Hammer and Sickle in Decatur

Excited to see the hammer and sickle graffiti on Decatur’s Sam’s Crossing bridge this morning.

The struggle is real in the Decatur area. ICE oppression of Brown people is pervasive. Our county CEO called police on ICE protesters, leading to the arrest of journalist Mario Guevara who is being tortured by ICE. Decatur’s Emory University continues to harass and discriminate against Palestinians. CopCity has opened. Despite state fascism, we continue to resist. Even the smallest graffiti is resistance, but not nearly enough.

Is communism the answer though? Here’s a true story. Grandmother and her sister Arester were raised formerly enslaved people in Covington, GA. Arester moved to Decatur in the 1920’s and talks here about their father John Wesley Wyatt. One of the people who liberated our family and others enslaved on the small farms and plantations of Covington also co-founded the first German Communist Party.

August Willich recruited Marx into the communist party, and later spent time administering reconstruction efforts in Covington. I don’t know if great grandparents encountered Willich – I only discovered this decades after grandmother passed away. We know from DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America that the enslaved were also equal participants in their liberation.

I’m just meditating and welcoming ancestral linkages between abolition and communism. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, communism is

the attempt to think and practice an anti-capitalist politics at the intersection of anarchism and communism.

Bring it.