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Before I transferred down to the Houston branch of the SWP in 1973, I worried a bit about the reign of terror that was a product of KKK collusion with the police department as this photo from a Newsweek article indicated.
It was not just Marxists who were apprehensive about the cops. One morning as I was about to enter the Texas Commerce Bank headquarters in downtown Houston where I was working as a programmer, I spotted a cop telling a white man in a suit and tie that he had a bullet with his name on it. Who knows what prompted that? Jaywalking, I guess.
If Houston was bad, Dallas was no bargain either. About a year into my stay in Houston, I went up to Dallas with a couple of comrades to sell subscriptions to the Militant newspaper at the University of Texas in Arlington, a campus located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. We had contacts in the student government office who gave us a map of the campus and their blessings. When we stopped back there to say goodbye, they had a panic-stricken look on their face. A campus cop was sitting by the door and out of our sight when we walked in. He ordered us off the campus after recording our ID’s. About a month later, I got a letter from the Dallas-Fort Worth police department telling me that there was a standing order for my arrest if I ever tried to sell the Militant on campus again.
When I was bringing my wife up to date on the Dallas shootings, I mentioned the incident about the Houston cop and his threat to a solid citizen. She was shocked. Afterwards, I thought about how much was being said now about the Dallas police department being a model of race relations, with an African-American chief. I thought that it might be worthwhile to search Nexis for Dallas and police brutality to see what comes up. If Micah Johnson stated that he wanted to kill white cops, I wondered how familiar he was with the city’s history and whether it made much difference on a department that had been “reformed”. It is a very old story and one engraved in the city’s African-American population, I am sure.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/07/10/the-dallas-cops/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
