An African mother called for help. Instead the police murdered her son
Philadelphia has been up in flames this week as the black community suffers yet another African life murdered. The righteous resistance of the black community comes as a response to the brutal police murder of Walter Wallace Jr., an African man in Philadelphia.
The Uhuru Solidarity Movement is calling on the white community of Philadelphia to stand in solidarity with the black community’s fight back against colonial police terror.
We unite with the black community’s righteous struggle for justice for Walter Wallace Jr.! Wallace, a 27-year-old resident of west Philadelphia, was shot ten times by Philadelphia police around 3:45pm on Monday afternoon. Despite Wallace’s mother calling for an ambulance, the city sent out two white police officers, who arrived at the scene, drawing their guns almost immediately.
As Wallace’s mother and neighbors stood by yelling for police not to shoot and citing mental health conditions- caused by living under colonial domination- their pleas were ignored as cops fired “at least two rounds each”, recalls one neighbor, killing Wallace instantly.
This unnecessary brutal violence remains the trend in African communities all around the world.
While white serial killers and school shooters are carefully transported from the scene, African people are being stepped on, choked to death and shot while selling cigarettes or suffering a mental health crisis.
Thirty-five years later, the community suffers again
This isn’t the first time this community has suffered from colonial police terror and murder. In 1985, the state of Pennsylvania dropped a bomb on the MOVE family at 62nd and Osage Avenue, killing 11 people, mostly women and children, and burning down 61 homes.
Thirty-five years later, only six and a half blocks away from the MOVE house, Walter Wallace Jr. was murdered by police in front of his friends and family.
As long as this dangerous, blood-sucking colonial police force remains in power, African communities will continue to be brutalized as they struggle just to survive.
Philly is home to five medical schools and fourteen general acute care hospitals
Walter Wallace suffered from bipolar disorder and other mental illness from living as a colonized person under the horrible conditions and lack of resources for African people in Philadelphia, despite housing almost twenty healthcare facilities throughout the city.
Not only are Medicaid acceptance rates “lower in areas with a high degree of racial segregation”, but the amount of doctors who accept Medicaid is narrowing, making it even more difficult for Africans to access healthcare, according to a study published in Health Affairs.
Africans have the highest death rate and the shortest life expectancy of any group in Philadelphia. Seventy percent of people in prison are African and 79 percent of people in a housing crisis are African, despite making up only 44 percent of the city’s overall population.
This oppressive, colonial, white-ruling class government prevents Africans in Philadelphia from getting the help they need. According to the Health Affairs study, “[t]he areas of the city with high percentages of [Africans] or Hispanics were likely to also be areas with poor primary care…accessibility.”
This is no coincidence.
The Answer is NOT to reform or defund the police
There is no way to reform a policing system whose foundations were born as a runaway slave patrol. The only way to make this system right is by demolishing it and replacing it with Black Power.
As white people, we must support the African People’s Socialist Party’s demand for Black community control of the police. Murders like Walter Wallace Jr. will never stop unless this occupying military force is extinguished in Philadelphia and all over the country.
African people should have the right to hire, fire, train and discipline those who police their own communities. If the cops who responded to his mother’s call were members of the community and knew their neighbors, Walter Wallace would still be alive today. So would Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tamir Rice and so many more Africans who were murdered in cold blood.
We defend the right of African people to resist. We unite with the demand for reparations to the black community for state-sanctioned murder, gentrification, mass imprisonment and overall colonial conditions imposed on African people.
We must join the Black People’s March on the white house under the leadership of the African working class and march in solidarity with the African struggle!
Black Community Control of Police!
Join the Righteous African Resistance!
Join the Black People’s March on the white house on November 7th!
Join other white people in working under the leadership of APSP!