Newark, NJ – The chanting rang out: “Shoot…and shoot! And lock and load and shoot!” at a rally here, April 26, called to protest New York Judge Arthur Cooperman’s exoneration of three police officers for killing Sean Bell. The victim was 23 when he was killed in 2006 in a barrage of 50 shots. He was to be married the next day.

“They [police] got license to kill. Your life and my life are not worth two cents,” said Lawrence Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, addressing the Newark rally. Called on short notice, more than 80 people turned out. Thousands of passersby on a busy Saturday afternoon were visibly supportive of the protest. Some joined in spontaneously. A man with three small children took a sign and stood with the rally for almost two hours.

“It’s a wallet, not a gun! How many bullets? Forty-one!” was another chant. The protesters’ cry recalled the case of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant similarly killed by New York police officers in hail of gunfire. When Diallo took a wallet from his pocket his killers claimed they thought it was a gun. They were later excused for their crime.

The names of New Jersey police killing victims were also chanted: Mike Newkirk, Earl Faison, Randy Weaver, Luis Ives, Fuquan Moore, Santiago Villenueva and others.

The parents of three victims of police terror attended the protest. They are Earl Williams, father of Earl Faison, Mary Weaver, mother of Randy Weaver and Elizabeth (Bonnie) Moore, mother of Rasheed Fuquan Moore. See fightbacknews.net/2005/03/newark.htm for a joint interview with Earl Williams and Bonnie Moore about their sons.

In a historic people’s victory, a long struggle by the family of Earl Faison and the People’s Organization for Progress led to convictions and prison terms for civil rights violations by five New Jersey police officers. Earl Faison was killed in Orange, New Jersey in 1999. It was the first imprisonment of police officers for a crime against a civilian in New Jersey history. The state of New Jersey refuses to this day to bring criminal charges against the officers, however.

Earl Williams spoke of the Bell verdict to Fight Back!, “I expected the outcome because there was no jury.” In Faison’s case, it took more than two years of struggle to obtain a jury trial. The trial judge later voided three of the convictions with no written opinion. “We had to fight to have the verdicts reinstated,” Earl Williams said. “I feel so sorry for the [Bell] family.”

The anger of the protesters and the community went far beyond previous levels. A participant told Fight Back!, “To shoot three unarmed black men 50 times – with no gun, no crime, no nothing, is absolutely devastating to me. I’m tired of marching. Sic your dog on me, I sic my dog on you. We ain’t got no f—-ing justice, why is there still peace?”

Another said, “I almost had a stroke,” when he heard the verdict.

“Black life is cheap,” said another. “If anyone should know what the state is, it’s Afro-American people. The state is organized violence. It’s been used from lynchings on courthouse greens to murder in jail. Until it’s one of them for one of us they will continue to kill us. Our state power must be the aim of our struggle.”

Lawrence Hamm told the crowd, “They’ll do it again and again until we change our strategy. They got to pay. We got to shut something down. We got to go down to Wall Street and shut it down. Don’t let those financial traders do their work until we get justice. Those cops got to pay!”

The rally shouted out, “They got to pay! They got to pay! They got to pay!”

#NewarkNJ #News #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #PeoplesOrganizationForProgress