Savannah Report Draft

1. Southern Trees Southern trees bear a strange fruit... Strange fruit: A song about lynchings in the South. Its from the 1930s, written by the same communist who adopted the Rosenbergs1 children after they were murdered for leaking state secrets. Billie Holiday made it popular. She would sing it at the end of her act, with the lights off except for one one her, haunting the club, as she performed with bitterness. Nina Simone sang it in her own way, and was often driven to vomit afterwards. Strange fruit, still hanging from the trees. Trayvon Martin. Troy Davis. Still hanging. We were in the streets when they killed Davis and we still haven't forgotten. The death row execution followed the highly publicized case involving the murder of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. The case gained worldwide recognition, and Davis gained millions of supporters when it became clear that he needed to be given a new trial or be let go entirely. 7 of 9 witnesses recanted testimony in the case which involved no material evidence supporting the states claims. While many thought it unfathomable for the execution to actually take place in the face of such circumstances, no one intervened in the end. Powerful politicians thought to be at least marginally supportive of justice and due process showed cold indifference when this particular mans life was on the line. In honor of a fallen brother, we took his name and formed a collective, a nascent formation, still figuring how to make the word collective mean something. We're sitting in a lull in Atlanta, after the hottest period of revolutionary activity many of us have ever experienced. The month long occupation of an Atlanta park quickly followed the night of Troy Davis' murder. These events exploded our ideas of political action. Our earlier projects fell apart during the excitement of the park. Our student groups, solidarity network and other organizations converged and disseminated during the occupation. It shook us up, but in a way that left us searching for something more. We know we didn't push the Occupy movement as far as it could've gone. We understand the need for infrastructure that allows us to respond to such spontaneous ruptures in the social fabric, but we're not exactly sure what that infrastructure would look like. In an attempt to move forward and be better prepared next time (whenever or whatever that 'next time' is), we're trying to get a better feel for our current political situationas anarchists, communists, or just hard-headed anti-capitalists and in the context of Atlanta. Those of us who could went down to Savannah, Georgia for a day, an overnight drive with only twenty feet of vision. When you are on a search for gas, the world becomes a lesson in the redundancy of capital. The lack of vision is the metaphor for our limited understanding, a limited sight. The freeways are haunting: the same gas stations, the same fast food, the same exit signs, the same shadows of trees, on a backdrop of abandoned towns and derelict buildings. They are all that this dying world has to offer us. No, thanks.

2. Savannahs Rosy Dawn: Agrarian Utopia and the Oglethorpe Plan

By the time we reached Savannah, it was 7 AM. We rested for a moment, trying to stretch and smoke off our tired eyes. Forsyth Park: its dreamy in the morning. The scene is colonial. a good ol Southern feel of green grass and quaint greetings of ma'am and sir. Forsyth Park is named for Savannahs slave-owning governor of 1834. Don't believe the hype: strange fruit still hangs.
1

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war, for allegedly providing plans for nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Both were executed by electric chair in 1953. The state secrets were well known to physics at the time. It took five electric shocks to kill Ethel.

The original planning model for the city provides an appropriate starting point for an analysis of the socio-economic dynamics of Savannah. The city was planned on a grid, nine blocks per square. The outer blocks were residences and shops; the inner was an open field designed for military training. Each colonist had access to land, growth was controlled, and slavery was forbidden. The plan was motivated by an historical reaction to industrialization that took the form of agrarian egalitarianism. Oglethorpe envisioned this utopian society in 1733. Hard work and simplicity led to the good life, but his opposition to slavery was born from a reactionary, post-industrial desire for mediocrity--not from any moral objection to slavery. While slavery was prohibited, indentured servitude was promoted. The prohibition was in effect for about thirty years until the colonists hunger for agricultural profit overcame the power of their platitudes. With slavery in force from 1751 onward, Savannah became a profit-driven agricultural port. The cotton gin revolutionized cotton production in 1793, and Savannahs maritime location encouraged the importation of as much kidnapped, African labor as needed. You know the racket: slaves make the cotton and its shipped to the world, supporting the plantation owners with blood-drenched gold that today lines Savannah's historic district. When slavery was put to a forcible halt by the Union Army, the city required new ways to profit from its resources. The growth of the cotton industry carried Savannah until the crop was decimated by weevils. Afterward, the shipping and manufacture industry of the city rose to economic prominence. In the last few decades, Savannahs economy has focused on manufacturing2 and the circulating capital through its port, while promoting a service economy through tourism. Fort Stewart military base and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) provide 21st-century capitalist culture to the historic city.

Paper-making factories and Gulfstream Aerospace are the largest employers, alongside the military and tourism

