Photo: Stacy Lanyon
To be honest, I had seen that a bunch of white kids were
gathering in Zuccotti Park, and I was like, “You know what, that sounds
interesting.” The following day, which was the third day of the occupation,
I said, “You know what, let me go down there.” I went down there and started
listening to what they had to say, and it was interesting. They were talking
about Wall Street and how Wall Street was behind basically everything that was
going on in the ghetto. They are the cause of why
there is so much poverty in the neighborhoods of color, and I started
understanding that through dialoguing with these white college kids. I kept
coming every single day. Then, they started putting tents up, and I was like, “Wow,
that’s crazy. They are really trying to take over this park.” I had never seen
this before. I had seen things like this back in the sixties on documentaries,
but to be alive and seeing an occupation, somebody occupying a certain area, I
was like, “We wouldn't be able to do that in my area. I like this. Let me just
keep staying and watching what these kids are doing.” I got to meet a lot of
occupiers, and I kinda learned a lot from them, from being around them. I
stayed there two nights with one of my friends in one of the tents. It was
crazy. I thought I was losing my mind. It was cool feeling like I could do
something that’s outside of the norm. Growing up, if I had done something like
that, I would have gone to jail. I was like, “Wow, I’m gonna give it a try. If
I survive one night that means that I just did something that I didn’t think I
could do and stood up for something I believed in."
I joined different groups in Occupy, went to a lot of assemblies. My whole issue was trying to push the Occupy movement into the hood. I kept talking at a lot of assemblies that they had. I kept saying, “Hey listen, when are we going to take this to Harlem?” I was like, “Let’s take it to Harlem. Let’s go out there and occupy something out there.” They really never took it outside of Wall Street at the beginning, but then after a while, other groups started getting formed – the prison abolition group, the immigration group and other groups started developing there, and I was like, “You know what, it’s starting to go toward the direction that I want it to.” One day, I put a proposal in to have a march go from the Lincoln Correctional Facility on 110th down to 125th street, and they said, “Alright, that sounds good.” We did it, and I felt great.
I joined different groups in Occupy, went to a lot of assemblies. My whole issue was trying to push the Occupy movement into the hood. I kept talking at a lot of assemblies that they had. I kept saying, “Hey listen, when are we going to take this to Harlem?” I was like, “Let’s take it to Harlem. Let’s go out there and occupy something out there.” They really never took it outside of Wall Street at the beginning, but then after a while, other groups started getting formed – the prison abolition group, the immigration group and other groups started developing there, and I was like, “You know what, it’s starting to go toward the direction that I want it to.” One day, I put a proposal in to have a march go from the Lincoln Correctional Facility on 110th down to 125th street, and they said, “Alright, that sounds good.” We did it, and I felt great.
After that, I kept on fighting. I got involved with the Stop Stop and Frisk movement. I started off at the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, which in reality is the Revolutionary Communist Party. Once I learned that it was working together to push people into the ideology of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group of us sat down together and said, “You know what, we’re going to separate and do our own thing because they are interfering with what we’re trying to do.” We are trying to work with people in the community. We’re not trying to push no ideology of one single person, but instead the ideology of the human family as a whole, how everybody needs to be involved in order to make positive changes. I learned that from Occupy Wall Street.
The bigger the group got, the more afraid I started seeing the government getting. They didn’t realize it was going to blow up the way it did. I said, “You know what, I’m going to use the same tactics that they used in Occupy Wall Street in dealing with police brutality and Stop and Frisk.” I used the same techniques, and a lot of people started getting on board. I started getting known by all of the police officers. I didn’t back down. We formed Stop Stop and Frisk Freedom Fighters. Basically, we are responding to every murder that takes place in the hood. We deal with anyone who is murdered or assaulted by the police. We are there to support them and try and let the family know we are there to help them. That’s what we’ve been doing. We worked with Ramarly Gram, Kimani Gray, Shantel Davis, Reynaldo Cuevas. There are so many of them that have been killed, especially last year. Twenty-one people have been killed. I took an interest in that issue. We have been on the police’s ass like no other group has been before to the point where they know us in every precinct. They know who we are. They know that when we confront them, we are not backing down. Everything has been going well. Within two years, we have become known as the professional agitators. The police officers at the 30th precinct gave us that name, so we’ve been riding with that.
