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Rebellion In La.

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Parent Issue
Month
July
Year
1992
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
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Agenda Publications
OCR Text

Michael Zinzun, a farmer member of the Black Panther Party, has been a leader of the Los Angeles Coalition Against Police Abuse since 1 976. He is blind in one eye as the result of a police beating. A long-time resident of South Central Los Angeles, Zinzun witnessed the events which followed the Rodney King beating verdict. What follows are excerpts from his speech at a Baker-Mandela Center for Anti-Racist Education rally at Ann Arbor's Salvation City.

It's not a question of saying "right on to LA, because of what you all did." It's a question of saying "we understand what you're doing; we sympathize with what you're doing," so that we can learn what we can do in this city against police abuse and the kind of injustices that tend to follow us any where and everywhere we go.

The Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) was founded back in 1976 as a direct result of the kind of police abuse that we were getting in LA, where a lot of people were getting gunned down. They would say that their foot slipped, and they'd gun you down. They were saying that it was "an accidental discharge" and you were gunned down.

Chief Gates even had the audacity to say that the reason that Black folks died more often from the choke hold is because the veins in our necks are made differently from other people's. The veins in our necks are different, and that's why they choked out 14 Black folks in one year, and killed them. That was his excuse.

That was not the thing to set off an uprising. That was one of the things that accumulated that set off an uprising.

Is police abuse still happening? Yeah, but let me tell you something. The city of Los Angeles shook the foundations of this country. We not only shook it there, but you felt the vibrations all the way out here.

I called home yesterday and one of the biggest fears that they have is that young Black brothers and sisters are coming together. When I called home yesterday, they said "Daddy, the gang truce is still holding." There ain't been no Black folks gunning each other down since the uprising. The Bush federal government is panicking. The state is panicking. The city is panicking.

The DA had enough nerve to come out a few days ago, because there ain't nobody gunning each other down, because we're tying the rags together, red and blue [the respective colors of the Bloods and Crips gangs]. The DA came out and said that every other Black person between the ages of 16 and 26 in Los Angeles is a gang member. That means that for every two people riding around in a car, you got one of them who's a gang member.

That was a justification for an operation that Bush has been push-

(see "LA. REBELLION" page 8)

Rebellion in LA

FROM PAGE ONE

ing all around the country, "Operation Weed and Seed." Now that caught my eye, as a gardener. I wanted to know what the weed was. Come to find out the Black community is the weed. My next question is: "Who's going to be the seed?"

CAPA ain't just talking about protecting folks who support the law. We're talking about the everyday raggedy sucker in the street, who gets disrespected, who law enforcement looks at as if we have no rights that they 're bound to respect. That' s who the people burned the city of LA down for.

They tried to make it into a racial thing. South Central LA was growing by leaps and bounds, because the uprising was growing by leaps and bounds. They even included some portions of Beverly Hills and Hollywood in South Central LA on the news, so they wouldn't scare folks. They were saying that Black folks were burning and looting. But you know what? I saw Asians. I saw White folks. I saw Chicanos and Latinos. Everybody was in the street.

It was not the burning and looting that was the message. It was the fact that we were challenging the system, because the system has not been working and people were willing to kick it in the ass. That' s why people rose up. We have been organizing around police abuse to the extent that some young brothers and sisters took to the streets and challenged the damned system. That's what's important.

Now these same people, folks who've got no education past the seventh grade or eighth grade or ninth grade, are talking about laying out demands. They've got scholars coming in there, sitting down and listening to them. They're tying their rags together. And that is what's scaring the system. The biggest threat is when we begin to come together.

We told them: "If those four dudes are found not guilty, we' re going to take this sucker to the street." We warned them. In fact, I went further than that. What I said was "if you find them not guilty, I want everybody to come downtown to Parker Center [Los Angeles police headquarters] because we're going to paralyze that sucker."

Now Gates has got to explain to everybody why police weren't everywhere else. They were all at Parker Center. Over 400 pĆ³lice and four jet helicopters were stationed at Parker Center, getting ready to move on us because we were protesting. When the shit hit the fan, they made it seem like it was in South Central LA, but all them fires you saw starting, that was Parker Center burning. The guy doesn't even have a place to stand to give out the tickets for parking now. They ain't got no windows to look out.

When the police came down on our demonstration, the first organized effort called in the city of Los Angeles, we then knew where all the police were. They were in large busses, preparing to move on our demonstration. By the time they got situated at Parker Center, everybody had moved downtown. And the shit was on.

They couldn't call it just Black folks, they had to call it a riot. We call it a rebellion. We call it an uprising. And we're proud of it, because we had everybody. We even had punk rockers. We had senior citizens, and people coming down in their wheelchairs, throwing rocks. Because that was what we felt was the way to get attention about the injustice.

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