PHOTOS: Communists Invoke Trayvon Martin in Anti-Police Protest Previous

07/22/2013
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(Robert Stacy McCain) - A coalition of Marxists organized what they called a “Statewide March Against Police Brutality” Sunday in the Southern California city of Anaheim, attracting a crowd estimated at 500 by Professor Donald Douglas.

The protest in Anaheim was on the one-year anniversary of the police shooting of Manuel Diaz, a 25-year-old gang member known as “Stomper,” whose death was ruled justified by the Orange County District Attorney’s office. Diaz had an extensive record of drug dealing and violent crime. At Sunday’s protest, some activists held a banner demanding that California Attorney General Kamala Harris prosecute for “murder” an Oakland police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Alan Blueford in May 2012. Police said the officer fired at Blueford, who was on probation for a burglary conviction, after the high-school senior pointed a pistol at police.

The major Communist organizations represented in the Anaheim protest were the Party for Socialism and Liberation and A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), a front for a Stalinist splinter group known as the Workers World Party. There was also a contingent from the Latino racist group known as the Brown Berets and at least one protester representing herself as a Spartacist (International Communist League), an extremist faction expelled from the Socialist Workers Party in 1963.

“Since the bogus ‘not guilty’ verdict in the trial of murderer George Zimmerman on Saturday, people have been in the streets every single day all over the country,” A.N.S.W.E.R. declared in announcing Sunday’s protest. Denouncing “the growth of a new movement against systemic racism,” the Marxist group said: “The murder of Trayvon Martin and the daily killing of Black and Brown people by law enforcement are inextricably linked. … Now is the time to build a movement against this systemic racism and brutality.”

Other protesters at Sunday’s event wore masks and black clothing identified with the so-called “Black Bloc” anarchists who have fomented violence and vandalism at anti-capitalist demonstrations, including the notorious “Battle in Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. Some protesters Sunday apparently vandalized Anaheim Police headquarters, scrawling “FTP” (“F–k The Police”) on a door.

None of the radical groups that participated in Sunday’s rally were identified by the Los Angeles Times, which quoted “activist” Michael Prysner, but did not mention his affiliation with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

(All photos and videos by Donald Douglas of American Power blog.)

UPDATE: Donald Douglas has posted many more photos at American Power blog, as well as this Vine video clip of a girl holding a Communist protest sign while taking photos with her capitalist cellphone: