CHICAGO, June 12—The racist Chicago Police Department (CPD) took the life of another member of our class. On the night of June 6, a killer cop shot 24-year-old Black father Maurice Granton Jr. in the back, killing him after a chase in the city’s south side Bronzeville neighborhood.
This blatant murder again demonstrates the role of the racist police under capitalism. Workers and community members have protested throughout the area since Maurice’s murder. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have joined them in their struggles and put forward communist revolution as the only solution to end these racist police murders once and for all!
Workers, kkkops square off in neighborhood, hospital
Immediately after Maurice was murdered, workers responded angrily in the neighborhood. They confronted the police who tried to keep order. People were gathered on all four corners of the intersection. They shouted questions at the racist cops, asking them where Maurice’s wounds were and how they could justify such a shooting. The cops responded by brutalizing people in the crowd, including harassing a 10-year-old boy who had dropped a phone and then using a taser on a woman who was trying to help Maurice after he was shot. Others were taken into custody.
At the University of Chicago Hospital, where Maurice was fighting for his life, racist hospital officials tried to usher his family out of the emergency room waiting area. The family was not having it, and in the end, CPD and University cops threw his family out. Then, more than a dozen armed cops formed a line in front of the entrance and said the area was on lockdown.
Only ruthless capitalism would be so cold as to gun down a worker, then proceed to block off his loved ones from seeing him as he died. This whole racist system needs to be destroyed!
Remember Maurice, call out the bosses
The next day, tensions were still high. PL’ers joined an angry young worker who was encouraging fight back. We knew this area well since we have had a CHALLENGE sale here regularly for several years and it was on this year’s May Day march route. We got out CHALLENGE, met more neighbors and Maurice’s sister, Joanna.
That same evening, Maurice’s family held a vigil where he had been shot. Maurice leaves behind two young girls who he loved and lived for. His sister said he was very funny and just wanted to have a family since he didn’t have one growing up. In all, there were about 75 people there to show their anger for his racist murder.
Different speakers at the vigil called for release of the body-cam footage, a new mayor, to put pressure on Kim Foxx (the Cook County State’s Attorney), and to “fix” the broken racist CPD.  They pointed out how young Black and Latin people are being criminalized and targeted for murder, while the police act with impunity.
We distributed more CHALLENGEs at the vigil, as well as a flyer exposing capitalism as the real culprit in this murder. It was pointed out that it did not matter that the cop who shot Maurice was a Black cop. This is true. In the end, they are all racist terrorists, doing the bidding of their capitalist masters who run society for their profits and power. Switching up a few politicians or getting more Black cops hired will never significantly change a system that needs racist and sexist state terror in order to exist.
Fight the bosses’ racist attacks
Racist capitalism had failed Maurice, just as countless others, from a very young age. He lived in foster homes growing up. Maurice attended Dyett High School, which had been gutted of resources for years and almost closed in 2015, had it not been for the community who organized a 19-day hunger strike which forced Chicago Public Schools to keep the school open. He was forced to live in an area with no jobs. And now, the racist system’s cops finish him off by shooting him in the back.
The bosses have been clearly worried about this shooting. They used their racist media to make Maurice look bad, including releasing a video that supposedly shows him holding a weapon, as well as sharing his Facebook pages in an attempt to justify their racist murder.
Various working-class neighborhoods in Chicago are gentrifying rapidly. Since 2000, over 300,000 Black workers and their families have been driven out of Chicago. The bosses are using their “war on crime and violence” as a way to move workers out of the way by evicting them out of their homes and terrorizing them.
Bronzeville could be potentially very valuable for the real estate bosses. It is close to downtown, has two train stations, two nearby highways and new multi-million-dollar bike/pedestrian bridges leading to the revamped lakefront with new bike lanes and improved beaches.  
However, people in this neighborhood that we’ve talked to understand all these plans and want to fight. Many have expressed interest in demonstrating at the police station where this killer cop works. Others want to go to City Hall and hold a march. All great ideas that our Party will continue to help organize, lead, and participate in.
PLP will keep up the struggle alongside our class sisters and brothers in any mass movements that we find ourselves. It’s essential to win more workers and students to the necessity of destroying this system of capitalism that is responsible for the widespread violence our class suffers daily. Our goal remains to wipe out these racist cops, bosses, and capitalism in Chicago and everywhere through communist revolution, and build in its place a worker-led society that meets our needs.