3. Spencer Lawton
...blood on the leaves and blood at the root. We know were aware of our political situation but we arent sure where or how exactly to strike. Yet, we can't just sit back contemplatively while the capitalists stroke their egos. At Armstrong College of Law, an opening speech by DA Spencer Lawton, celebrity prosecutor of Troy Davis, presented an easy opportunity. A district attorney's political capital is tied to successful prosecutions and Lawton garnered a sickening kind of prestige after Daviss conviction. He was named Georgias District Attorney of the Year in 2008. The legal grim reaper presented in front of a crowd of surprised law students, oblivious to Lawton's role in Troy's murder despite their academic pursuits. The gentlemanly lawyer laughed it off, and that was that. This is the point at which most of our radical actions have typically ended, with the hope that some media would report it, or that we would gain some internal benefits as comrades from the activity. We are beginning to reconceive radical action. Our project does not end as we are shoved out the door by a member of the embarrassed but composed college faculty. That morning was a bit of excitement before we delved into a deeper inquiry in Savannah. A fresh wind was at our backs. 4. Investigation as Practice The transition from activism toward communist practice requires a new understanding. We aim to develop a form of practice that steers away from the activism, the movementism, the ambulance-chasing of our familiar activity -- going from one campaign to another with no direction and no commitment, without delving deeper to learn about the fundamental social contradictions at play. We aim to learn to engage in communist practice in a country like this. We want to develop revolutionary strategy, something that has been lacking in all of our past experiences. We are experimenting in social investigation, which is the process of learning from our conditions and the people in a scientific manner. Savannah was our first experiment with investigation. With the murder of Troy Davis as an opening line, we sought to understand Savannah on many levels: What are the demographics of this city? What do politics look like herehow do people feel about the electoral sphere, and how do they feel about actions outside and against it? What do people want to change, and how are they willing to change it? What are the potential fault lines of this social fabric? We agreed that our goal would be to learn. We would learn from the people and we would learn from the city. We would avoid speaking lines at people, instead giving them opportunities to explore their thoughts alongside us. We would be peers, not pedants. The following report is a collective recollection of an admittedly limited investigation. We have attempted to give an inclination of what conclusions we could draw from our investigation, taking each of our contacts as representatives of a particular demographic. Our analysis is founded on a day's worth of research and bears that limitation. But after just this day, we came back with a wealth of emotionally heavy experience, a newfound understanding of Savannah's political climate, and even more questions than we had before the trip.

5. Fitting the Description ...strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. After returning to Savannah, we moved towards the housing projects, south of Forsyth Park. We met a young black man (M), who was studying to be a chef. We asked him about Troy Davis and the system that allowed the execution. M showed he had few illusions of life in capitalism. He gave a critique of the American political system and the capitalist economy: If they take away your business license, how are you supposed to pay them if thats your way of paying? You know, if they take away your driver's license, and you drive trucks, how you supposed to pay? Take away your car tag, how you supposed to pay? How you supposed to come up with the money then? You know what I mean? If you were barely surviving and just happened to get behind, you know, then they break you. M recalled how he was once stopped by the police at a bus stop. Six police cars surrounded him, and they then tried to arrest him because he fit the description of a man who had just robbed a store. Misfortune, of course, is not evenly distributed. Recently, while boarding their schoolbus, his nieces were hit by an employee of the school board. Their mothers attempts to press charges were stonewalled indefinitely. Economic mobility was a pipe dream. Justice was a lie. The police kept everything and everyone in check. With all of this being the case, when we asked M what he thought would take to change things, his first instinct was to go to the mayor or other elected officials. This forced a contradiction in our role as investigators: we are there to learn from the people, but that doesnt mean we arent there to struggle with them. We cannot assume that the proletariat3 already has a revolutionary communist consciousness. This would be a mistake of liberalism. Since were revolutionaries, we reminded M of a detail from his bus stop experience: You know, so there was some elderly people and they spoke up for me. Cause I usually speak to them so I have a pretty good relationship. So they were telling em 'this guy comes up here everyday to work about this time of day.' And one of them said 'if he robbed a store, why is he standing here at the bus stop?' I mean they was like about to come off they porch with their canes and start hittin em or something... With this, M. laughed, shrugged, smiled and said: ...Maybe I should pick up a sign or something.

The word proletariat is used to describe the section of people with nothing to lose but their chains (Marx), not necessarily synonymous with the working class but including unemployed, underemployed, and the propertyless generally.

6. Civil Rights Uprisings: Hosea Williams and the Savannah Rebellion of 1963 Ms first instinct to go to elected officials while simultaneously being willing to struggle and willing to participate in street action is reflective of the history of black proletariat resistance. A character in Joyces Ulysses famously quips that history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Today our history itself is tragically alien to most people; if we want to awaken from this nightmare, we need to understand how we got here. Savannah was the site of the first mass urban uprising of AfricanAmericans in the United States against white supremacist segregation and oppression, on July 11, 1963. The following summer of 1964 saw mass rebellions in major Northern cities, including New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago. In the years to come were many more around the country, including Los Angeles (the Watts rebellion) in 1965, then Newark NJ and Detroit in 1967. An in-depth history of the 1963 uprising in Savannah is beyond the scope of this report, but it sheds light on how the elite chose to neutralize black rebellion. Hosea L. Williams, a veteran of World War II in the French theater, played a major role in developing the rebellion. Williams joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the early 1960s and immediately launched confrontational actions among African-Americans against Jim Crow segregation here. He founded the Chatham County Crusade for Voters, which employed more militant tactics to fight for civil rights. This was highly controversial at the time and still is, even among civil rights advocates. W. W. Law, then head of the Savannah NAACP, opposed Williams's tactics of night marches because they gave cover to violent elements among the people who wished to fight back4. The direct cause of the uprising was that local Savannah movie theaters, whose owners had initially promised de-segregation, went back on their word after a few days after its implementation and imposed their disgusting Jim Crow policies again. The Freedom on Film: Civil Rights in Georgia5 series sums up the situation: On July 11 the demonstrations reached a breaking point when local and regional law enforcement officials used tear gas and fire hoses against the demonstrators. Angry members of the crowd responded by throwing stones, setting fires, and breaking windows of downtown businesses.... Governor Carl Sanders put more troops from the National Guard on standby. For days afterward the city remained tense with demonstrations and stalled negotiations. By the time leaders called off the series of night marches, police had arrested more than five hundred blacks, and Williams served sixty-five days in jail, the longest continuous stretch for a civil rights activist.

