Support the BART 14. #BlackLivesMatter. #NotOneDime. Demand that BART stop its persectution of civil rights protesters; those who halted BART for a time on Black Friday.
BART is tabulating the number of call they get on this, and that the person coordinating the tabulation, and therefore an important number to call, is the BART District Secretary, at 510-464-6080.
Please take a moment to make your voice heard in this matter. Remind them that Rosa Parks never paid the losses felt from the Montgomery Bus Boycott. this is another such moment.
510-464-6080
Tell them:
- Drop the charges!
- No restitution!
- Disband the BART police!
- Lower fares for the needy!
Following is a letter the Gray Panthers sent to the the BART Directors and General Manager:
- Gray Panthers of San Francisco
- 2940 16th Street, Room 200-4, San Francisco CA 94103
- BART Board of Directors
- BART General Manager
- 344 20th Street
- Oakland CA
- January 8, 2015
- Gray Panthers of San Francisco is very disturbed on hearing that BART management is pursuing heavy criminal charges and some $70,000 restitution against 14 Black Lives Matter activists who courageously chained themselves to trains at West Oakland BART on November 28, 2014. We believe, and virtually everyone we have spoken with believes, that they are heroes, and deserve a medal. We cannot believe how out of touch you are with community feelings.
- Your website states “The tragic death of Oscar Grant will remain a painful memory for all of us. While we cannot alter the past, we have been using the lessons learned as a catalyst to change our future. We on the BART Board have been continuously taking the actions needed to improve the BART Police Department to ensure our officers are better-trained and better-equipped and we’re working with the community and our customers to earn their trust and confidence by keeping them safe and secure.”
- Safe and secure? In January 2014, BART police attacked and tasered an unarmed Black man twice, then dragged him off the train. In March, BART police beat and arrested Nubia Bowe, a 19-year old student and a Black woman suspected of dancing on the train; and in September BART police slammed a Black woman to the ground and charged her with resisting arrest. These events are well-documented, two on video. These are not isolated cases. A Black friend of the daughter of one of our members was racially profiled, beaten, and arrested by BART police.
- On your website, you justify your punitive actions against the Black Lives Matter activists by saying “As a public agency fully funded by riders and tax payers, we must never lose sight of the agency’s mission to provide public transportation to the citizens we serve.” We agree. Your mission is not to profile, harass, beat, arrest, and even kill Black and Latin passengers.
- The Black Lives Matter people were not just disrupting BART for racist events in faraway Ferguson, or New York, or Cleveland. They were sending a message that right here, BART is endangering Black and Latin passengers. Interrupting service when Black and Latin passengers are endangered is as proper as interrupting service when broken equipment endangers any other passengers.
- You should be listening to these men and women because they represent the feelings of a large proportion of the citizens you claim to serve. Drop the charges and the restitution demands.
AND IN MASSACHUSETTS
Today, January 15th, possibly partly inspired by the BART shutdown, protesters in Boston shut down Interstate I93 for 4.5 hours, cementing themselves in huge casks of concrete. They released the following statement:
Today, we place our bodies in the street for four and a half hours, the same amount of time Mike Brown lay dying in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. We are a diverse group of LGBTQA, white, pan-Asian and Latin@ people acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, both locally and nationally. We stand behind the demands released by organizers in Ferguson, which can be found at http://fergusonaction.com/demands/
We are participating in this action in response to a national call for non-Black people to turn up for two central reasons. As non-Black people acting in solidarity, it is necessary to disrupt a capitalist structure that has been built on the physical and economic exploitation of Black bodies since our country’s inception. We also recognize our unique position in the struggle for economic, political, gender and racial liberation: though many of us do identify as people of color, we are able to participate in such an action with significantly lower risk of physical harm and brutalization by the State specifically because we are NOT identified as Black.
We maintain that the U.S. is and has always been a state founded on the exploitation, enslavement and oppression of people of color worldwide. The political and economic system we struggle under today would not exist without the centuries of exploitation of Black and brown people. It is crucial to recognize that capitalism is a system that is upheld by white supremacy. We cannot end capitalism without ending white supremacy. There is no such thing as total liberation without ending the exploitation of Black and brown bodies.
Mayor Marty Walsh and Governor Deval Patrick have both condemned the current anti-racist movement and its participants as “disruptive” to the city of Boston. But Boston is a city that stops, on average, 152 Black and brown people a day on their ways to work, to their homes, to school and to their families. Is that not “disruptive”? Boston is the third most policed city per capita in the country. Is it not disruptive for Black and brown residents to live
under this extensive surveillance, under police intimidation and brutality? How can elected leaders of our city and state support the violent disruption of Black lives, but not the people resisting that very violence? A delay in traffic or on the MBTA is not comparable to the constant state of fear and anxiety created by police in Black and brown communities.
Governor Patrick has also complained that the peaceful protests are “expensive,” citing $2 million in police overtime pay during the last three major protests. Unnecessary deployment of both state and local forces, outfitted in full riot gear and with military-grade weaponry on reserve, is bound to be “expensive.” The $120 million used by our state government annually to incarcerate drug offenders is “expensive,” as is the proposed $2 billion budget to construct new detention facilities in Massachusetts in the next 7 years. Clearly, the State incurs immense expense criminalizing and surveilling Black and brown bodies. But who pays the highest price? Black and brown individuals and families who must try to rebuild, post-incarceration, in a city with no living-wage legislation, rapid gentrification and one of the highest costs of living in the country.
And so, for four and a half hours, we disrupt access from the predominantly white, wealthy suburbs to Boston’s city center.
“Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.” – Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
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