Carl Dix speaks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with residents and BAsics Bus Tour volunteers.
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Voices from the BAsics Bus Tour: Day 2, Dinner in the Bronx!
Our BA Everywhere crew had been out in the streets and around some projects of the Bronx on a summer afternoon – taking out BAsics, distributing palm cards, working to bring people into the movement for revolution. We were soaked with sweat and a little tired, but excited about the beginnings of our work in the Bronx and looking forward to a very special night to cap it off.
Our BAsics van didn’t have a difficult time finding the house we were looking for as we drove it down a quiet, tidy street in the Bronx. One of its brick sides is painted in black, with portraits of two young men murdered by NYPD superimposed on the background. A few words under the portrait on the left side had their names followed by the word “EXECUTED.”
The front of the house is painted blue. It contains the names of about 40 people – Anthony Rosario, Hilton Vega, Malcolm Ferguson, Frankie Arzuega, Leonard Lantin, Jose L. Zarete, Patrick (Hessy) Phelan, William Whitehead, Amadou Diallo – above them all the words “in memory of.” A tombstone placed in front of the house said, “In our grieving hearts we acknowledge police brutality and Racial Injustice, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ said the lord.”
Everyone named on this wall was murdered by the NYPD. The BAsics Bus Tour was being welcomed to a dinner by two of the mothers fighting police brutality and murder for a night of warm companionship, stimulating discussions, and heartfelt exchanges about future possibilities that were deep and sprinkled with humor. Ample quantities of delicious food had been prepared. These parents and some other members of their families mingled late into the cool of the evening, along with the BA everywhere crew that had come from throughout the country and other parts of the city. No one who was there will forget this night in the Bronx.
One of the BA Everywhere volunteers said after the event, “there’s a lot of things rattling around in my head. All the people killed. All the people whose names haven’t been recognized here in this city and all around the world would fill up this whole neighborhood and beyond”.
It’s summer in New York City and things are heating up as the BAsics Bus Tour is set to roll through in just a few days
Article by Alice Woodward- Building support for the BAsics Bus Tour beginning this Monday in New York City
Donate to support the BAsics Bus Tour
Greetings fellow bus riders around the country, all those who know about this movement for revolution and are finding out about it, contributing, working on it in so many ways, becoming part of the campaign to get BA everywhere. It’s summer in New York City and things are heating up as the BAsics Bus Tour is set to roll through in just a few days. Seriously hot, like you’re covered in sweat in a few minutes kind of hot, like the sun sets and it still feels like there’s a damp towel wrapped around you. It’s a blazing July in the city.
If you traveled through the city on a late afternoon when the streets bustle and you might by chance catch a cool breeze, you’d find in several locations large public pools with long lines snaked around the block as people wait to soak up the cool relief. Ice cream trucks and bicycles, fire hydrants that kids mess with spraying cars as they go by, basketball courts where the heat somehow loses out to how good it feels to play a game of ball. Think of the millions of people, many without air conditioning, packed in together in housing projects and apartment complexes, sometimes families of immigrants living together, many to an apartment. It was not the heat itself, but it mixed with the smoldering contradictions in a society where the masses of people are kept down and pit against each other, that first compelled the city to open up large public pools decades ago. Today those same contradictions among the people and even more so, the systemic overt racism and fear of Black people that gets whipped up, came to the surface when one of these pools reopened this summer in a recently gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn. The NY Times has contributed to this dynamic with reports on “complaints” about youth coming there from “other neighborhoods”.
Preparing for the BAsics Bus Tour coming to the Bronx: Going to Soundview
Photo: At the door where Amadou Diallo was shot and killed by NYPD. Neighbors hold up Revolution posters (PDF|JPG).
This week, as we have gone to community centers and people we have met in the Bronx to prepare places for the tour volunteers to stay and more, we went to the Soundview area and to the block where Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by NYC police in the alcove of his apartment building in 1999.
Contribute to the BAsics Bus Tour. Watch and spread this video to make the goal of $25,000 by the end of this weekend towards the next leg of the Tour… kicking off in NYC and surrounding areas. DOWNLOAD this for screenings throughout the weekend: vimeo.com/45323963
100 Days - 100 Hoodies in Harlem, the impact of BAsics 1:13
Yesterday’s march “100 Days – 100 Hoodies” was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in Harlem. People expressed over and over that the system is greasing the skids to let George Zimmerman free and once again making the victim out as the criminal. And they want this to stop! Click HERE for pictures, and click below to read on.
Carl Dix at a speak out in front of the Sanford, FL police station on May 25, 2012.
Sanford is where 17 year old Trayvon Martin was murdered in a modern American lynching
We Say "NO MORE" printed in Florida Star
We Say “NO MORE” statement was published in the Jacksonville Florida Star on Thursday, May 24th. Click this link and go to page A3 of the e-edition.
Signed by Don Cheadle, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Carl Dix, and others. This is a statement that the killing of Trayvon Martin and the 2.4 million in prison make clear that there is a whole generation of Black and Latino youth marked and treated as a “generation of suspects” to be murdered and jailed. This is not an issue for Black people alone but for all who care about justice; it is not a random tragedy. We say NO MORE!
Share this Statement with everyone you know, say “no more!” and mean it, and spread the message widely!
BAsics Bus Tour volunteers headed to speakout at the Sanford Police Station bringing a banner signed by hundreds throughout the region:
“No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.” - Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:13