4 5

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2553
http://www.civilrights.uga.edu/cities/savannah/riots2.htm

7. The Hood
Pastoral scenes of the gallant south... Uprisings in the streets, and forty years later, where are they now? Barnard and Henry Streets6: blocks of old homes, some in disrepair, empty lots, some black-run local businesses, and strips of closed businesses, gas stations selling lottery tickets and cheap drinks, teenage parents walking down the street. We met with a group of women, sisters, friends, were on their porch. They hesitated to speak to us at first. When we mentioned Troy Davis, emotion bled through. They told us that things were in turmoil the night of his execution: People were hurt, just really hurt. But, what can you do about it? The government runs all of that. So basically they said they can do what they wanted to. So, what could we do and then we woulda been ended up behind bars if we tried anything other then what y'all are doing now. So, I mean, all we can do is be hurt, cry. You know, its a rage, mad, anger. They gonna do it regardless. The way I saw the situation, it was just like, you know, they already had him behind bars for so many years. You know what I'm saying. And the man was saying he was innocent. And once you get behind those bars, theres nothing you can do. I mean, its all controlled by them. They control what time you go to sleep, when you watch TV, how you go to the bathroom, all this other stuff. And this man, he remained his innocence so. The government, is this power, and its real good that we do this, but its just a sad situation that there was nothing we could do. And they keep going on. Speaking about Troy brought out the sadness and anger that characterized that night. His murder was a call to action, an outcry, only a brief recognition of violence in the prison of the everyday. Down the road we came across a similar group, but this time it was all men. They sided with Troy, but fatalism was there. They brought up Trayvon Martin as an example of the continuation of Jim Crow. They doubted things could change: You gotta remember. The Klan is down here. You gotta know that. Its never gonna change...We know where were at, this is Savannah, nothing but Jim Crow. He was in there a long time, he didn't kill him. I think...that wasn't right. I mean, it wasn't. But, it wasn't right. Thats just like that boy down there in Florida. It's not right. Zimmerman gets a free walk. It was not right....If its us, (points to self), us being a different color, we woulda went to jail immediately. But guess what, guess what? Its still a color, still a color barrier here in this world. Execution, is a key player around here...even if that man [Zimmerman] right there for that young boy done gonna get death penalty, he'll get a chance to live. My black ass don't get a chance to live. They gonna kill our ass. I want to take another 'long with me. They used Clarence Thomas as an example of how bad the system is. So bad, that it gets you to sell out your own kind: We have one of the biggest bigots who was born here. His name is Clarence Thomas. You know, that dark haired fella. He is not us. TDC: Whats he a bigot about?
6

Intersection in the hood that TDC investigated

He a two-face. He's from the south, he know whats going around here. He got a job with some white wiggas and he's a white wigga now. But he can't hold power over them. They told us about Savannah, and saw the gentrification as a continuation of slave-era policy. But I'll tell you about this raggedy mother fucka here. I've been here all my life. Ain't shit free here. You can come down here and you can go to River street and all that. Those was slave camps. Tunnels, underground where they transported slaves. Don't let them show you the picture of River Street that it was such a great place, cause it was fucked up. You see those bricks on that street? Slaves did all those bricks. Thats what the white man is going to do to us now. I've been here thirty, forty years in this area right here, they trying to run our ass out of here now. So you know how they do it? They overtax you, you cant afford to pay the god damn property tax and they run you out of here. So you can't afford it. And Troy Davis? That was fucked up bullshit. They killed his damn sister.7 I don't think justice will ever get served TDC: You don't think so? Not in this system? What difference does it make now? Who gives a shit, they done did execute him, you know? And where was Clarence Thomas on that? Thanks a lot Clarence. He said he was 'biased' and had nothing to say. He says he is from here. You dirty... Dirty bitch. I'll say it. Fuck Clarence Thomas. Another team came across an older man named D, originally from Beaufort, South Carolina. D maintained Troy's innocence and mentioned hearing that another man admitted to the killing but was never prosecuted. D hinted at political collaboration and corruption within the police department. Repressive policies like New York Citys stop and frisk don't have to be encoded in law to enshrine a normality of police violence. Beginning in 2008, Savannah police brutality increased palpably: warrantless searches, arrests based on carrying alcohol, and direct violence became common. The Savannah police target young men between the ages of 15 and 35, often bashing heads against the wall before incarceration. When we brought up the Black Panther Party's armed youth-patrols against police abuse, D responded approvingly. While police violence rises, SCAD continues to buy vacant properties in the proletarian areas of Savannah. D voiced an appreciation for the above-average service jobs created by the college. SCAD contends with the sizable industrial sector in Savannah. Despite the gentrification, he warned us to be careful walking through the neighborhood, especially after dark. There is a contradiction at work in the gentrification of Savannah. People see SCADs aggressive expansion as providing jobs, but lament the resultant increasing living costs that break up the existing community. Thinking back to the rebellion of 1963: if there were middle-class students interspersed in the proletarian neighborhoods, could some have been mobilized to fight alongside the proletariat in its struggle? Would the repressive forces as readily employed the mechanisms of indiscriminate violence, like pepper spray?

http://sfbayview.com/2011/martina-correia-1967-2011-champion-of-troy-davis-and-justice-forall/

8. Integration in the Political Sphere The hypocrisy of liberalism can be revealed in times of social rupture. An uprising of the people is seen as a break from respectable political demonstrations and seen as inevitably leading to the downfall of any political movement. Their own opportunism and their own cowardice are hidden behind morally righteous phrases and condemnation. If the movement becomes discredited, how are they to use it to promote their own bid for office? If insurrection becomes generalized, what of those who are too afraid to die for the people? In the neighborhood we investigated, the masses not only had a substantial knowledge of their own history, but also a firm sense of justice that is absolutely not served by the police force. This justice is one outside of the existing order of the day. In this sense alone, in the way of Davis murder, we can see that the illusion promoted by the Oglethorpe plan has many cracks in it. The mentioning of Clarence Thomas by proletariat in the hood is important. It reflects a deep sense of hatred for those who become incorporated into the interests of the empire. The alliance between sections of the black working class and the bourgeoisie has a long history. What we see today is rooted in the rebellions in the 60s. At this time, the white bourgeois formed an alliance with parts of the movement that spoke of an end to racism by any means necessary. The biracial coalition of the increasingly influential black middle-class and the white bourgeoisie is a pillar of the New South. Integration of the political hierarchy was an easy illusion of bourgeois equality. But did this mean housing projects become half white and half black? Did the police make a quota of one white child shot for every black child? One of the most integrated social institutions is the prison system and this is in no way an accident; we intend to explore this in more depth later on. Integration has an objective limit to it, and this limit is the nature of class society. Political emancipation by the state is not the same as human emancipation from the state8. Emancipation from the state is not on the agenda of liberalism or bourgeois democratic ideals. The New South as a social relation worked, and cities like Atlanta avoided massive uprising by integration. This policy was actively promoted by sections of the bourgeoisie at the time. Savannah local Mills B. Lane, Jr. was president of C&S Bank during the 1960s and '70s. Headquartered in Atlanta, C&S was the largest, most profitable bank in the South. In the 60s, Lane began advocating for integration behind the scenes in the Atlanta business world. He pushed for the formation of a prointegration Committee of 100 consisting of Savannah businessmen to secure Williams's release from incarceration after the Savannah Rebellion. Lane was one of the main influences in overturning the County Unit System, used by the white ruling class to disenfranchise black voters in Georgia. This was in contrast to the ruling class in other places in the South, like Mississippi or Alabama, where pitched battles defended any cession of rights to African-Americans. Finance capital, or in other words banks, have had relatively more strength in Georgia than other parts of the South. Both Atlanta, the axis of transport and business in the South, and Savannah, one of the countrys main ports of commerce, conditioned this reality. As the banker capitalists grew more dominant in Georgia, they found the open Jim Crow segregation that emerged after Reconstruction in the South less conducive to their interests than a token, surface level integration that mainly affected political elites and the appearance of equality. The year after MLKs March on Washington, the US imperialist ruling class (on a national level) wrote the Civil Rights Act into law. Doing our investigatory work in Savannah (think M), we saw how the black community first thought to address the black, elected officials. Although they all recognized the injustices of white supremacy, the solution was to defeat Republicans politically. The fight for the right to vote was the axis of political struggle for African-Americans in the South, and there is a continuing attachment to exertion of this right whether or not a candidate offers any promise of change. The fight for the right to vote was crucial to political struggle for African-Americans in the
8

See Marx, On the Jewish Question

South; however, over time that struggle has been restricted to voting rights almost entirely, and this is at the expense of revolutionary activity. As Paul Scott put it recently, while noting how black leaders have begun using Trayvon Martins 911 call for their election campaigns: My kin folks didnt die for the right to vote. They died trying to get free by any means necessary. Sold Out on Politics Judging from the responses we got from folks on the street, the veneer of support for elected officials is shallow. After the Civil War, every mayor of Savannah was a member of the Democratic Party until 1966 when a racist backlash against Mayor Malcolm Maclean, a white, pro-integration/New Southern Democrat, threw the first Republican ever into the office. This anomaly was regulated by the next election, and the Democratic candidate has won the race in ten out of eleven mayoral elections since then. While this political, ruling class publicly opposes the most openly white supremacist slogans, they maintain the segregationist set-up. For instance, the Democratic forces of mayor John Rousakis distanced themselves from open neo-Nazis who came in to stoke reactionary violence, but opposed the use of busing to integrate Savannah's schools in the 1970s9. The neighborhoods we saw during our investigation were still as segregated as ever. The political engine integrated some leaders of the civil rights struggles into its leadership and gained enough support among the sections of African-Americans in Savannah to keep electoral control and maintain at least an image of legitimacy among the people. The current mayor, Edna Jackson, was an NAACP activist during the 1960s and participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965 10. But when we dig deeper, we find that the elections do not express the will of many people at all. In the case of the last mayoral election in 2011, less than 17% of the city's population participated at all and only about a third of those voted for Jackson.11 This contradiction among the people is complex. It cannot be solved by giving platitudes about their oppression or by blaming the masses for their own conditions. This complexity is present in their views on President Obama. Many people tended towards a view that he wasnt able to create positive change because obstructionist Republican forces were blocking him at every turn. This is a mirror opposite of trend in the Occupy movement in this country, which identified the political and financial elites as the enemy, but tried to include the police within the 99% to unite with. One clue to dealing with this contradiction lay in the ridicule of Clarence Thomas by the brothers. It is precisely because his roots were in Savannah in the hood that he was such a sell-out. This revealed a contradiction to the people between his race and his social role. In essence, this is a class difference, and it was powerful enough for the people to openly ridicule him for his betrayal. This is a very positive reaction in terms of rejecting the dominant imperialist ideology of identity politics -- where someones common background is synonymous with their representation of some section of the people. That people from his own hometown already reject the reactionary Clarence Thomas means that it is not out of the realm of possibility to point out the hypocrisy and betrayal of other representatives of the ruling class to people who may look or sound like them. Harkening back to John Carpenters cult classic film They Live, the proletariat sometimes doesnt need much convincing to put on the glasses and see the true nature of the oppressors.
9

