8th Annual Reclaim MLK's Radical Legacy Weekend
For the 8th consecutive year, the Anti Police-Terror Project called the Bay Area into the streets to Reclaim MLK’s Radical Legacy. We honored the hundreds of lives lost in the last two years to gun violence and to Covid-19, as well as those we’ve lost at the hands of the police. This year we combined our struggles and rode for all of us.
MLK’s legacy has been whitewashed for many decades. The state would have us believe he was a passive figure. The truth is he was a radical leader, unshakable in his demands to end capitalism, war, empire, poverty, and white supremacy. King did NOT call for more cops! He called for more social services to eliminate poverty. He called for a war on poverty, not a war on crime.
King said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” That’s Oakland’s budget every year. Crime and violence are a function of poverty. King understood that when you make life impossible for people, they may turn to crime for survival and out of desperation. The Feds killed King, Malcolm X and many Panthers — now they’re killing people in Oakland with impunity since OPD outsourced police murders to outside agencies like FBI and CHP.
We acknowledge that the pandemic is still ravaging communities, and we take this seriously. We also acknowledge that police terror, like the pandemic, is a public health emergency. We are fighting to dismantle the New Jim Crow — continuing King’s legacy, while the power structure in Oakland and around the country are doing everything they can to make the New Jim Crow stronger.
And that’s why we still hit the streets on MLK Day and Weekend, but did so in a car caravan.
All violence is state violence. When we end state violence, we end all violence.
On Monday, January 17, we took action in Oakland to demand:
Prevention not police
Resource our communities, not cops
Invest in trauma response, not prisons