and to tear up the Joshua trees
instead of to, you know, to find
the freedom that you used to be able to find
in, in, you know,
the desert.
Lightning But No Rain
Theresa Allison Founder of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) Mother of gang truce architect Dewayne Holmes
(Amazing black hat and bracelets on both arms. Beautiful rings.)
Mothers ROC came about right after my nephew was killed,
November the 29th of ’91.
After the death of my nephew, my son
Dewayne
thought about a peace among,
you know, the, the guys in the project—
I don’t want to say gangs—
the young men.
The truce, they started meeting every Sunday,
so I thought about
a group of mothers gettin’ together,
so I thought about
the words
Reclaiming Our Children.
I knew that there was
a lot of kids going to prison,
a lot of kids going to the cemetery
by the hands of our enemy,
the unjust system.
Then my son Dewayne was sentenced for a crime he did not do.
When they killed Tiny—
when I say “they,” I mean the police.
They shot forty-three times.
Five bullets went into Tiny.
No bullets went in nobody else’s body.
I think what they do, they want to make it look like a drive-by
shooting.
See, when the gangs
shoot at each other,
it’s a lot of ’em
fire
(She shows the shooting with her hand)
bullets.
When they killed Tiny, they were in unmarked cars.
When they shot my nephew, they were dressed like gang members,
duck-walkin’,
with hard beanies, jackets, no badges or anything,
all over the project,
like
birds!
This was going to be listed as a drive-by shooting,
and then they were gonna put
it on another project.
This is what they do all the time.
And for some reason the lights was out in the project,
’cause Tiny was goin’ around
gatherin’ up the children,
’cause when the lights go out in the projects,
there’s a lot of shooting.
So when I left the Fox Hill Mall
I felt something was wrong,
but I didn’t think it was my family,
’cause that day look like the crucifixion of Jesus.
I told people, “Doesn’t this look like
the crucifixion of Jesus?” and they say,
“You right.”
It was the weirdest time of my life,
it was the weirdest feeling.
It was lightning,
no rain!
And when I got back home my daughter was runnin’ down La Brea
wid her two little girls and she was cryin’.
My daughter told me then
that Tiny,
that Tiny had been killed.
The day we had Tiny’s funeral
it was so many people,
and me
being a strong Catholic,
it reminded me of the time
that Jesus took that one loaf of bread and made a whole,
it was just like that.
All of Tiny’s death told me
that
a change must come,
really
a change got to come.
My son changed.
(She’s crying)
Other guys in Watts changed.
Our life totally changed
from happy people
to hurting people.
I mean hurting people,
I mean hurting,
pain.
When we came back from the funeral,
we had a demonstration,
so I had a
great coalition.
I mean, I,
I mean it was …
I’m tellin’ ya,
I’m tellin’ you eight hundred fifty people,
nothin’ but Spanish people,
that caravan,
I had white folks!
That in itself …
They don’t want,
they don’t want the peace,
they don’t want us comin’ together.
So after that they wanted my son more.
They wanted Dewayne more.
So when they attack my son,
He was walkin’ slow.
They told him
to give him his driver’s license,
but they kept insisting he was another person,
Damian Holmes,
or some other Holmes they use,
other than Dewayne Holmes.
So they had him in a car.
So some people ran and got me.
We surrounded the police car,
we gonna turn it over,
we gonna turn it over.
Some laid on the ground.
I laid at the front part of the bumper, and one little girl—she was
about eighteen but she looked like twelve—
she was underneath the back wheel, so they couldn’t roll.
If they rolled, they would have hit somebody,
people were all over the ground.
I told him, I said, “My son don’t have a
warrant.”
He said, “Oh yes he does.”
I said, “Okay, run his name through this computer.”
“Oh, we can’t do that.”
I said, “You a lie.
You do it anytime you want to arrest them.”
So they kept saying they couldn’t use it, they had to take him to the
station,
to run his name.
“But maybe he doesn’t have anything.”
“We just have to take him to the station.”