http://www.civilrights.uga.edu/cities/savannah/nazis.htm http://www.savannahga.gov/cityweb/minutes.nsf/2f0947e9d916134085256cc2005a75a3/ a3a7e1f51628305085256ee700538592?OpenDocument 11 http://elections.chathamcounty.org/Portals/ElectionsBoard/Prior%20Elections/ 2011/November%208%20-%20General%20Municipal/ SAVANNAH%20OFFICIAL%20SUMMARY%20REPORT.pdf

10

9. Frazier Homes
...the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. We travelled from the hood towards the housing project Frasier Homes, on MLK Boulevard. The orange, rectangular buildings were closed with a black, metal fence. Many homes looked vacant, but the residents that we talked to had plenty to say. One man, B, had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement; he participated in sit-ins with the youth wing of Hosea Williams civil rights organization during the 1960s. B saw Troy Davis execution as the same racist system he had been fighting his whole life. B was concerned about the future of the struggle. He stated that he doesnt think there is much desire among the young people of his community to fight back against injustices in the world today. He doesnt know why this is. He said maybe his grandkids will see the end of racism but he certainly wont. However, the younger residents were no less aware than he. Two young boys on bikes stood one of the buildings. As we asked about Troy Davis, they shook their heads as they rode off to 'do some work', and parted with this: Yeah, Troy Davis, that was messed up. But worse things happen here every day. Other boys admitted to seeing shootings out of their doors; one claimed that he had been incarcerated. Astute adolescents--but how could they not be? While knocking on doors, we came across graffiti on a staircase. Frasier Killers was scribbled in black. Next to it, somebody had marked KKK and two swastikas. But not all the fascists in the project wore the same uniform; the police rolled up only fifteen minutes after we had. They circled where we stood before coming up to an apartment. Unsure if we were causing the project to catch heat, we bailed. The systemic violence in Savannah was concrete.

10. The Police State and The Prison Industrial Complex

During the course of our investigation, one team met with a former police officer. The officer worked twenty years in multiple police departments before retiring, and claimed to have known Troy as a young child. The officer was 100% positive Troy was innocent and had endless stories about the racism of law enforcement. The officer mentioned a recent domestic dispute in Effingham county, in which a black male was given much more incarceration time than a white male typically would have. Incidents like this were a standard procedure for police departments, encouraged from the highest levels. The interviewee explicitly linked the prison industry to the operations of the police, stating that there is big money in prisons and that the police force routinely enters black neighborhoods and targets the weaker members of that community presumably so they could be prosecuted with minimal resistance. The comments were even more alarming given a recent article detailing the Louisiana forprofit prison system in which county sheriffs have major financial interests12. Coastal State Prison is located in Garden City, just outside Savannah, with a capacity of 1,578 souls. Three other state prisons (Long, Smith, and Rogers) are located nearby. Smith and Rogers have a combined capacity of 2,600 but information on the capacity of Long State Prison is unavailable. According to the Georgia Department of Corrections website, approximately 5,000 offenders work on prison farms or in preserving, preparing, and serving foods statewide. After the state legislature passed the repressive House Bill 87 in 2011, further criminalizing immigrants in Georgia, the resulting shortage of farm workers -- and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for the states capitalists -- led state officials to order prisoners to perform the work13. They refused and, for the time being, the slave labor
12 13

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/georgia-may-use-prisoners-1195152.html

