The 20th century ended on a grim note for the African American community. Abner Louima savaged by white cops; Taisha Miller gunned down in her car; the pickup truck lynching of Robert Byrd in Texas; Amadou Diallo dead on his doorstep in a 41-bullet fusillade. Around the country police "profiling" of Black men constantly made headlines. We were left drained, exhausted and outraged.

Now we are faced with a new wave of brutalization. The whole country watched, horrified, as a news helicopter zoomed in on two dozen Philadelphia cops stomping Thomas Jones. Less than a week later, teenage honor student Raynard Johnson was discovered hanged in Kokomo, Mississippi and the police called it suicide, although he had recently been threatened for his friendship with two white girls. Frederick Finley was choked to death by a mall security guard when his daughter was accused of shoplifting. Each new atrocity sparks disbelief and rage.

The effect of this is that the Black nation lives in an ongoing state of low intensity warfare, with all of the grueling psychological and physical damage that low intensity warfare is supposed to produce in target populations. Some of these incidents have an especially disheartening twist. The cops who trashed Thomas Jones were equal opportunity brutalizers—white and Black. The murderous security guard who killed Frederick Finley was Black. It’s not news to anybody that Black cops work for a white supremacist system and wind up serving that system, no matter what their intentions. But there is something else going on here. The Philly cops and the security guard seem to have absorbed the message—"Black life ain’t worth shit"—that permeates the culture of this country. It’s no surprise that gangbanging is destroying so many young people of color.

With every assault our community rallies itself and its allies to protest and to demand justice. Sometimes these movements are even strong enough to force the jailing of racist murderers and killer cops.

More is needed. We have to fight for elected civilian control boards with real power. Community control will not change the basic nature of the police, let alone the white supremacist capitalist class they serve and protect. But it can provide a buffer for our community, some space we can use to pull ourselves together to fight for deep revolutionary change.

The struggle against these attacks must be waged in a broader context. The police are just the funnel to the prison-industrial complex where millions of Black men and women are caged. The Black Radical Congress (BRC) has launched a national campaign to tackle this head on under the slogan "Education, Not Incarceration, Fight the Police State." We urge every thinking African American man and woman to take part in this critical resistance struggle.