WASHINGTON, D.C. – As threatened in the Trump regime’s summer plans for Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD, has announced that a curfew targeting primarily Black and immigrant youth will go into effect on the evening of Friday, August 7, for the Columbia Heights neighborhood. This comes exactly one year after the Trump regime announced a militarized occupation of the city, and 56 years after the martyrdom of Johnathan Jackson.
The Columbia Heights neighborhood has become a hotbed of state terror. Washingtonians who live and work there encounter regular sightings of National Guardsmen on patrol as part of the low-intensity warfare waged against the working class, on top of an already heavy MPD presence. ICE raids and kidnappings remain a regular occurrence in the neighborhood, and the Black, Latino, and immigrant masses who call the city home confront the daily reality of military occupation alongside longstanding austerity campaigns, mass surveillance, and the overall deterioration of living standards. This is a constant reminder that the ruling class is at war with the working masses and oppressed nations. The policy of systematic elimination is not by accident, but by design.
For this reason, the carnage against the overwhelmingly working-class Black masses in the United States is carried out with genocidal intent. Amid rising fascism and the increasing abandonment of any pretense of adherence to liberal-democratic values, parliamentary norms, or vague notions of universal human rights, the state more unabashedly uses terror as a means of ruling over the oppressed nations subjugated by imperialism, and the Black/New Afrikan nation is central to the struggle against that terror.
As revolutionary organizations of the masses across the country hold events to commemorate the martyrs who struggled for Black liberation, through political education and solidarity campaigns for what is now multiple generations of Black political prisoners, D.C.’s predominantly Black residents continue to face genocidal terror. Black people in the United States, constituting an oppressed nation in their own right, continue to confront the reactionary state terror that seeks to eliminate them. The capital of the hegemonic center of world imperialism remains a site of struggle for the national liberation of generations of native Washingtonians, who live under the ominous and parasitic presence of the state apparatus that makes the maintenance of empire possible.
In neighboring Virginia, political prisoner and revolutionary leader Kevin “Rashid” Johnson continues to face severe state repression and torture. He was transferred back to a detention facility in Virginia after being released from retaliatory solitary confinement. Having endured solitary confinement, continued brutality, and numerous transfers over decades of capture and torture, Comrade Johnson continues to be used as an example to target conscious revolutionary leadership, in an attempt to intimidate the resistance of the oppressed Black nation and subdue the fervent will of the masses to struggle for an end to U.S. Imperialism.
August 7 of this year marks 56 years since the martyrdom of Johnathan P. Jackson, killed in the Marin County courthouse massacre at 17 years old. His brother, George Jackson, was killed a year later. The Jackson family started the tradition of Black August as a time to honor the sacrifice of those who gave their lives in the struggle for national liberation, and to continue that struggle by any means necessary.
