Los Angeles, CA – Local community activists and the Committee for Community Control of Police held a rally press conference here, August 18, to demand that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder file charges against George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. The rally also raised the slogan of self-determination for the Black nation in the South and marked the 50-year anniversary of the historic civil rights march on Washington D.C. Speakers denounced the continued oppression of Blacks and Chicanos as evidenced of the ongoing killings and beatings by the police and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

Jubilee Shine, Coalition for Community Control Over the Police, told the crowd, “W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903, 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, ‘Either America will admit Black people on the basis of democracy, or America will cease to exist.’ But America has never been a democracy.”

Shine continued, “Now, 50 years since Dr. King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Voting Rights Act has been overturned for the southern states, the submerged Black nation. And in Florida, where the Black vote went uncounted to make Bush president after he lost the election, a white supremacist investigation and prosecution and defense of a white supremacist terrorist named George Zimmerman – and don’t let the media tell you he’s Hispanic. Had he been named Jorge Zuniga, he’d be under the jail – they let Zimmerman waltz out of court.”

Shine concluded by saying, “All democratic people must in principle uphold the right to self-determination for the Black nation, and all oppressed nations. Trayvon Martin is murdered, and the killer acquitted and protected, precisely because of the imperialist relationship of the U.S. to the U.S. Black nation, geographically located in the Black Belt south. The Black nation, which emerged with the betrayal of the Reconstruction after the Civil War, has since been denied sovereignty and the opportunity to identify its relationship to the U.S. This denial of rights and theft of resources has been manifested in the collective oppression and super-exploitation of African Americans in the deep South, and replicated in the ghettos of the largest U.S. cities. Florida has the highest count of lynchings of any state. There can be no local justice for Trayvon in a Florida court. The federal Justice Department must intervene with Civil Rights charges. And the only solution to the historic and systemic oppression of Black people in the U.S. must be based on the right to national self-determination. Justice for Trayvon Martin, Federal charges now for terrorist George Zimmerman, Self-Determination for the Black nation!”

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