Now, you
know and I know too,
before the police stop you for a traffic ticket
they done ran your license plate.
I mean, they know who you are,
you know.
They knew he was,
they knew he was Dewayne Holmes,
they knew he was Sniper!
I said, “Look, I’m not gonna move.
You not gonna kill my son like you killed my nephew.”
So the police happened to pull the car up a little bit and hit my leg.
Dewayne said, “Don’t you hit my mother!”
But we, I already told him, “We gonna turn the car over, Dewayne,
we gonna turn it over.”
They were not gonna kill my son.
And that was their intention, to kill my son,
they still wanna kill my son,
they do! (She cries)
So then
the sergeant came
and he told the man,
he said, “It’s not your son.
I made a mistake.”
Somebody yell outta the car,
“Make ’em tell him they’re sorry.”
So the cop had to say,
“I’m sorry,”
that they didn’t want to have …
After that Dewayne couldn’t walk,
go from one side of the project to another.
They was trying to get my son,
to stop us, to stop
the demonstration,
to stop
us from protestin’ against them,
to stop the world from knowing
that they corrupt.
LA supposed to be
the best police officers in the world,
and if everybody all over the world knows
they the corrupt one,
then
that’s the problem,
they been doin’ it.
They used to take our kids
from one project
and drop ’em into another gang
zone and leave ’em in there
and let those guys kill ’em
and then say it’s a gang-related thing,
hear me?
They picked my son up several times
and dropped him in another project
when he was just a little boy.
They’ve done it to my kid,
they’ll do it to your kid.
It’s the color, because we’re Black.
The woman that killed Tiny,
she had a big
plaque—woman of the year!
Yeah, she shot him in the face,
her and her partner, we call ’em Cagney and Lacey,
and she is …
a little—
I can’t give you the name—
how she use to go in an’ pull these kids,
I mean from twelve years old,
and kick ’em and hit their heads against trees
and stomp on the ground.
Why you got to do Black kids like that?
Why couldn’t you handcuff ’em and take ’em to jail?
Why couldn’t they handcuff my nephew Tiny
and just take him to jail?
After they done shot him down,
he couldn’t move! (she cries)
Why they have to shoot him in the face?
Doesn’t seem like they killin’ him
to keep from him sayin’ what they said to him.
(Crying and an abrupt change)
They coverin’ up!
’Cause they know they killed him wrong!
I’m not sayin’ they were just gunnin’ for Tiny,
but they not men enough,
they not men or women enough to say, “Hey, I killed the wrong person.”
These police officers are just like you and I.
Take that damn uniform off of ’em,
they the same as you and I.
Why do they have so much power?
Why does the system work for them?
Where can we go
to get the justice that they have?
Ts tuh!
Where? (crying)
Then they took my child!
I was tired,
I have heart problems.
I went away
and they took him while I was gone.
A Bloodstained Banner
Cornel West Scholar
(He is in a three-piece navy-blue suit with a pocket watch and he has on cuff links. Eyeglasses. Books everywhere, papers on the desk. It is as if the desk, which is two-sided, is a fortress. The answering machine clicks and there are two beeps.)
You sell
at the
most profitable price
and it’s inescapable, it’s ubiquitous,
you’re selling things,
you’re selling things at the most profitable price
and you’re trying to gain
access
to power and property
and pleasure
by any means you cayan,
you see,
and thal [sic] are two different things.
On the one hand
there’s
like duh frontier myth in America,
right? (barely audible on the word “right”)
That we (hard to hear that “we”) gain some moral and plitical [sic]
regeneration
and expansion by means of conquest and dispossession of duh
people’s land.
So I mean a, uh,
Richard Slotkin talks about dis in terms
of being a gunfighterr (grabbing the “r”) nation.
If in fact our major myth is that of the fronteer,
the way in which you expand the fronteer
(He is leaning forward, with his head down close to the desk,
his
glasses seeming to sit on top of his ears, and screwing up his
face, as
he literally puts his body into the idea)
is by being a gunfighter.
