Wendell Allen Murdered by NOPD: Another Tragic Example of "The New Jim Crow"

In Chile, this is how people react to the police murdering someone. Banner reads "Mendoza Collio: We Mourn Your Death With Fire." May our anger boil over to such powerful action.

Wendell Allen was murdered yesterday by the thugs in blue of the NOPD. He was unarmed. He was a star basketball player. He had his whole life ahead of him.

While the outcome of his encounter with the police may have been especially tragic, his story is far from unique.

The New Jim Crow system of justice put his body on an all too familiar path, on a collision course with the fear-inspired bullets of the NOPD thugs who broke down his door last night.

The entire story of Allen's interactions with the justice system reflect a perfect example of The New Jim Crow, in the way Michelle Alexander defines it in her book of the same name. From Wendell Allen's criminal record for minor offenses (especially drug offenses), to the trap of probation violations, of non-payment of exorbitant fines due to poverty leading to further warrants and arrests, of kids with criminal records being second-class citizens when it comes to employment, leading many to turn to the black market economy to survive (not saying that Allen sold weed himself, but some around him of the same age group did, and it led to his unjustifiable murder by Officer Josh Colclough).

All of these events in Allen's life are straight out of Michelle Alexander's narrative of how a new system of Jim Crow has been enacted on African-Americans through the policing and imprisonment systems over the past 30 years.

Listen to Alexander's excellent NPR interview and you'll be amazed as she recounts almost word for word an outline extremely familiar to what Wendell Allen had encountered in his short life. Now he will never get the chance to live in freedom from this new Jim Crow system, and another mother is burying a son far too soon in New Orleans.This daily terrorism, the relegation of large portions of our community to second class citizen status, and the police murders that inevitably result from the system's criminalization of an entire generation of young people must come to an end!



RIP Wendell Allen, Justin Sipp, Adolph Grimes III, Henry Glover, Shotgun Joe Williams, Cayne Miceli, and so many more.
IT IS UP TO US TO END THIS UNJUST AND BRUTAL SYSTEM THROUGH STRUGGLE IN THE STREETS!
NO ONE WILL DO IT FOR US!
FIGHT BACK! THE LIVES OF OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS DEPEND ON IT.