Rebuild the National Movement Against Police Terror!
The Whole Damn System is Guilty as Hell!
From April 21 through 23, the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation will hold its first national meeting in over a decade in Minneapolis. Our goal is no less audacious than it is necessary: to build a determined movement of resistance against police terror. We aim to live up to the potential of the beautiful uprising of the summer of 2020, when the whole country rose up in powerful and diverse ways against state terror and white supremacy following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and take it even further.
The October 22nd Coalition was founded in 1996 by a group of activists, family members of loved ones lost to police violence, and revolutionaries as the first nationwide movement against the national epidemic of police brutality. Our Stolen Lives Project, the first-ever national list of victims of murder by law enforcement, was compiled by a network of volunteer researchers, led by parents of victims of police murder, when the internet itself was in its earliest stages. With our National Day of Protest, marked every year since 1996, we put resistance to police terror on the national agenda.
The center of our movement is and must be families who have lost loved ones to police violence. We continue to bring forward families as leaders of this struggle. Still, families cannot fight this battle alone–we have been clear that it is everyone’s responsibility to stand up against the systemic injustice of police abuse and violence. We have put countless thousands of people into motion against police terror for decades, long before it was popular.
In 2014, following the murder of Mike Brown by cops in Ferguson, Missouri, we saw the beginnings of a nationwide uprising that would come to full bloom in the summer of 2020. People of all walks of life, with the people under the gun of police brutality at the very center, took to the streets. At the same time, the powers-that-be took notice and set to work to divert, contain, and crush this growing consciousness.
By 2016, one section of the powers-that-be started to group up around the fascist program espoused by Donald Trump of open racism and open threats of violence. By 2017 in Charlottesville, with the murder of Heather Heyer, the violence became very real, and has been a constant reality of people’s protest ever since. Meanwhile, another section of the ruling class moved to contain the movement by funneling millions to organizations that took the movement out of the streets. Millions of protesters were rendered mere spectators in the struggle, while others were hauled off to prison where some remain today.
October 22 Coalition has always sought common cause with people fighting police brutality and murder across religious, social, and political affiliation. For our Coalition, the streets come first. Our primary goal is to build the capacity of people under the gun of daily police violence to resist, shoulder to shoulder with people of all other walks of life. Our position paper, "Fighting Police Terror in an Age of Fascism: A Time of Urgency, a Time for Unity, and a Time to Bring Forward an Era of Mass Resistance" (https://www.october22.org/O22PositionPaper.pdf), brings forward new ideas on how we can do this.
Come to Minneapolis April 21 through 23 to help develop a vision and a plan for returning the movement to the streets. Help build the leadership of those most deeply affected by the system’s abuses, as well as those from all other parts of society in a united nationwide movement. Come with ideas, dreams, and challenges of your own. Join in to make plans for the October 22nd National Day of Protest/Fists Across America 2023. Let’s stand together to return militancy to the fight against oppression.
In Solidarity and Struggle,
The National Office of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation
