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The Fire This
Time
Although
the 1992 Los Angeles uprising slipped into the recesses of memory,
Randy
Holland, brought what fueled the uprising to the forefront of the
public
consciousness, with a critically acclaimed film, The Fire This Time;
but it was
shunned by major networks, the Public Broadcast System, affiliates.
Holland, a
television writer and independent filmmaker who avoids sensationalize
with
trite sound bites but investigates historical roots; contributing links
leading
to the tragic inevitability of the eruption of rage that surfaced in
reaction
to the Rodney King trial. Chronicling the arrival of fugitive African
Americans
to California in 1850, evolution of ghettos, the 1965 Watts riot,
Cointelpro,
(FBI counterintelligence program,) the rise of gangs from the void
created by
the crushed Black Panther Party. Paranoid
delusions? The legacy of despair and decay that
unravels in the
film shows the deep underpinnings of disenfranchisement and the
deliberate
oppression of African Americans. Failure to remedy the insidious
problems of
poverty, racial injustice, interracial tension, unemployment, lack of
education
and health care, police brutality, guaranteed; predestined the
consequences
that arose: the deliberate arresting of small boys to mark them with a
criminal
records for the rest of their lives; bank and insurance companies
unfair loans,
insurance and mortgage policies; sprinkling of more liqueur stores in
South
Central then any other kind of business, loss of 200,000 factory jobs;
crumbling and disintegration of the community. After the Watts riots,
Lyndon
Johnson created a commission to restore the city and they specifically
cited,
white indifference and complicity contributed to the dismal state of
race
relations at the time. The LA city government plan was to implement
over a
25 year period. The old plan is similar to Rebuild LA, which is on the
same
track to nowhere. The first 25 year master plan brought a riot. The
plan was
misdirected, the little bit of the plan they did implement failed
miserably.
After the Watts riots, community empowerment programs like the Watts
Writers
Workshop began, but was sabotaged by FBI and LA Police Department and
burned to
the ground by an agent provocateur who later admitted it. The Black
Panther
Party and the United Slaves organization were pitted against each other
to
cause their obliteration and to prevent the rise and spread of black
self-empowerment. “The FBI had 400 agents spying and sabotaging the
community,
this is all documented evidence from the Church Committee and by Louis
Tackwood’s book, “The Glass House Tapes,” Holland said.
From the onset the media's swift
concerted blitz gilded
over the surface of the LA rebellion; no historical background; nothing
on
Cointelpro which removed the entrails of a community- creating a vacuum
that
left youth with no leadership, paving the way for gangs, benefiting the
FBI’s/CIA’s divide and conquer tactics as was done to others.
Cointelpro ruled
by assassinations, infiltration, bogus, forged letters, leaflets, media
stories, break-ins, vandalism, beatings, false imprisonment,
surveillance of
mail and telephones, etc. “Its the same strategy they are doing today
by
keeping the gangs at war. The CIA, law
enforcement on the national, state, county, city level provide arms to
warring
factions to control resources in territories, arming both sides of
Iran/Iraq,
countries in Central America, Africa and elsewhere. The giving of
weapons to
inner city youths so that they will kill themselves off, annihilate
themselves,
in other words. Drop the guns in, let them all kill themselves and then
we'll
come in and clean up, because there's a resource involved and that's
the land.
So much history, so much pain, so much sabotage and indifference has
gone into
creating the fire bed of the recent disturbances,” said Holland.
The CIA imports and dispenses heroin
and cocaine in the
ghettos to narcotize; drive up crime rates- to rationalize repressive
legislation and police state sentiments; confirmed by John Stockwell,
the
highest CIA officer to leave the Agency and others. Similarly weapons,
as a
youth attests are mysteriously deposited by the boxcar load into
communities
free for the taking. “How the guns get into the projects, is that the
tracks,
the trains run down Willington and across Compton Avenue. They stop, no
conductor, nothing, nowhere in sight. Its open house, people go up
there and
grab guns, mop pads, car parts, anything inside. The crates are stocked
way to
the top full of guns. You might go to another car; it might be box's,
crates
full of shells, cases of shells. Nobody knows where it came from;
everybody
hears the train, we know there's something on the train; run straight
to the
train and whatever is on there, we come upon, we take.”
“They drop guns from helicopters, they use the Union
Pacific Railroad and the kids broke in and its loaded with guns,”
said, Bobby
Lavender, founding member of the Bishops Nine Deuce and the Pueblo
Bishops,
(Bloods). He talked about the trains stopping with guns.
“If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able,
handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our
country and
change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything the
fulfillment of the prophecy re-created from the Bible in song by a
slave, is
upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign/no more water, the fire next
time.”
James Baldwin. |
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