Montgomery, Alabama has a long history of racist police brutality. And they’re at it again. Most recently, five Montgomery police officers resigned and three have been put on suspension amidst charges of police brutality [Nando], as well as abuse of authority, mistreatment of citizens, and false reporting of incidents. One officer, Michael Clark, is being charged with criminal use of mace in the brutality against a 17 year old prisoner. As usual, seven of the eight cops were white, and all of the victims were Black.

Just about every year or couple years, there’s another big high-profile incident with the Montgomery PD, and everyone acts all shocked, like this isn’t shit that goes on every day. Should it surprise anyone that police officers end up acting like jackbooted thugs when we send them on a war, constantly train them that their first job is to take down criminals (rather than, say, assisting the community), jack them up into militarized units, and run them through what amount to little more than paramilitary raids on low-income neighborhoods? There are housing projects in Montgomery which are raided regularly, whether there is any report of a crime or not, by heavily armored police in black SUVs. Poor people of color in Montgomery are basically living under military occupation. Holding these officers accountable is a necessary first step, but we also have to deal with the militarized culture and practice of policing, as well as end the insane and racist War on Drugs, and address the class disparities trapping people of color in high-crime ghettoes in the first place, if we are ever going to see a real solution to police brutality.

For further reading:

• GT 2001-04-22: History of Race Riots, White Supremacy, and Police Brutality
• GT 2001-04-04: Kalamazoo Police Department Faces Continuing Scandals from Racist Brutality
• GT 2001-04-04: Kalamazoo City Council Pays Reparations to Victims of Racist Police Brutality
• GT 2001-03-28: DC Cops’ Dirty Laundry Revealed in E-mail Audit
• GT 2001-10-25: Cops refuse to adequately investigate rape in Austin

An Auburn fraternity brother dresses as a member of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween

[The incident of AU fraternity members wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes for Halloween] could portray Auburn as a racist community. I do not believe Auburn is a racist community.

–Grant Davis, secretary to the Auburn University Board of Trustees

Funny that it keeps happening, then. Davis’s comments were made two years ago in 1999, when members of Pi Kappa Alpha dressed as Klansmen for Halloween and were mildly punished once it came to the eyes of the administration. The hate images put on display this Halloween 2001 by two all-white Auburn fraternities are shocking and horrifying in their own right, but they are not anything new to the Auburn community. Just in the past few years, the Auburn community has seen repeated incidents of racial hate and remains deeply engaged in institutional racism on many levels.

• As previously mentioned, two years ago there was a parallel incident where Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity members dressed as Klansmen for Halloween.

• Auburn’s historically white fraternities are, and have always been, almost completely racially segregated against Blacks.

• Among Auburn’s registered student organizations is a campus chapter of The League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that is tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• Numerous complaints of racial discrimination by Bourbon Street Bar managers in downtown Auburn, including managers inventing phoney dress codes on the spot and lying about city ordinances in order to exclude Black patrons from the bar.

• Pervasive racism in hiring, promotion, and benefits in the Facilities Division (whose workers are overwhelmingly Black, managers overwhelmingly white) has prompted marches, demonstrations, and finally a federal civil rights lawsuit against the University. In response, Auburn dealt with the problem by… ignoring worker complaints and shifting building service workers to a night shift of 4:00pm to 12:30am, which will result in many of them having to quit in order to keep family commitments.

• The Auburn University Board of Trustees consists of twelve white men, one white woman, and one Black man. The senior administration is almost exclusively white (one exception, of course, is the director of Multicultural Affairs). Auburn remains under a court desegregation order to increase hiring of Black administration and faculty and to increase Black student enrollment, but the much-vaunted 24% increase in Black enrollment still leaves Black students at Auburn as only 7.2% of the entire student population.

