CLEVELAND
People's fight-back wins on two fronts
Parents win police-murder suit
It's not uncommon for families to lose loved ones to
police violence. It happens every day. What is uncommon is
for those families to get some semblance of justice in the
courts.
However, after an eight-year battle, Jack Blair and Betty
Blair know that their fight on behalf of their son, Michael
Pipkins, was not in vain. On Dec. 12 the city of Cleveland
agreed to pay $1.25 million to the Blairs and to Pipkins'
four children.
December 28 marks the eighth anniversary of Pipkins'
death. That night Cleveland police put Pipkins in a
chokehold, claiming he stole a car. When he became ill, they
delayed taking him to a hospital. Even the internal police
review board found that the officers caused Pipkins' death by
failing to take him to a hospital immediately.
Hundreds protested for weeks after Pipkins' murder. The
Justice for Michael Pipkins Committee kept weekly pickets at
City Hall going for over a year, while the Blairs took their
petitions for justice for their son into the community every
chance they had.
This struggle eventually led to the city banning the
common police practice of using the chokehold to subdue
victims.
In 1994 Pipkins' family filed a federal civil-rights
lawsuit. Now the city has settled out of court rather than
see the case go to trial. The courage and determination of
Pipkins' family should inspire all those working to stop
police violence.
Federal court strikes down vouchers
On Dec. 11, a federal appeals court struck down the
voucher program in the Cleveland public schools. With the
judges voting 2-1, the court ruled that the public funding of
religious schools violates the constitutional separation of
church and state. The Ohio Federation of Teachers hailed the
ruling as a victory.
The vouchers are a reactionary scheme to rob inner-city
public schools of much-needed dollars and funnel them to
private and religious schools. It plays on the fact that
poorer school districts are underfunded, which leads to
overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, and outdated
textbooks. This underfunding also leads to a brain drain of
qualified teachers who can earn higher salaries in more
affluent suburbs.
Advocates of the voucher system, like President-elect
George W. Bush and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, claim it will
provide poor students, especially African Americans, with a
better education outside the public school system.
However, voucher opponents in Cleveland report that many
voucher students are receiving inferior education, sometimes
in unsafe buildings.
The fight to resist privatization and/or Christian
right-wing control of public education is a just fight. But
it must be combined with a fight for equal and adequate
funding of education for all, especially the most
oppressed.
--Martha Grevatt
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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