“Today, what is hopeful is that more and more people are starting to see that the prosecution of one officer or the indictment of one officer or winning a civil case by a couple folks is not the kind of justice that we want to see.”Ĭolón, who is much newer to activism than London, tells the audience that seeing the film “was pretty traumatic.” A poet and playwright, she was moved to organize after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last summer. “Organizing for me is an antidepressant,” says London, who co-chairs the Chicago chapter of Black Youth Project 100 and performs his poetry nationwide. Kapri, Colón, and London join the ranks of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and many other writers of color who have channeled their painful personal experiences and observations of state-sanctioned violence into poetry and protest. Police brutality did not start or end with Burge, and in communities of color there is a long history of organized protests and creative responses to this phenomenon. Poets gathered for this teach-in on the eve of the City Council’s historic hearing on a reparations ordinance for Burge’s victims. In Chicago, activism in response to his crimes persists. He now lives in Florida and continues to receive his police pension. He served less than four years in prison. Cannon spent twenty-four-and-a-half years in prison as a result of the false confession tortured out of him by three detectives in November 1983.īurge was acquitted of torture charges in 1989, but was eventually fired from his job and found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors used the extracted confessions to convict the victims, and, in some cases, send them to death row for murders they did not commit. To extract confessions, Burge and his men also suffocated suspects with plastic bags, beat them, and staged mock executions. Burge used a hand-cranked generator and other devices to electrocute victims on the ears, fingers, legs, and genitals. Between 19, Burge and detectives under his leadership tortured more than 100 black men and women, including Cannon. The End of the Nightstick memorializes the victims of former Chicago Police commander Jon Burge and chronicles the quest to bring him to justice. The grainy footage is more than twenty years old, but the film could have been made yesterday. We’ve just watched a documentary about police violence in Chicago. Next to him, young poets Kristiana Colón, Britteney Black Rose Kapri, and Malcolm London (all three recently published in the groundbreaking anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop) sit with downcast eyes. These things that I just described are things that were done to me.” “You don’t use the electric cattle prod on a man unless you’ve been doing it for a while. You don’t put a shotgun in a man’s mouth and split his upper lip and chip his two teeth unless you’ve been doing it for a while,” Darrell Cannon says to a small group gathered for a teach-in at the Poetry Foundation in downtown Chicago. This article appears in the May 2015 of our magazine.
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