Just back from the August 10 protest in the working-class Bronx, NY against the system’s refusal of justice for Ramarley Graham. On only 12 hours notice, 200 of us gathered in response to Frank Graham’s call to rally for his son once again, in front of the Bronx District Attorney’s office. The demand, the theme, was “justice”: but the reality is the exact opposite. The chants were all familiar and strong, peoples’ whole bitter lives pouring into their voices. “They say get back, We say fight back!” In Ramarley’s name, in the names of all our fallen.
On procedural grounds, a judge threw out the first case against the cop Richard Haste who murdered the unarmed Ramarley in his own bathroom in front of his grandmother, but, ever “impartial,” left it open for a re-indictment from another grand jury. Last night the grand jury declined to do that. “They say get back.” The Graham family now wants to demand a federal investigation. “We say fight back.”
My heart bleeds for them in this moment when, Frank says, “everything is dark,” but the feds investigating NYPD death squads in the Bronx is a farce! The U.S. government is the king of racist death squads all over the world, from Vietnam to Congo to El Salvador to Iraq, just to name four places in my lifetime that have seen their Ramarleys shot down in their own homes by U.S. government thugs. “We say fight back.”  How, then?  An image comes to mind from Ismaël Ferroukhi’s film Free Men, of the women and men Algerian communist workers in Paris who fought the Nazi occupation alongside their French sisters and brothers only to see colonial France turn the guns on them back in Algeria.
We  will always fight back. But it will have to be in a way that takes account of the cruel predicament of our Algerian communist predecessors, and of the Grahams today. Fighting back is always necessary but no one fight, it seems, is ever sufficient. Think of how, even with state power won and kept at terrible cost, the first communist revolutions had such a hard time transforming the rotten world they were left with.
No one struggle, not even revolution, is ever enough. Every thing always seems dark when that truth hits home. It’s the dialectical truth that nothing is at rest at last, nothing is final, nothing is secure, everything changes; we must keep moving and stay with the pace. “Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.”
But if we toughen up, somehow the fight goes on harder and smarter the next time. A handful of people from my union were there, as we have been throughout this long year, because Ramarley Graham should have lived to be our student. A sobering day, being this close to official state murder of a young black Bronx high-schooler. “NYPD, KKK, How many kids will you kill today?” The black sign in back said simply “Richard Haste, you can’t hide”: everyone there knew how that chant, introduced by PLP, goes on: “We charge you with genocide.”  
A long history of genocide, in this racist city, this racist country, this racist continent, this planet of racist slums, and lengthening as we speak. But always with those who say no. Who will have the last word?  What will that word be? For now, it’s “No!” The Graham family has been inspiring speakers of that saving word.
It will be “No!” until our last breath, until we can speak that other word, for all our fallen sons and daughters. Freedom.
New York teacher