So many heroes,
these cowboys
wit dere gu-uns
Now, you can imagine
on one level
dat’s done
because you wanna
expand
possibilities for the market,
extract resources from the land,
even as you subordinate the peoples who are on that land.
Well, on another level
it’s a deep machismo
ethic,
which is
gangsterous,
eh? (almost as if he’s saying “okay?” or “right?”)
That to be a
Mayan
who engages in this
means ta put othuhs down,
ta be tough, ta be cold
and meanspirited, and so forth.
To be like Rambo,
as this brother Stallone made big money in the last decade,
right?
Uh, and
this kinda gangsterous orientation,
which as we know,
ya know,
has a long history in black and white,
uh, and
in rap music these days—
you know, gangster rap,
which is deeply resistant of, uh, against racism and so forth
but so centered on machismo identity because
you tough
like a soldier,
you like a, uh, military mayan,
you, you can best,
you’re better thayan, uh, these other
military men that you’re fightin’, against,
you can outpolice the police,
you can outbrutalize the police brutality,
the police who are being brutal and so forth
and so on.
So you’re playing exactly the same game, as it were,
and racial reasoning, I think, oftentimes has been construed as an
attempt of black people
all coming together
in order to
both protect
each other
but usually the men
who will serve as the policing agents,
therefore the interests of black women
are subordinated
and the black men
become the
machismo heroes,
because they’re the ones who defy
and women can’t do that.
Why,
because,
you know, these folks who you’re defying
themselves are machismo,
so you need a machismo person to respond to the machismo.
So you get dis
encounter
between two machismo heroes,
you see,
and it takes courage.
I don’t wanna downplay these machismo heroes
but it’s still within a patriarchal mode,
it’s still very much within a patriarchal mode,
and it reproduces and recycles the same kinda conception of what it
is to engage
in
struggle
and what it is to
attempt to gain
some progress,
as it were,
and hence what I think we end up with is a certain kind
of turf policing.
The best we can do
is hold up
a bloodstained banner
of a black struggle that is rooted in moral vision
and yet
acknowledging the fact
that a power str
uggle
will be fundamental for any change, so you don’t wanna be naive
and on the other hand you don’t also wanna just become
amoral at the same time
or give up
on
the broader possibilities of humann
beings engaging in interaction that accents our humanness,
more than simply our, uh,
our delusory foundations,
race or gender or whatever.
Uh,
but!
ass,
you know,
ass the bess we can do,
ass the bess anybody can do at any moment of human history
is simply hold up the bess of what you see in the pass,
no guarantee whatsoever
that, one, it will ever triumph or, two,
that it will ever gain a mass following.
I mean for me
it, it, it,
the real marking was the, uh,
the demise of
the innernat …
the demise of
the Black Panther Party, which was the
last representation
of
internationalism
and multiracialism
grounded in the black community,
you see,
’cause
what the Black Panther Party was trying to do
was ta take duh best of the boldness and defiance of Malcolm X,
which is often machismo-driven
but also quite authentic
in terms of its critiques of white supremacy, but also
link it to
a certain internationalism
that acknowledged the roles of people of color,
that acknowledged the role of progressive white persons,
that acknowledged the role of all
whosoever will
identify
with poor
people and working people,
and, uh,
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, given all their faults,
did have that kind of broad,
all-embracing vision that people forget.
I mean that broad international perspective, you see,
and it was not closing ranks,
it was not just a kind of narrow black nationalism that they were
putting forward,
at all,
at all.
Uh,
but once that went under
it became very clear
that we were in a moment of dissarray,
and, of course,
the conservative forces,
business classes, especially corporate elites, unified, consolidated, and
then
were able to bring to bear their own policies
in reshaping society,
primarily in their own interest,
and that’s what we been up against for the past nineteen, twenty
years.
Yeah.
No, well, good luck,
good luck
indeed in deed.
I’m always pullin’ an’ prayin’ for ya.
(BLACKOUT)
Here’s a Nobody