Durham, NC: Banner Drop for #EricGarner

Today marks the three-year anniversary of Eric Garner’s lynching by the New York Police Department. Daniel Pantaleo, the pig who executed Eric, remains on the NYPD payroll to this day, despite the fact that the execution was captured on film and viewed by millions of people. Eric’s murderer walks free, while the man who captured the lynching on film, Ramsey Orta, is currently incarcerated.

Justice has not been served – justice will never be served by a State who’s very formation was rooted in the genocide of Indigenous nations, the violent theft of their common lands, and the grotesque cultivation of said lands by Black bodies held captive through the ultraviolence of slavery upon plantations.

As Malcolm X said, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches, and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made.” The so-called United State, as a collection of colonial states that rests upon occupied land, is that blade.

In remembrance of Eric, we dropped a banner in Northgate Park as a means of communicating to our community that we have not forgotten, that we will never forget, and that we still cannot breathe. And that we are not going to take it anymore. We want the Durham Police Department abolished; we want the incessant cop cars that roam down Club and Roxboro St. stripped down for parts and scrap metal; we want the police stations on Foster and W. Chapel Hill St. occupied and converted to housing squats for the people living under overpasses and in tent cities; we want that $71 million monstrosity on Main St. torn down to the ground;  we want the uniforms ripped apart and sewn back into banners to drape across the I-85 South, emblazoned with the declaration that #BlackLivesMatter.

For a world without policing! Living communism, spreading anarchism! And as always, #AllCopsAreBastards