Juneteenth at Richmond CA, and connecting folks with Bob Avakian and the revolution
Richmond, California drew thousands for the annual Juneteenth festival last Saturday. The legendary musician George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic was the highlight of the day. It was a scorching hot day. At the end, the combination of clouds rolling over and the soothing voice of George Clinton brought some relief and brought the mostly Black participants to their feet.
The Juneteenth Festival commemorates the end of the civil war and the end of legal slavery in Texas. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that the slaves were free.
It was in this setting that a crew of revolutionaries set up a table under the shade of a huge tree and decorated the area with displays of quotations from Bob Avakian (BA), and enlarged covers of BAsics. Our focus was on the BAsics 1:13 quote, “No more generations of our youth…” We had a large banner for people to sign to support the BAsics Bus Tour - we talked about the trip through the South to Sanford, Florida and were calling for donations for its just-announced upcoming mission to the Greater New York City area!
We also had the enlargement of the “Three Strikes…” quote which tended to be very striking and provocative. Here you have this celebration of the end of slavery - and even if you want to think that slavery is over, the system does not let you forget that it is not. Slavery… Jim Crow… the New Jim Crow: Three Strikes. A lot of people related to it in one way or another, agreeing this is what is going on and bringing out a lot of examples to highlight these facts.
One thing that stayed with me and I am still thinking about as I am writing this was the question of a young boy maybe 7 or 8 holding his younger sister’s hand asking his mom, “Mom, why that man’s head is cut off?” referring to the picture of lynching. The mother looked around hoping to occupy her son with something else, looked at me, looked at the picture and she said under her breath, "It is not cut off, it is just bent to the side.” She was trying to avoid bringing out the horrors of this system to her young son. I got into it. I acknowledged how difficult it is to explain to the little kid what lynching is and why and what effect it did have on Black people. I asked her if she would like me to explain this. She shook her head with tears in her eyes, and said, “OK”, and I explained what the picture was trying to say and why we are bringing out this quote from BA, “No more generations of our youth…" As I was speaking to the kids they kept looking at their mom, like, Is this true?… and their mom was confirming it all. She gave me a hug and got some papers and cards to distribute. As she was walking away she was in a whole cloud of thoughts.
One young man was reading the enlargement of BAsics 1:13. When I walked up to him, he said, “This is the story of my life - but what are you going to do about it?" He talked about the profiling he and his friends experience all the time just a couple of blocks down from the park. He told us how he and his friends were pulled over for no reason and no reason given, and at the end all their names had been entered into the police data base. He asked what we thought is the way out of this. He said that he was into getting a community restaurant or bar or something where people can chill out and have fun. But his friends said he was crazy. The system would not let you, they told him. He talked about how he felt isolated. We talked about the difference it can make to have BA Everywhere, the Bus Tour and what BA and Basics could do, what impact it would have on his friends if they started to see this quote everywhere. We gave him a copy of BAsics and said, "Open any page.” He opened to BAsics 2:11, "Put the advance of the world revolution above everything, even above the advance of the revolution in the particular country - build the socialist state as above all a base area for world revolution.“ He said, “That is what I am talking about. I am sold.” He got the book and went away with a stack of cards of BAsics 1:13.
One man, who was acutely feeling how serious the situation is, and felt that many more people should be waking up, after talking about BAsics 1:13, the BAsics Bus Tour, what BA has done and why we need to get BA everywhere, and the importance of people like himself acting now to build the movement for revolution took a stack of cards with BAsics 1:13 and wrote on the banner "Trayvon Martin, new revolution startin.”
There were a lot of folks and especially younger folks and women who gathered around the banner to talk to us, take pictures and write their messages. One scene came about after a discussion we had with two mothers and many children they had with them, ages ranging from 8 or 9 years all the way to teenagers. We got into “No more generations of our youth here and all around the world….“ The mothers dug it and told the kids this is about your future, what it is going to be? The kids got the markers and wrote, "Kids Rock!” and “Fuck the Police." Another woman with her teenage daughter asked about what do you mean, “all over the world…” And when we got into the pictures of kids in Haiti and Pakistan and talked about child prostitution all over the world and they found out about the Bus Tour, they donated $5 and asked when the bus arrives here, ”‘cause we need it here badly.“
1 Notes/ Hide
- basicsbustour posted this