Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Cornelius Taylor is dead. He was killed on January 16 by the state in Atlanta, Georgia. Police stood guard as the city workers fatally crushed him with a frontloader during a raid on a group of people living in tents next to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. The pigs are, of course, lying; trying to cover up their participation in the killing by blaming it on an overdose, just like they did after they murdered George Floyd.
The timing and location reveal another layer of evil to the crime. Cornelius was sleeping across the street from Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same place where Martin Luther King Jr. was once co-pastor with his father. This church hosts a highly attended memorial service every MLK day, along with other events covering several blocks around MLK’s childhood home. With the federal holiday just four days away, city officials called for the area to be purged of the visibly poor in preparation for the events. They desired to display a pristine picture of urban life in the Capitalist metropolis — removed of its racialized homelessness, as if Martin Luther King Jr.’s neighborhood were an exhibit at Disneyland. In a city where New Afrikans are 47% of the total residents, 86% of the homeless are Black. This racial disparity among the homeless is even more telling on the All-Empire level (13% versus. 36.6%). “Gentrification,” deployed as a mode of ethnic cleansing; a modern buzzword for the mass displacement grinding in the background of each and every victory of the white worker.
Cornelius Taylor spent his last day on this Earth in a plastic tent on Old Wheat St in the King Historic District of Atlanta, just two blocks down from MLK’s childhood home. City workers arrived on January 16 in a frontloader with a metal bucket attachment, accompanied by Atlanta police officers. Neither worker nor pig bothered to check the tents; this was out of sheer laziness, yes, but also the active, ingrained dehumanization of people who cannot afford an apartment. We know what happened next because of the medical examiner’s report, which attributes Mr. Taylor’s cause of death to “blunt force trauma to the pelvis and abdomen.” The bastards ran him over with the state machine, essentially crushing his body in two. The tent, pavement, and other debris were soaked in Cornelius’ blood.
And the pigs who stood guard as Mr. Taylor was crushed? They have already tried to cover up their active role by submitting an incident report that implied Mr. Taylor died of a drug overdose, rather than the tons of force that had spilled the blood from his body.
The report of lies describes another homeless man waving the officer down to point them to what had just happened. The cop pulls Mr. Taylor’s paralyzed body out of the collapsed tent, but didn’t notice (read: chose not to report) the unconscionable injuries to his abdomen and torso, nor the pools of blood seen by all the other witnesses. All they included in the report was a “nose bleed” and “foam emitting” from Mr. Taylor’s mouth; that an “overdose” was suspected. Let us now dispel any possible lingering notions of good-faith in this report. It is a blatant lie; meant to muddy the waters, create doubt of the obvious, and most of all, shift blame away from the pig and onto the victim. Police think they can literally sweep Cornelius Taylor under the rug if they just assassinate his character as a “drug addict,” another maligned group that the pigs see as undeserving of shelter or life. In what can only be understood as an admission of guilt, police continue to delay release of the body cam footage in the “ongoing investigation.” This is nothing new. Body cams which support a pig’s claim get released immediately; those which contradict their lies are held in purgatory to quell the public’s outrage.
A service was held on February 3 for Mr. Taylor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same church where honorary services were held for Martin Luther King Jr. the week before. After the service, family members and activists led a silent march to city hall. They are demanding an end to encampment sweeps…
But a demand like this will do nothing to alleviate the daily state-enforced torture of the homeless. Just hours after the funeral, the Atlanta city council voted to change the methods used to carry out homeless displacements. They voted to stop using heavy equipment in their raids, as well as to bring back another useless “task force” on homelessness. It is now up to the mayor to ratify or veto the changes. No, begging the state for change will not stop the displacements, even if they are carried out with a shinier boot. It is a mistake to make preemptive concessions to the killers, it is a mistake to limit this movement by demanding mercy from the oppressor and their infantry of goons. Like bartering a sale in a market, the seller shouldn’t start from a price that’s lower than what they want.
Others in the city already understand this, if we are to believe anonymous sources who claim to have returned to the scene of the crime in the early morning of January 30. According to these sources, the frontloader was incinerated; a spontaneous outcry of people who want to start from the opposite of concessions.
The demand to stop encampment sweeps is a far cry from the vision of Martin Luther King Jr; a man who was assassinated for his efforts to upend the deep antagonists of capital and its tentacles of destruction squeezing the life out of Black and other oppressed communities. The night before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech titled I’ve Been to the Mountaintop to New Afrikan sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. These workers were striking for better working conditions after a malfunctioning truck crushed two fellow workers to death, like Cornelius Taylor. King told them, “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis.”
But tragedy did follow. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered the very next day; 60 years later, their monopoly on violence causes the same “tragic accidents” which impoverish, brutalize, and crush New Afrikans beneath the state.
Martin Luther King Jr’s name was slandered by the state his entire career before modern attempts have tried to rob his legacy of all its anti-capitalist beliefs. They strangled George Floyd under a pig’s knee and blamed his death on an overdose. They mutilated Cornelius Taylor in a violent attack against the Black and homeless, before pushing that same tired lie. There is no reforming a system that operates on New Afrikan death. We will live and die in these conditions, or we will live and die winning our shared liberation.
Cornelius Taylor. Say his name!
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