The garden had been planted over the last several months through civil initiative by the people of Historic Africatown’s Central Area, especially @BlackStarFarmers. It was planted on the land which was once the parking lot of the Coleman Elementary School, which many generations of African American families attended over the latter half of the Twentieth Century.
Many such new community gardens have been established throughout the city over the past year and a half, in the course of the struggle by all peoples to preserve health, nutrition, mental wellness, meaning, and connection to the soil while surviving the Covid Pandemic.
The reason, of course, that this particular garden was demolished today is because it was Black.
The garden was established in solidarity with the African American Heritage Museum & Cultural Center, Baba Omari Tahir, Baba Earl Debnam, and the spirits of the late Michael Greenwood and ISAIAH EDWARDS.
It was a highly productive garden, as can be attested by any of the thousands of people who witnessed its prominent public unveiling this past Juneteenth – at the birthday of the ongoing re-liberation of the east yard of Coleman School building. Coleman’s parking lot (which is now Jimi Hendrix), was supposed to have been only temporarily held by the Parks Department during the conversion of the former Coleman School building into the African American Heritage Museum & Cultural Center (AAHM&CC). It was then supposed to have been returned to the Museum once construction was finished.
Instead, the Museum was stolen by the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle and placed under the leadership of the FBI.
The Parks Department kept the parking lot parcel, converted it into a dog-walking park, and named it “Jimi Hendrix”. This arrangement was very popular among affluent white settlers to the Central Area until last summer’s empire-wide popular democratic uprising against lynchings, when significant crowds of actual Black people began to, in fact, regularly use Jimi Hendrix Park and frequently assemble in it.
This, of course, caused some of the white settlers to complain about so many Black people still being alive and visible in broad daylight — a full two decades into the Twenty-First Century.
So, the Parks department promptly tried to appease those settlers by turning off Jimi Hendrix Park’s electricity supply (which forces all African American events in the park to bring our own generators and fossil fuel to power them, since the clean hydroelectric power is apparently for whites only).
When called about this, the City openly boasted that they had turned off the power in response to “un-permitted events”, and also that they would “not issue any event permits”. This is, of course, directly parallel to the Israeli apartheid policy of refusing to issue home-building permits to Palestinian families, and then arbitrarily demolishing Palestinian homes for “not having a permit”.
The desolation of this community garden is also, of course, a warm-up exercise in the City and County’s ongoing preparation to once again order more storm troopers to attack and tear down the AAHM&CC, as they did this past May 8th, and as they did on June 4th of 1998.
Here is a short video of the aftermath of the garden’s desolation today.
The AAHM&CC finds it significant that former DOJ Weed & Seed Director (now Mayor) Jenny Durkan’s demolition of this Black community garden occurred just 22 days after the principled resignation of Professor Cornel West from Harvard University — an institution which had refused to grant tenure to Dr. West because he consistently points out the similarities between the apartheid suffered by Palestinians and apartheid suffered by Black people.
It is unfortunate that, on April 29th, while he was still under the whip of his Harvard overseers, Dr. West’s name and online presence were used by team Urban League to provide unearned credibility to their fake museum “NAAM” Scam organization (the one who’s founding director was openly and proudly a Boeing executive and FBI agent).
The AAHM&CC has publicly declared our museum site an Aphartheid Free Zone in solidarity with the people of Palestine who are under such brutal attack and demolition at this very moment. We challenge all other museums and educational institutions which claim to be of, by, for and/or about Black people to do the same, especially the one calling itself “the NAAM” (which is illegally occupying our building on behalf of major global corporations while claiming to be a tenant of the Urban League).
We will be pleasantly surprised if the “NAAM” makes any statement in solidarity with Palestine against Israeli apartheid.
We believe the reason they will not do so is that their sponsor, the Urban League, is openly in political alliance with multiple pro-apartheid organizations, including, notably, the “ADL“.
The Urban League’s lawsuit to evict AAHM&CC Co-Founder Omari Tahir (and “all other tresspassers”) from his own property at the Coleman building is being litigated by the giant global lawfirm PerkinsCoie, which has both a seat on the Urban League Of Metropolitan Seattle’s Board and a page on its own website devoted specifically to its Israeli clientele.
Furthermore, the Urban League Of Metropolitan Seattle’s Board also includes a senior leader of the Ben Bridge Jewelers Company, which openly brags on its website about doing business with both Israel and the infamous DeBeers blood diamond cartel — who are probably more famously associated with classical “apartheid” in Africa than any other family on Earth.
These are the reasons why the NAAM’s policy-response to the George Floyd uprising was to host a press conference which called for the Seattle Police Department to be doubled in size! That press conference was held July 13th, 2020, in the very same Jimi Hendrix Park where, exactly one year and nine days later, that same Police Department would oversee the brutal destruction of this Black Community Garden.
These are also the reasons why the Urban League employs the kind of property management firm whose unstable employee shoots and murders innocent young Black women in the parking lot.
If you were wondering, now you know.
-The AAHM&CC
PS: Here is the full length video of the City’s violent attack upon the garden.
The African American Heritage Museum & Cultural Center 