Elaine Brown & Anne Knight
Elaine Brown (1943-) grew up in North Philadelphia with her single mother Dorothy Clark. Despite desperate poverty, Dorothy worked hard to provide Elaine with a good education. Elaine moved to California and worked as a cocktail waitress at a strip club. She soon became involved with the Black Liberation Movement and began working for the radical newspaper Harambee.
Among the events Karl Marx identified as signalling the “rosey dawn of the era of capitalist production” was “the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins.” From the day John Hawkins sailed in October 1562 from Sierra Leone with some 400 procured slaves bound for Hispaniola, British traders made huge fortunes from such hunting.
Even greater profits were to be made from the Triangular Trade that developed between the west coast of Africa, the Caribbean and major British ports.
Three years after the devastating fire in the West London tower block, the public inquiry is being sabotaged by those who are most responsible for the disaster, writes Moyra Samuels
“Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Fredrick Douglass, 1857
There have been many rallies and demonstrations in Spain, such as those that took place on Sunday 7 June, organised by the newly formed Black, African, and Afro-descendant Community in Spain (CNAAE). In Madrid, over 3,000 people gathered at the US embassy.
In solidarity with the BLM movement in the US, at the beginning of June in Belgium 1,200 people gathered in Antwerp, 750 in Ghent and 200 in Hasselt. In Brussels, between 10,000 and 12,000 people gathered at Place Poelaert, in front of the Palace of Justice. They were addressed by undocumented migrants demanding regularisation; families of the victims of police killings; anti-racist activists and others. Several highlighted the past crimes of Belgian colonialism and the fact that Belgian governments refuse to acknowledge and address them.
Widespread police violence has ensured demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd have brought victims together with tens of thousands of protesters. Selma Oumari reports from Paris
When George Floyd died at the hands of the police, many people in France felt this was happening in their own country. So many Black, Arab and Asian people are being killed in France as in the US. The latest deaths came in a context of already existing anger towards the brutality of police forces. Tensions have been rising during the lockdown, as the police have been harassing people in non-white areas. Fourteen people have been killed, and others wounded over the recent months.
Socialist Review reports from a continent facing an unprecedented economic collapse
Despite the comparatively limited impact of Covid-19 on Africa, the continent as a whole is on the verge of its first recession in a quarter of a century. GDP growth is projected to fall from 2.4 percent in 2019 to between -2.1 percent and an eye-watering -5.1 percent this year. According to the IMF, this will be the sharpest contraction of the continent’s economy on record.
Brian Champ in Toronto reports on an upsurge in demonstrations against institutional racism and violence
Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd on 25 May. Two days later, in Canada, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a young Black Indigenous woman, fell or was pushed to her death from her 24th-floor apartment in Toronto. Her family had called for help with an episode of mental distress she was experiencing. The Toronto police arrived, removing the family from the home, leaving only Regis and police inside. Moments later she was dead.
From the US to Africa, Korea, Europe and beyond, millions have marched against racism and police violence. Harold Wilson begins our global round-up with the explosion of anger in Britain
George Floyd’s racist murder was as public as it was graphic, but others have been just as brutal, casual and naked. Breonna Taylor was shot dead in March as she slept in her Louisville apartment by three police officers serving a ‘no-knock warrant’. On 1 June, police in northern California fatally shot unarmed 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa, who was on his knees with his hands raised outside a Walgreens store as they responded to a call of ‘alleged looting’. “When confronted by the police, he dropped to his knees and surrendered, and they fired at him,” said a lawyer representing the family.
Petros Constantinou reports on how EU moves to isolate and confine migrants in buffer zones along the Greek/Turkey border are being resisted
Black lives matter, refugee lives matter! This is the cry from thousands in Greece, outraged by the escalation of racism by the neoliberal government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, with mass evictions of 11,000 recognised refugees, among them pregnant women and babies. Government measures have also taken away food allowances previously provided.