And there’s a lot more that I couldn’t put together for this hastily-compiled list. Of course, none of this was mentioned or responded to in the administration’s white-washing diversity rally media event. Instead there was everything I had hoped for in a serious, harsh response to the individuals who committed the most recent acts–and everything I had feared in distancing, disavowal, and refusal to deal with the larger environment that nutured the kind of moral obliviousness that would allow frat boys to think that their vicious re-enactments of hatred and genocide were all just a big stupid lark. Look, this is a serious problem in the Auburn community, and one that we’d better get damned serious about dealing with. If we fail, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, I fear that very shortly we will learn that racism is a sickness unto death.

Take action!

Please send polite and carefully-considered e-mails to Vice President for Student Affairs Wes Williams and Interim President William F. Walker urging them to take this hate incident seriously by ensuring that the individuals who committed it and the fraternities who hosted it are severely punished, urging them to permanently dissolve the local chapters of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi. Further, politely but firmly ask them to make sure that their response to this incident include a careful look at the broader racial environment at Auburn and that concrete new programs be implemented to address racism in the Auburn University community.

(Thanks to Colleen of The Feminist Blog for pointing this one out)

The state government in Texas has passed a law requiring equitable coverage for contraception in health insurance plans [NOW]. It joins 15 other states in requiring health insurance providers to not discriminate against contraceptive devices in their prescription benefit plans, and makes another stride in making women’s health care more accessible and affordable. Sadly, a similar law failed in the Alabama state legislature. Oh well: we’ll organize more, we’ll come back stronger, and this time we will win.

OK, so we returned from the Permanent Autonomous Zones conference a bit worn out on crusty punk kids, but very charged by the experience and ready to work on a lot of possible projects, including setting up a radical civic media center / infoshop in Auburn. On getting home, I checked out information on getting a business license in the city of Auburn.

So here’s a question: why the hell does it cost $505.00 just for the privilege of being allowed to sell watermelons out of your truck without the cops harassing you? It costs only $105 or so to get a business license if you want to sell stuff out of your shop, so why the extra $400 just for the privilege of setting your truck out in the hot sun on somebody’s parking lot (assuming you can get their permission to use their parking lot in the first place). Does the city really have that much of an interest in preventing impoverished local farmers from selling their own damn stuff instead of being ripped off by corporatized grocers? The barriers to entry for any new independent businesses are insane — costs for a business license, and just the basic work of sifting through a 30-page licensing ordinance; no wonder downtown Auburn is being completely colonized by corporate chains like the GAP and Mellow Mushroom, who already have tons of pencil-pushers hired to take care of all this crap. Meanwhile, local farmers and booksellers are sliding out of business and not coming back thanks in large part to these pointless start-up costs imposed by city government’s corporativist economic planning.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers campaign against Taco Bell picked up a big moral boost as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s United Farm Workers passed a resolution endorsing the boycott of Taco Bell [IMC]. The solidarity from UFW is inspiring, given UFW’s historical role as a spearhead of organizing for the human dignity of migrant farmworkers and their near-legendary inspiration for low-wage laborers and Chicanos across the nation.

CIW launched its boycott of Taco Bell in April, 2001, in response to repeated stonewalling from Taco Bell management. CIW had asked Taco Bell to take responsibility for the abysmal working conditions of Florida tomato pickers (the average farmworking family lives on about $7,000/year; farmworkers have no labor rights under US law; the piece rate paid for tomatos picked has not increased since the 1970s). Taco Bell claims that it is not responsible for the contracts made by its suppliers — an excuse just as phony as Nike’s excuses that it is not responsible for its outsourced sweatshops in Indonesia or Mexico. If Taco Bell would pay just one penny extra per pound of tomatoes, it could double the income of tomato pickers. But they will not take any responsibility or make any moves to bring their suppliers to the bargaining table with the CIW. So the CIW has launched a dynamic and creative campaign to speak truth to Taco Bell and hold them accountable.

The campaign is surging forward as the Taco Bell Truth Tour begins. We had a Taco Bell protest here in Auburn during the Southern Girls Convention, and, who knows, we may work on some more later.

For further reading:

• GT 7/27/2001 reports on Southern Girls Convention, including the Taco Bell protest
• Also, check out the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ website

Take Action!

• CIW Taco Bell Take Action page