plan remains stillborn. A significant amount of labor power in Georgia is in the prison system. 15,000 work for the Department of Corrections. The total prison population is 55,000. One in 12 Georgia residents is incarcerated or under correctional supervision. The United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than any other government in the world, and Georgias rate is higher than the national average. The statistics are even more horrific when we look at the conditions affecting Black people specifically. About one in six African-Americans in Georgia are incarcerated or under correctional supervision -- for Black men in particular, this rate approaches 25%. Of children in juvenile detention in this state, 71.3% are Black. According to the 2010 Census, the African-American share of the state population is only slightly over 30%. These conditions are not limited to direct repression by the state, but extend into other basic aspects of life. Health indices among this section of the people are shocking: for example, as of 2006, the rate14 for low-birthweight babies in Savannahs Black population is 14.4%. This exceeds the rate in most sub-Saharan African countries and is slightly higher than that of Sierra Leone, Malawi, and Eritrea15. In 2011, there were 719 arrests for possession of marijuana in Chatham County16. Black folks were twice as likely as other people to be arrested on this charge, while sources indicate that the rate of marijuana use is essentially equal between different races17. This is hardly unique to Savannah or Georgia, but is part of a nationwide pattern of oppression of not only Blacks, but also Latinos. One person in the hood said that the first change he would make is the legalization of weed. Immediately after saying that, he hesitated, telling us not to write that down. In reality, however, suspicion of drug possession is a main way the police legitimize their war on the people. Drug possession arrests, mainly for marijuana, fuel the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of youth: marijuana possession arrests are the largest component of all drug-related arrests (about half), which are by far the largest category of total arrests (about 12% of the total18). This is indeed a political question and exposing the war on drugs as a war against the people could help millions better understand who the real criminals are. Mass incarceration breeds mass resistance. Over the last two years, prison strikes and uprisings have torn across Georgia. November 2011 saw a historic prison strike, the biggest in U.S. history, with reports of strikes at up to 26 facilities19. More recently, in May 2012, there was a riot at one of the states private facilities, Coffee County Correctional Facility20. There is growing unrest in the states jails as prisoners have had enough of the deplorable conditions theyre forced to live in. As a growing proportion of the proletariat and oppressed people in this country is forcibly locked down by the imperialist state, the importance of resistance and revolutionary organization by our brothers and sisters behind enemy lines grows proportionately. Several teenagers we spoke with in Savannah had already done time behind bars. For those of us currently on the outside (the minimum security wing of this nation of prisons), there remains a need to articulate political mobilization to support resistance within prisons, and to strive to articulate means of real support for radicalization so that those who become conscious behind prison
14

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-data-repository/cradle-toprison-pipeline/cradle-prison-pipeline-georgia-2009-fact-sheet.pdf 15 http://www.globalhealthfacts.org/data/topic/map.aspx?ind=47 16 http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/news/documents/2012/02/29/ Copy_of_Posession_of_Marijuana_Arrests.pdf 17 http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war 18 http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/dcf/enforce.cfm 19 http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/12/georgia_prisoners_strike_for_pay_decent_food.html 20 http://whyihatecca.blogspot.com/2012/05/2-riots-in-cca-facilities.html

walls can transform these concentration camps into fortresses of the revolutionary movement, and when comrades return to their communities they can effectively continue their revolutionary political work.

11. Toward the festival:

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Making our way back north, we saw six police officers banging fists and laughing over the head of a young black man. They had him in cuffs, proud of their prize. It was sickening. The cops stood perversely excited, but their prisoner was composed. Aware of his surroundings, he knew the game. A sister at our side saw this, hearing the same enraging joke over and over. Always the same: blacks in handcuffs, cops laughing; drunk tourists at play with pigs as guardians; Troy Davis, Trayvon Martin, Joetavius Stafford, Dwight Pearson, Ariston Waiters21. A cop kept ordering her to stay away, even as she moved back. She exploded, couldnt take the joke anymore. Straight into his face in rage: Fuck you, pig! The officer was stunned. The prisoner was astonished. Did he just hear that? As the sister walked away, another officer said get her too for disorderly. But the cop didn't arrest her. It makes you dizzy sometimes. The heat catches hold of you when you walk through the streets, seeing how capital enforces its laws. The original wealth of this city came from cotton, first picked by enslaved black hands, later picked by free black hands, shipped out to the whole world. Savannah profits on a wine squeezed from strange fruit. The Oglethorpe Plan: civilization at the river; blacks stay out; poor stay out; stay on the farms; stay in the hood; stay in your place. The model is still in the architecture. The north side of Savannah is patterned: street, alley, alley, street. Orderly, defensible, secure. Streets paved over slave-lain cobblestones. The colonys egalitarian plan was, in a twisted way, the geographic model for pre-war enslavement and post-war segregation. According to Savannahs own tricentennial plan of 2006, the Oglethorpe plan is the explicit model for Savannahs current design. Oglethorpes legacy is an aesthetic patina of Utopian history, of Italianate and Federal architecture, which obscure the history of slavery and colonization located in the projects and the hood. All warfare is based on deception. One manifestation of that deception is officers pounding their fists over a man robbed of his freedom. We angrily wrenched ourselves away. We were there to investigate and learn, not to provoke the hounds. The time will come.

21

Joetavius, Dwight and Ariston were all shot by the police in Georgia between October and December 2011.

12. SCAD Art Festival We spent some time at a big street art festival hosted by the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD). The crowd here was mainly middle class, if not rich -- many students but also others of all ages -- and mainly white. Overall, there was a clear disconnect between the life of the SCAD student, whose tuition exceeds $30,000 per year, and the lives of the proletariat two blocks to the south. We did meet one small group of students who understood race and class relations in Savannah. Two sisters, one from Gwinnett County and one from Mexico, knew about the Troy Davis case and thought his execution was horrific. After being told about our day so far, one opened up and said, In Savannah, your race determines the police response. She gave a story of a professor at SCAD who got a flat tire while driving alone in front of a police precinct near the projects we had been at. There were plenty of officers around who witnessed it happen, and none of them helped the woman. Instead, the police moved quickly to harass black youth for loitering on the street nearby. Both sisters refuted the myth of serve and protect. They told us a story of an 18 year old autistic white man who was tased and beaten by Tybee police while he was waiting for his brother to bring him a cheeseburger. Their stance on gentrification was that it was complex: the Graphic Design Department at SCAD hosted a conference on revitalization of the community, involving buying dilapidated old buildings and decorating them instead of leaving them abandoned and trashed. They saw exploitative and positive elements to the process. They cited a past event of a SCAD student being shot during a drive by in one of the neighborhoods we were in as an example of the hostilities between the two social forces and the difficulties in opening dialog. The sisters were an exception, though. Most people at the festival were either indifferent or openly hostile. A handful of white students made jokes about Troy Davis, but backed away when called out. If there is revolutionary potential in the SCAD demographic, it would require much more struggle to bring forward -- in contrast to eagerness of the black proletariat. The task remains to formulate a strategy to win over the more advanced from this section of society.

