive. On further inspection, they and others come together under the realization that the systems that are oppressing them are almost one and the same and must be dismantled.
—Activist in Los Angeles (USA)
Racist US Rulers Rightfully Fear Mutiny
On July 17, the Secretary of the US Navy exonerated the 258 Black defendants convicted in the 1944 Port Chicago Mutiny.
Throughout US history, up to and including World War II, the US armed forces were strictly segregated. At Port Chicago, California, Black sailors were assigned to load munitions into Navy ships under hazardous conditions and intense speed up. As a direct result, a huge explosion wiped out two ships and a train. It killed 320 sailors and civilians, most Black, and injured 390 more.
In the aftermath, White officers were given hardship leave. But the Black sailors were ordered to go back to work without additional safety measures. Two hundred fifty-eight Black sailors refused.
The Navy prosecuted them all. Fifty leaders were charged with mutiny and the rest with disobedience. All were convicted. Those charged with mutiny were sentenced to 8-15 years of hard labor. All were given dishonorable discharges.
As civil rights attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out in their defense, this was not an actual mutiny. In a mutiny, soldiers or sailors turn their guns on their officers and attempt to change the course of a war. This was a job action—a strike against murderous, racist, working conditions. Only the wartime context allowed the Navy to charge these workers with mutiny.
In 1948, President Truman worried that racism in the US was hurting the US’s image in the Cold War. He desegregated the US military. Black troops have still disproportionately been sent to the front lines in every imperialist war since, but at least it’s no longer “official policy.”
Eighty years later, the US military is faced with a recruiting dilemma. As global conflict increases from local wars to the inevitable World War III, the US military must improve its image. Hence the exoneration of the Port Chicago defendants (none of whom are still alive)—and the renaming of the Port Chicago incident from a “mutiny” to a “disaster.”
Black soldiers and sailors played a key role in leading actual multi-racial mutinies during the US War on Vietnam. We are confident that class-conscious soldiers and sailors will see through this propaganda trick, and organize to turn the next imperialist war into a revolutionary war for communism.
—Comrade who studies history
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