The worth of a Black youth’s life in the empire

On June 1, a jury in South Carolina found Chikiei Rick Chow not guilty of the murder of 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack Belton. Chow had accused Belton of stealing, chased him down for 130 yards and shot him in the back, killing him.

Both Chow and his defense team’s main claim is that Belton, while being chased by Chow and his son, turned and attempted to aim a gun at them. This claim was debunked by the prosecution through the evidence of the gun, which turned out to be a nonlethal airsoft gun that had fallen out of Cyrus’s pocket while he was being chased. It was also contradicted by Chow himself: in bodycam footage, Chow talked about everything except the claim that Cyrus Carmack Belton had pulled a gun on him or his son, Andy. (WIStv.com, Nov. 4, 2025)

With this evidence and more, Chow should have been found guilty. But here, in the belly of the beast, the “justice system” does nothing for the oppressed, it merely maintains the status quo. Even in the rare cases where the system “works” and a conviction is handed down, the sentences are often laughably light compared to the crime. 

Take the case of Elijah McClain, who was assaulted by police and killed after paramedics administered an illegally high dose of ketamine in 2019 in Aurora, Colorado. When convicted, officer Randy Roedema received only a 14-month sentence, while the two other officers involved were acquitted.

Centuries-long tradition of enslavement, lynching

It has become a tradition under this reactionary system to murder and lynch the Black working class and Black youth specifically, a tradition with roots going back to enslavement, when violence against Black children was routine and open.

One example comes from the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman turned abolitionist. Jacobs, born and enslaved for 29 years in North Carolina, recounted the story of a young boy named Luke, who was enslaved by a wealthy landowner. She described how the enslaver treated him: he kept a cowhide beside him, and for the most trivial occurrence, would order Luke to bare his back and kneel beside him while he whipped Luke until the master’s strength was exhausted. 

Some days Luke wasn’t allowed to wear anything but his shirt, so he’d always be ready to be flogged. The last time Jacobs saw Luke, he was chained to his enslaver’s bedside.

Luke’s treatment wasn’t some rare act of cruelty. It was carried out openly and brazenly, as a matter of course. 

Another example is François Trepagnier, a Louisiana enslaver notorious for his brutality. Trepagnier kept a young Black child named Gustav on a leash, often on the porch of his home, calling him his pet and throwing him scraps like an animal. Trepagnier kept this up until 1811, when he was killed during the German Coast Uprising by enslaved Black people who stormed his home and killed him while liberating their comrades.

This kind of state-sanctioned humiliation and violence against Black youth didn’t end with slavery’s abolition. It continued, and continues, in the United States.

Lynchings and pogroms

The fascist movements of the Black Legion, the KKK and other reactionaries took their playbook from their European counterparts, who targeted both the working class and ethnic minorities. In Russia, the White Army carried out the White Terror against revolutionaries and pogroms against oppressed groups. 

In 1919 the U.S. experienced a wave of white supremacist violence in dozens of cities that became known as Red Summer. The ruling class understood that the next generation carries the revolutionary fire forward, and so this movement made a specific point of slaughtering the youth to choke that fire out before it could spread.

This is the lineage that gives us Jesse Washington, 16 years old, lynched in 1916 for allegedly killing a white woman. His murder was photographed and turned into postcards sold across the South. It gives us the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917, when fascists burned down the Black section of the city while police and National Guard troops stood by and in many cases joined in the lynching, killing Black youth and children alongside everyone else. 

The next year, in 1918, sisters Alma and Maggie Howze and brothers Major and Andrew Clark were lynched on the false claim that they murdered a white physician. Both sisters were pregnant at the time of their deaths. The horrific history of lynching gives us Eugene Williams, whose killing sparked the Chicago race riot of 1919, and decades later Ernest Green and Charlie Lang, 14 and 15 years old, lynched in 1942 from that very same bridge the Howze sisters and Clark brothers were lynched from.

Two years later it gives us George Stinney Jr, 14 years old, executed by the state of South Carolina after being railroaded on false charges of murdering two white girls. In that same year Willie James Howard, 15 years old, was lynched in Florida in front of his own father for writing a Christmas card to a white woman. 

And most infamously, this tradition gives us Emmett Till, 14 years old, whose 1955 murder became the defining symbol of the ruling class’s policy toward Black youth: Do whatever it takes to stop the next generation. The rulers treated his killing like those before and after as either justified or a mere inconvenience.

These murders are not historical footnotes. They are the blueprint, and the ruling class has never stopped working from it, which is why the sabotage of Black liberation movements continues and why the genocide of Black people in this country continues. Cyrus Carmack Belton, chased down for 130 yards and shot in the back, is proof that this tradition is alive and well.

Imprisoned for being Black

It isn’t just murder. It’s also prison, being sentenced for the crime of being Black. Look at 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony, whose only crime was defending himself from an assault. In a state — Texas — that loves to romanticize self-defense, Anthony was demonized for it: An all-white jury took less than three hours to convict him and sentence him to 35 years imprisonment in the killing of a white high school athlete.

Now compare that to Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people taking part in an anti-racist protest and attempted to kill a third. Rittenhouse was turned into a media darling, with the ruling class and its allies inventing every excuse imaginable to justify what he did. Rittenhouse was acquitted.

This is the same double standard that has played out on a global scale. Examples from history include France’s brutal repression of the Algerian liberation movement and Britain’s brutality against Kenyan youth during the Mau Mau rebellion. 

The capitalist class dehumanizes Black youth, because it understands, on some level, exactly what it’s afraid of — that the conditions facing the Black community, and Black youth especially, are precisely the conditions that produce revolutionary theory, revolutionary thought and, ultimately, revolutionary organizing among the oppressed.

The Chow Trial is over, and injustice was the verdict, as it always is under this system. So what do we do? We organize. We educate. And critically, we let Black comrades lead this struggle, especially the struggle to end capitalism, because Black comrades, along with other comrades of color and oppressed peoples, understand how this system functions and what has to be done to it: It has to be removed and replaced with a dictatorship of the proletariat.

But before any of that can happen, there has to be a real connection with the people. And that connection is built by struggling alongside the people, especially Black people, as it becomes increasingly clear that Black people, as well as Latine, Indigenous, LGBTQIA2S+, women and gender-oppressed people and other oppressed peoples are the primary targets of ruling-class terror. Only by building that connection, by helping carry this struggle forward together, can we win, not just workers’ liberation, but Black liberation too. 

And right now, that’s not just one front among many for the socialist movement. It’s the front that determines whether the movement survives at all.