Clifford Grevemberg, after being savagely beaten by Savannahs swinest. Photo: Savannah Morning News.

13. Cloverdale The privilege of Savannahs affluent was not the only type of disinterest that we faced in Savannah. The Cloverdale suburb is west of downtown, separated from the projects by the interstate. This neighborhood was where Troy Davis lived up until he was caged in 1989. It is known as a middle-class neighborhood with a mostly African-American population. Reactions to our investigation were varied, but there was less interest, less optimism, here. One man was happy to talk to us, but maintained a position of I didnt know Troy personally, so I cant really say. He said this about each question: the role of police, the role of the state, the role of the law. His line was an empirical skepticism that curtailed his opinion on anything at all, and in this case it stifled the possibility of a revolutionary conversation. Another of our teams knocked on many doors no one answered, even when people were home. In contrast to the projects, even most of the people on the sidewalk were not interested in talking. Many homes were boarded up, or for-sale. At the neighborhood basketball court, we spotted some gang graffiti. The sole break in the silence was a young man, A, who we ran into at a bus stop. He said that people were suspicious recently due to a recent increase in neighborhood crime. A went on to tell us that you could no longer order pizza delivery here because the crime had gotten so bad. Other teams found some conversations. One woman, S was an African-American in her midtwenties. She seemed standoffish at first, being very young when Troy Davis was convicted, but explained that her brother is going through a similar situation. He is convicted of murder and she believes he is innocent. While initially skeptical, she eventually offered to distribute some of our fliers to her coworkers who knew Troy. We ran into a 66 year-old man on the sidewalk. He was familiar with Troys case, and he quickly caught our purpose. After listening to our questions, he pointedly asked, What are yall gonna do about it now? One interviewer challenged by saying, Well, maybe thats the problem, referring to the apathy expressed in the mans statement. He was clearly still invested in social justice; however, he claimed his fighting days were over and that now its our turn. While he seemed defeated, he wished us well. Fostering a stable, black middle class was a major goal of the U.S. government in the wake of the 1960s uprisings. Middle-class communities would support the black political elite by providing tokens of the American Dream. But decades later, we can see Cloverdale as a living example of the results of this dream. The recent financial crisis has hit this area hard. The median net worth of black households plummeted by over 50% after many lost their homes22. In this new era of austerity, the words of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto dont suffice when they say the lower strata of the middle class...sink gradually into the proletariat. The shift we observe in areas like Cloverdale is not gradual, but jarring and violent. In a future united front for revolution, this section of the people -- many losing everything or facing the loss of what little they had gained in moving up in society over generations -- would be important to win over to the side of those who already have nothing to lose but their chains.

22

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/wealthgap_07-26.html

14. Occupy Savannah Occupy Savannah pulled around five hundred participants at its peak. Unlike other places (like Atlanta) there were not established left forces that jumped into the Savannahs Occupy movement at any point. Nevertheless, similar splits between more liberal and radical forces came about organically. As the group that we met with was relatively small and did not represent the wider variety of viewpoints, we did not get a sense of all the line questions involved here. Those at Occupy Savannah were mostly optimistic and aware of political events. They shared some of their ongoing projects with us: one was building a mobile garden that could be used to create gardens in abandoned lots to feed people while being easy to deconstruct for avoiding police repression. At its height, OS had been seeing 150-200 people at general assemblies but there was never an overnight occupation. In our discussion with the brothers and sisters from Occupy Savannah, one of our key points of struggle was violent and nonviolent methods. One person expressed pessimism for whether the oppressed could ever be able to win against the overwhelming military force of the state and therefore nonviolent tactics were necessary. Unstated was that, if such struggle were practically possible, there would not be opposition to it on principle. A leading member of Occupy Savannah spoke with us about a recent encounter he experienced with police: an African-American man and his son were on the street in downtown Savannah holding up signs about Troy Davis and Trayvon Martin. The OS brother witnessed them being brutalized and arrested by police, and when the brother and his friend went to file a police report, his friend was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. It is worth noting the potential role of middle class activists backing up proletarian resistance if there had been similar forces on the streets in an organized way during the 1963 uprising here, supporting the people, how might things have played out differently? For example, The Oath Keepers are an organization that calls upon law enforcement and military to uphold the Constitution, and often assosciate with individualistic small government factions, such as the Tea Party movement and Ron Paul. But recently, members of the Oath Keepers in Georgia called on law enforcement agents to refuse orders to execute Troy Davis and united with the call for a general strike or sick-out of all execution personnel.23 These are glimpses of the potential unity that could be built in a revolutionary situation, partially by means of breaking up the reactionary camp and winning over parts of it to the side of the people.

