SENATOBIA, Miss. – On June 14, 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, a New Afrikan infant, was gunned down by the Old State’s armed dogs in a crowded Walmart parking lot, 40 miles south of Memphis. Wiley’s mother and aunt were walking out of a local Walmart with a pack of Pampers diapers when, despite his mother screaming that there was a baby in the car, the local police and Tate County Sheriff’s opened fire on the family vehicle without hesitation. One of the bullets fatally struck Wiley from a side angle, entering the right side and exiting the left side of his chest. All three were rushed to a nearby hospital, where 1-year-old Wiley was pronounced dead.
The 45 percent-Black Senatobia erupted in fury over this wicked act of butchery; local residents held spontaneous protests on June 16 outside the Walmart where Wiley was killed, and the Old State’s enforcers, lined up with gas masks and riot gear outside of the Walmart’s entrances, used tear gas to forcibly disperse the masses. A New Afrikan resident, Kaysoski Sanders, said, “You gonna shoot up a car with a baby in it? Come on man, that’s ridiculous. That’s uncalled for. That’s uncalled for. Guaranteed it was because of the color of their skin.”
Another protest was held that same day outside Senatobia City Hall with 200 people in attendance, voicing anger and vitriol at a city government that serves capital over the people. Leon White, a New Afrikan Senatobia resident since 1999, marched with dozens of others along Front Street, watched over by snipers perched atop old-time storefronts like an army holding hostile territory, carrying a sign that read, “The People Demand: End to Police Terror,” cursing at the Old State’s police as they stood by. He stated the long-standing distrust between the Senatobia community and the police “has been building for a long time” and blamed it on inadequate safety training, which, to him, made little sense for a small Mississippi city with one of the lowest crime rates in the state, below the national average.
However, Como, Mississippi, resident Shirley Hardin noted the growing contradiction between the police and community going back years, referencing a 2014 arrest of a 10-year-old New Afrikan boy for urinating in public. In addition, other Black Mississippians in attendance, including a Jackson resident whose son and brother were killed by police within the last decade, stated that the New Afrikan masses are still dealing with unjustified police violence despite the 1960s having passed, and called for justice to be served for the generation of New Afrikan’s today.
Mississippi Dept. of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell urged the Senatobia community to “be patient” while his agency conducts its investigation; Walmart, a multinational monopoly corporation, even released a statement a day after the shooting, sharing its “sadness” for that Sunday’s events and stating it was “working with law enforcement as they continue investigating,” the same law enforcement serving their Old Society through exploitation and oppression of the working class and all marginalized peoples in the U.S. and abroad.
A City Council meeting held on July 21 did little to quell the fury of the masses, who continue to press for justice, transparency, and answers over why the bodycam footage from June 14 has not been released.
As of July 30, the Old State’s servants involved in this ruthless shooting have not been publicly identified, as per usual across bourgeois news outlets and platforms, even as the officer who killed Wiley, pig Hunter Foster, was placed on administrative leave, pushing the narrative that the officers’ lives were “threatened” by Black women with a child walking out of a store.
The genocidal murder of Kohen Wiley, preceding the death of Afro-Filipino youth Nolan Wells in downstate Ocean Springs on the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Old State’s founding, is not an isolated accident. Whether a city or town inhabited by Black people is branded “high crime” or “low crime” makes no difference; these are nothing but dogwhistles, concealed and weaponized by the imperialist bourgeoisie and its State to facilitate the national oppression of the Black Belt and the murder of New Afrikan children and youth with impunity everywhere.
The U.S. Old State was built through the transatlantic slave trade, colonial conquest of Indigenous lands, and westward expansion into Hawai’i, Puerto Rico and other nations. It should come as no surprise, then, that New Afrikan youth continue to die from lynchings and police murders while our migrant comrades are caged in ever greater numbers.
Kohen Wiley’s family were criminalized from the start, and the quickness of the Senatobia police to shoot at New Afrikans in a vehicle over a box of diapers reinforces the reality of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist class’s allegiance to national oppression and exploitation of the multinational proletariat. New Afrikan liberation cannot be won through cosmetic reform or the individual heroics of opportunist misleaders posing as saviors. It demands the organized construction of neighborhood defense against state-sanctioned terror, and the united front of the oppressed New Afrikan nation and the multinational U.S. proletariat, waging protracted struggle against their common enemy, to smash imperialism and construct Socialism, with the right of self-determination up to and including secession as the sole path to genuine emancipation from the Old Society.
