Dear Friends, Fellow Workers and ALLies,

The community and workers of Portland’s Red and Black Café, an IWW, anarchist, vegan, co-op, needs your support and solidarity.

A uniformed police officer, James Crooker, entered the Red and Black Café and ordered a cup of coffee.  On his way out of the store he was delayed by another customer who wanted to let him know how much they appreciate the police and the service they perform (keeping the homeless out of sight, the workers working, minorities in jail, and the angry away from the throats of “Our [corporate and political] leaders [who] invent nothing, but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects”1).

John Langley, one of the co-owners and Fellow Worker, of the Café approached Officer Crooker and asked him to leave, stating how uncomfortable he felt having an armed Police Officer inside an Anarchist Café.

As John Langley explained to Lynne Terry:

“It’s not about the police,” Langley said. “It’s about what the police represent to many people who frequent the cafe.

The cafe draws vegans — of course — along with homeless people and animal-rights and environmental activists who Langley said have been targets of police abuse and harassment.

Now this story has gone national and the Conservative/Liberal Statists are up in arms.  William Gillis, in a letter to Roderick Long, describes the impact on the Café:

“I have good friends on staff and their phones are ringing off the hook with death threats. Mainstream conservative and liberal pundits have talked of showing up with weapons to start a confrontation…  My friends could really use some support; in this environment some kind words or awareness from those who aren’t fanatical devotees of the police state would go a long way.”

The anarchist stands resolute against rulership, against authority, against oppression – period.  This is why we will sit at a lunch counter against the wishes of its racist owner and, at the same time and in the same respect, remove the statist myrmidon from our own coffee shop.

This is not a contradiction; this is consistency!

So help out the Red and Black if you can, give them a shout, drop a buck or two in their paypal and make the Neo-Con-Liberals tremble.

“Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the black and red unite.” — Otto von Bismarck.

1. Thomas Hodgskin