Enough is Enough!

Memphis: People Righteously Rebel After Pig Murder of 20-Year-Old Brandon Webber

June 14, 2019 | revcom.us

On the night of June 12, a death squad anchored by U.S. Marshals called the “Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive Task Force” murdered 20-year-old Brandon Webber in the Frayser neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee. These pigs didn’t even identify Brandon—they claimed they were on the prowl for a “suspect with felony warrants,” they saw Brandon, and within moments they opened up with their guns and murdered him. Brandon’s cousin, Demetrick Skinner, said these pigs fired as many as 20 shots at Brandon.

This Time Was Different

People from throughout the neighborhood immediately began gathering. Scores of Memphis police swarmed into the neighborhood too. One man told a Memphis newspaper that he saw these pigs “laughing, sometimes even taunting the gathered community members.” He continued, “Every time I turned around, I saw another person with tears in their eyes, furious at another life lost.”

Hundreds of angry people faced off against the riot-equipped pigs. Reports indicate that the people broke out windows of police cars, and pelted police with bricks, bottles, and whatever they found at hand. Police responded with brutality—but people bravely stood up and continued to battle these pigs with their tear gas, their yard-long batons, and all the rest of their arsenal of death. According to a report on National Public Radio, 36 pigs with the Memphis P.D. and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department were injured, some being hospitalized.

The public murder of Brandon Webber happened the day after Memphis authorities announced that another cop would not be charged in last year’s murder of Terrence Carlton, an unarmed 25-year-old Black man.

In the last few weeks alone, among the murders of Black people by police that have come to light: Pamela Turner, assaulted and then gunned down at point blank range as she walked to her apartment in Baytown, Texas; Myron Flowers, shot to death while he sat in the back seat of a car pulled over for “equipment violations” in Clinton, Louisiana; 20-year-old JaQuavion Slaton, killed by police in Fort Worth, Texas; 20-year-old rapper Willie McCoy, shot 55 times in 3.5 seconds as he sat in a Taco Bell drive-through in Vallejo, California. All the killer cops—and the killers of countless other people—remain free.

Murder, brutality, repression, imprisonment, injustice at every turn—this has been going on for centuries! It is a cornerstone of a system that exploits and oppresses people across the world, and is destroying the planet itself. The system lets these killer cops walk time after time—because they are doing their job, they are defending a system, that allows them—encourages them—to kill people, and they know they won’t be punished. And the people in Memphis were courageous and righteous to rise up in rebellion against these killers and the system they enforce.

Now officials in Memphis are vilifying Brandon Webber, and praising their murdering pigs! Brandon Webber was a human being, a young Black man who was wantonly shot by a gang of killers authorized by this system to do just that. He was a father, a high school graduate, and college student. He loved and was loved by many people.

Far, far too many Black, Latino, and Native American youth like Brandon Webber have been cut down by the enforcers of this murderous system. Far, far too many tears have been shed for far too long. How long will this pain and suffering continue? Until we make revolution and put an end to this madness. It is past time for all who want these outrages to stop to get with the revolution and work with it now, so we can put an end to the system.   

Brandon Webber