By: Huey Dessalines

Ahmaud Arbery, murdered by settlers.

BRUNSWICK, GA: Ahmaud Arbery, a 25 year old former high school star, was murdered by settlers Gregory and Travis McMichael while jogging near his home in Brunswick, Georgia on February 23. Arbery was jogging the same route that he routinely used, when settlers in the neighborhood called the police and reported a New Afrikan male allegedly engaging in burglarizing a house under construction. The McMichael settlers apparently decided amongst themselves that Arbery fit the supposed burglar’s description and decided to jump into their truck to stalk him, armed with a .357 magnum and a shotgun. They confronted Arbery, allegedly to “talk to him”. There was a scuffle (imagine being Black and two armed white men roll up on you in the Deep South), which ended with Arbery dead. The older McMichael is a former police officer.

Naturally, the local prosecutors defended and exonerated the McMichael gang. According to them, McMichael and son were operating under the auspices of the Georgia citizens’ arrest statute, and their murder of Arbery is covered under self defense. Naturally, the people are not buying this lie, a familiar one that many remember was played out when George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin several years ago in Sanford, Florida. Friends, family, and concerned New Afrikans have taken the initiative to not let this blatant murder be swept under the rug like many times before. The bourgeois reactionary New York Times reports:

In and around Brunswick, activists and allies of Mr. Arbery’s family are doing what they can to organize online. They have started a Facebook page and have coordinated a pressure campaign, emailing law enforcement officials and the local newspaper. There are hashtags, #IRunWithMaud and #JusticeForAhmaud, and T-shirts have been printed.

Revolutionaries support the masses whenever they rise in struggle of any type, because we are of the masses and for the masses. There is a correct line and an incorrect line, which can be determined through study, summation. and practice. The police and prosecutors do not respond to pressure campaigns. Even if they did press charges, reactionary colonizer juries would not convict either McMichael, and the prosecutors and police are not in the service of New Afrikan people. If they were, they would not murder us with abandon, free of consequence. Recall how, after Hurricane Katrina, New Afrikan people were murdered by colonizers. Read this account of how colonizers abuse Afrikans when society collapses due to natural disaster, now draw parallels to today.

Apparently thinking they’d caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for 10 to 15 minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they’d be allowed to live. Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. “I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area,” he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. “I said, ‘Help me, help me — I’m shot,'” Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, “Get away from this truck, n****r. We’re not gonna help you. We’re liable to kill you ourselves.” My God, thought Herrington, what’s going on out here? He managed to stumble back to a neighbor’s house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records (PDF) show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found “metallic buck-shot” scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as “at least seven [pellets] in the right neck.” Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery. “It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun,” says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. “If he hadn’t gotten to the hospital, he wouldn’t have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it.”

Brunswick sits on the Geechee coast, the center of a culture derived directly from Africa. The Geechee region maintains its own creole language and a proud history of self sufficiency and autonomy stretching back to long before the Civil War. The city itself is 60% New Afrikan, yet colonizers such as the McMichael gang control the economic structure of the region, and by extension, its politics. There is no justice to be gained in phone bomb campaigns towards the class of people who dragged us here as slaves. They laugh at us, openly and in secret. Only an armed movement of the masses under a disciplined Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political line can ultimately secure justice for Arbery, Trayvon and countless others of our people murdered by settlers over the past 500 years. Even if we don’t catch bullets, we are catching COVID-19 and dying unnecessary deaths because settlers require our labor to maintain their parasitic economy. The only way to see peace, happiness and plenty as Black people is to study and apply the lessons not only of our own theoreticians and revolutionaries such as Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, WEB Du Bois, Assata Shakur, and Malcolm X, but to steel ourselves also with the experiences of People’s Wars raging across the globe as we speak. The path to justice for our dead is paved with the blood of the enemy, spilled in People’s War for National Liberation and Communism. No other course of action is open to us after 500 years of slavery, toil, and death.