Conclusions We stated earlier that investigation is about learning, and that learning is two-fold. We try to learn about people in a way that does not co-opt them into the agendum of some political prejudice; and we also learn about ourselves in terms of our ability to avoid political prejudice. This model of investigation therefore provides both the material for specific analyses of our target and the self-critical process that we use to make the next investigation better. As a form of practice, TDC is still very new to investigation. We hope to continue making reports in our area, and hope that other comrades reading this report will begin work of their own. Our first investigation, which lasted only a day, has given us a glimpse of the violence necessary to continue capitalism under an illusion of a 'historic southern town'. Not only are we not alone in knowing this truth (people who live there are quite aware), the illusion is losing it's strength: the cracks in the system are growing. The crisis of capitalism daily is creating a larger and larger army of people behind bars, thrown onto the street, fearfully closing their door as patrol cars drive by, screaming in the night at the debt, the bills, the same meaningless job every day. The contradictions that this society is based off
23

http://www.dailypaul.com/179555/calling-oathkeepers-in-ga-do-not-execute-troy-davis

of continue to become more severe. That there are problems becomes self-evident: solutions to them is something else. Solutions, that is to say, resolving contradictions requires us to have a deep knowledge of those contradictions. Such is one function of revolutionary investigation. Understanding how to resolve these contradictions requires new knowledge obtained through practice. What new knowledge did TDC gain from a day in Savannah? Cracks in the system are emerging (conversation with M, degradation of Cloverdale neighborhoods). But this in itself is nothing new: we could have learned this from a news story or a book. The method of understanding this (investigation), and the level of understanding this (direct experience), however, are new to our tendency. We learned that there is a real possibility for alliances between the social strata of the working class: Occupy Savannah, a movement made up of a majority of middle-class forces (or would-be middle-class), was willing to support (not attempt to lead, but support) proletarian forces and communities that would otherwise be considered 'outside' their designated neighborhoods. Overall, as a first mission, TDC learned that it is possible to go into communities and learn about the condition of the people through dialog as revolutionaries. This might seem banal to some or absurd to others, but it is an important fact. Revolutionary politics is not something 'crazy'. It is not inherently pedantic to have dialog with the people. It is not a practice of racism for white people (which are a part of TDC) to learn from black proletariat. But in the end, our data was very limited. Investigations need to be targeted, and much better prepared. We need to have controversial political questions ready in order to fully gauge the consciousness of the people. And, expanding a point made above, we aren't there simply to 'discover that shit is bad'. Investigation needs to be a process of revolutionaries making contacts with the people, making alliances with sections of the proletariat that are ready to throw down, creating networks of resistance. Investigation needs to be a process of building power. We aren't academics writing papers to be graded. We are revolutionaries gathering and synthesizing data. Finally, investigation is a break from revolutionary ambulence-chasing24. There is an important need to have a dialectical balance between being critically engaged and partisan to revolutionary politics, while simultaneously having an open mind to new things and recognizing that we dont hold all the answers. These can be hard to do at the same time, but it is a challenge we need to always keep in mind when conducting investigatory work. It was refreshing to see that the spirit of 1963 was still alive in the minds of many on Savannahs streets. The Black proletarian community was overall ready to fight back against elements of direct state oppression. There was not a widespread loyalty towards the existing system. While members of the SCAD student body we spoke with were not on the same page for the most part, there were elements of openness to being won over to the side of the oppressed. From our day in Savannah, we saw how everything is falling apart. Things are getting worse. But there is no upsurge spontaneously emerging with a full analysis of the situation and ready to go toe to toe with the enemy. What is present is the potential: what is needed is leadership. We Gonna Win

24

This refers to a practice all too common among radicals in the United States, who will jump from one campaign to another on a whim, without developing analysis, summation, or a broader revolutionary strategy in order to build bases for mass support and eventual contestation of political power.

Will we win? This isn't the question to ask. We have no say in what time we exist in. We have little say in who we meet. What we do have a say in is how we respond to our conditions. We very well may not know if we are to win this fight. But the noble thing to do, the revolutionary thing to do is to act as if we will. Comrades, we must be confidant. If the world is not ours to be seized, we must be damn sure to make the downhill battle a living hell for our enemy. For revolution to occur, we need a dynamic and expansive revolutionary strategy and particular organization developed to carry out that strategy. Both of these things need to be formulated based on concrete conditions, on knowledge from the people, by the people, for the people. Even an army of tens of thousands arising spontaneously tomorrow, each ready to die, would be powerless without these two factors. We saw and heard a number of things in the streets of Savannah. The proletariat generally was positive in its response to a revolutionary analysis. This is far from saying that people were spontaneously communist. We found that contradictions were still present, particularly on the nature of the state. Our time will come, and the people know it. Behind the fatalism there is hope. They say things will never change, but people want to be wrong. They want to be proven the contrary. And this understanding that a new world is possible, that justice will finally be handed down and the roles reversed isn't always going to be expressed in ways we immediately understand. It may even be expressed in ways that a lot of communists might disdain. When we spoke to sisters on their porch, in the black proletarian neighborhoods of Savannah, one sister had this to say: The only solution I can come up with with is to just keep doing what we doing and eventually, the man up above, the creator of all this, is gonna come a time to where they gonna be in the same situation he was in. You know. So. Thats the only solution: just doing what ch'all doing, keep doing what ch'all doing. And he gonna rectify it. God is gonna rectify it. Thats the only thing we can do. Cause if not, we being behind those bars facing the same thing he facing. TDC: Do you think that God will rectify it with using us as his force? Yeah. Because we walk by spirit. You know? So, eventually, its gonna come. Its gonna come one time where we gonna win. Of course. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Cause unjust don't prosper and that was very unjust. And they call that justice. Chickens coming home to roost. We gonna win