This statement was written by Joe Iosbaker on behalf of the Labor Committee of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression – caarpr.org.
Carol and Aaron Ammons are African American elected officials in Champaign, Illinois. Trump’s Department of Justice has come after them, trying to drive them from office and to stop their efforts against racism and their support of the democratic demands of the Black community.
I believe Carol and Aaron Ammons
Aaron Ammons is my union brother. He’s a fighter for workers’ rights, for Black liberation and social justice.
He has the great fortune to have a soul mate who is also a freedom fighter: his wife, State Representative Carol Ammons.
Aaron and I met as members of the executive board of SEIU Local 73. We were both employees of the University of Illinois. I worked for the Chicago campus, and Aaron for the Urbana-Champaign campus.
Aaron went from organizing his co-workers for better wages and working conditions to running for and winning election as an alderman in the city of Urbana, and then winning election as Champaign County Clerk in 2018.
Carol was elected to the General Assembly in Springfield in 2014.
Theirs is a great story of the African American freedom struggle.
Mississippi up north
Today we have a racist culture war emanating from Trump’s presidency. It was a shock when I heard that Aaron and Carol were indicted by a grand jury for alleged misuse of campaign funds and state grants.
It was a shock, but it should not have been a surprise.
Illinois is a racist state. I live in Chicago, where the 21-year reign of Mayor Richard J. Daley caused the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to refer to the city as “Mississippi up north.” This week, marchers went into Marquette Park to commemorate 60 years since Dr. King marched there. In Dr. King’s words, “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I had never seen, even in Mississippi, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as in Chicago.”
Illinois is the only state in the country that has a Torture Commission in the state legislature. It was created to deal with the hundreds of cases of young Black and Latino men who were beaten and even electrocuted by Chicago police officers, led by the sadistic, racist Detective Jon Burge, into confessing to murders they did not commit.
Carol Ammons and the fight for reparations
Supporters in the Black Liberation movement in Illinois see the hand of the Trump administration in the indictment handed down by a grand jury.
Everyone knows that Trump has it in for Chicago, the city that sent Barack Obama, the first Black president to the White House. Everyone remembers it was his white racist anger at a Black man in the White House that propelled Trump to run for president in the first place. Furthermore, Trump hates on Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson as well as Governor Pritzker for their defiance of his racist anti-immigrant attacks.
Trump’s Department of Justice joined a lawsuit against the city of Evanston for discrimination against white people for its reparations program, a program that aimed to address harm caused by discriminatory housing policies and disinvestment in Black communities over the past century.
Kamm Howard, director of Reparations United, said he believes Representative Ammons is facing false charges from the federal government in retaliation for her support in the General Assembly of reparations. There are several bills and other motions in Springfield to make amends for the enslavement of Black Americans, and the systemic racism still present in the U.S. today. Representative Ammons even travelled to Ghana, where she pledged to dedicate her public life to raising awareness of the transatlantic slave trade and advocating for reparative justice for people of African descent.
Indictments
“But they’ve been indicted,” say the corporate-owned media! “There was an investigation by a grand jury,” said the leadership in Springfield.
I know a little about grand juries. In 2010, because of activism against the criminal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, I was among a group of anti-war activists raided by the FBI and subpoenaed to a federal grand jury. The pro-Israel types in the Department of Justice thought they could intimidate the burgeoning BDS (boycott, divestment and sanction) movement. The Joint Terrorism Task Force tried to smear us with the lie that we were providing “material support to foreign terrorist organizations.”
They failed, because the anti-war movement rallied in our defense. We were also able to get unions representing over a million members and 14 members of Congress to speak out that ours was a civil liberties case.
What exactly is a grand jury?
A grand jury is an infamous prosecutorial tool. It’s an anti-constitutional instrument which returns indictments 99% of the time! Among prosecutors and civil liberties advocates, there’s a well-known adage: A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. In other words, an inanimate object.
Grand jury proceedings are secret.
Grand jurors hear one side only; prosecutors draft and read the charges to the grand jurors who are not instructed on the law or screened for bias.
Defense counsel is barred from the grand jury, and no judge is present.
You don’t have the right to have your lawyer present; to see the evidence presented against you; to cross-examine witnesses; to refuse to testify.
Most European countries stopped using grand juries decades ago because they are essentially tools for the prosecution.
Don’t believe the hype.
Aaron and Carol Ammons have done nothing wrong. All people of good conscience should oppose the railroad that the Trump Department of Justice has brought to threaten these courageous elected officials.
#ChicagoIL #IL #InJusticeSystem #OppressedNationalities #AfricanAmerican #CAARPR #SEIU
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