Occupy really had a bad reception in the hood, especially when we went in there to protest against Obama. He had a big dinner in Harlem, and there were a lot of Occupy Wall Street people there. A lot of the people in the neighborhood were really against Occupy Wall Street. I guess they didn’t understand what they represented. They were all, “You need to get out of here with that bull crap. All that Occupy white stuff doesn’t work here. Obama is a good man. He’s the first black president.” I was like, “There’s something not connecting here.” That’s why I started going to a lot of different meetings and saying that I was also a part of Occupy Wall Street and took Occupy Wall Street people to a lot of different meetings that I went to, so they could talk to them and understand that there is a connection with the 1%, Wall Street and all of these other elite groups that we don’t see. There’s a big connection to why the people of color are suffering and going through the obstacles they are going through, dealing with jobs, dealing with homelessness, dealing with crime. All of that is part of a bigger picture, and I try to connect that. We’ve been doing good. The Kimani Gray incident happened, and I said, “You know what, I’m going to call my Occupy buddies." I love them. They came with big numbers. Right now, a lot of people know what Occupy Wall Street is and would love to have them there again.
This is important because I grew up my whole life being abused by police, being treated like I was some kind of criminal. I got stopped and frisked so many times. Back then, I didn’t even know what it was called. I didn’t know what it was. I just knew that it was something that felt was part of my culture as a person of color growing up in the ghetto, in the hood. I thought it was just part of my culture. I saw it happening to everybody. I thought it was part of a ritual that I had to go through growing up in the hood. When it started happening to my nephews, to my son, to other kids in the neighborhood, I started saying, “This doesn’t look right. This is starting to feel like something is wrong with this.” Also, when it happened to my step son, he audio recorded it. I told him, “If the police keep harassing you, next time you feel like the police are going to run up and stop you, press the audio recorder on your ipod and start recording." That’s what he did. He was able to record it. He was the one that was called a mutt. They said they were going to slap him and break his arm. I was proud of him the way he stood up, and they did a documentary on that, which was pretty good. They even used it in the Stop and Frisk trial. It really shows exactly what’s happening to hundreds of thousands of kids every day when they are being stopped, questioned and frisked. They are being treated the same way they treated my step son.
When that happened to him, me and his mother were so infuriated. We didn’t know what to do. We just wanted to go find the officers and fight with them, “You touch my son like that, let’s do this.” You know what I’m saying. We went to the police station. We made a complaint. We tried to push the issue. That’s when the police pushed it to the limit. That was the icing on the cake. After that, I said, “You know what, it’s on. Everywhere I see the police, I’m recording them. I’m documenting. I’m going to learn what I need to learn to be able to stand and confront them, to be able to stand strong in my square and let them know that I know my rights, let them know that I know that they are violating my rights and that I know that there is a limitation to what they can do. All the practices I’ve been doing have been working very well because I’ve been having a lot of confrontations with the police face to face, and the things that I say make them back up. I must be doing something right, and I want other people to feel empowered the same way to go out there and stand strong, knowing their rights and knowing that they haven’t done anything illegal, knowing that they shouldn’t be forced to endure this type of dehumanization, this type of harassment or criminalization. They can stand up and fight back.
I hope to help bring about a world that I probably won’t be alive to see. This is the type of world I want. When I was young, living in the building that I lived, my mother and everybody in that building knew each other. When my mother needed something, one time she had no rice, so she went upstairs to the neighbor and got a cup of rice. Then, the neighbor didn’t have sugar. She came down and got some sugar. Everybody in the building was exchanging what they had. I was like, “Wow, this is cool.” Everybody knew each other. Everybody was together. Everything was equal. Whoever didn’t’ have, the others were willing to give what they had. It was an equal exchange. That’s the type of world that I would love to have, where we could all look at each other to the point where we don’t see no difference, where when I look at you, I don’t see a white person. I see a human being who has a beautiful character and who is willing to do everything they can to spread the message to the world. That’s the type of world I want, a world where we could all look at each other as equal, and we could help one another. No matter the trials and tribulations we go through, we’ll have each other’s back. For some reason, this government was able to divide us, and that’s how they’ve been able to conquer us. Hopefully, we’ll see that type of world.
No matter what type of world we are going to have, we’re always going to have our issues and our problems. The thing about it is in that world that I see, we’ll work together in making these issues make sense and come in with some type of solution that will make the communication better, so that it gets to a point that we could deal with the issues better and move forward. Communication is the key for us to continue to be able to move forward.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
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