To Avenge Kyam, Smash Racism Worldwide
Friday, October 2, 2015 at 1:46PM
Challenge_DesafĂ­o

BROOKLYN, September 21 — Forty workers and students demonstrated today in the continuing struggle for justice for Kyam Livingston, murdered in 2013 by the kkkops’ medical negligence in Brooklyn’s Central Booking Jail.
Kyam’s family and the Justice For Kyam Committee, with strong support from the Progressive Labor Party, have guaranteed monthly actions to remember July 21, the date of her murder. The racism of Kyam’s indifferent cop jailers caused her death, the speakers explained to scores of neighbors who stopped on their way home from work. Members of PLP explained that the capitalist rulers use their police forces to terrorize workers and discourage fightback. Many residents of this mainly immigrant working-class neighborhood listened, donated money, and took leaflets and over 300 copies of CHALLENGE. The overwhelmingly positive response to our monthly actions prove that the bosses, their lackeys and their brutal profit system can’t stop the struggle of the working class.
Kyam’s mother spoke movingly of her daughter’s final hours, the conditions faced by those held in central booking, the callousness of those responsible for her daughter’s death and her own commitment to seeing those responsible punished. She vowed to shut down the Central Booking Jail and the crowd responded, “Shut it down, shut it down, shut this racist system down!”
A speaker related the struggle in Palestine/Israel to the struggle in the U.S. against racist police violence.
Among the several members of PLP speaking at the rally, one young teacher, holding her toddler in her arms, moved the crowd when she said no mother should have to bury her child. There is something wrong with a system, she went on, where the mainly Black and Latin students in her school are forced to start their day by passing through scanners like criminals.  
Another teacher spoke about students being forced to learn how to “assume the position” by the NYPD. Both related the murders by police from Brooklyn to Texas to Ferguson to Baltimore, as well as the everyday oppression faced by the working class, to the need to destroy capitalism with communist revolution.

Article originally appeared on The Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party (http://www.plparchive.org/).
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