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All four former Minneapolis cops involved in the death of George Floyd have invoked their Fifth Amendment right to silence as investigators probe the case, according to a report.

Officers Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng have refused to answer questions about what led to Floyds death, citing their right to avoid self-incrimination, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman told CNN following a news conference Thursday.

However, Thomas Kelly, the attorney for Chauvin the white officer captured on camera pinning Floyd, who was black, to the ground by his neck denied his client invoked his Fifth Amendment right following the report, according to Newsweek. Freeman did not return a request for comment from the publication.

As protests rage over the incident, Freeman said his office has been flooded by emails demanding to know, What are you going to do about the murder of George Floyd?

But while Freeman condemned the now-fired officers actions as graphic and horrific and terrible, he said the footage alone isnt enough to bring charges.

He vowed to conduct an investigation as expeditiously and thoroughly as justice demands, adding that hes reviewing the case of Freddie Gray for guidance. Gray, a 25-year-old black man, was killed while in police custody in Baltimore in 2015.

The question in my business is, is it criminal? Freeman said at the Thursday news conference, according to Newsweek.

Thats what I have to prove and there are cases that you can quickly and easily evaluate. Most cases, particularly cop use-of-force cases, are specifically more complex and have to be done right.

None of the four officers had been charged Friday.

Viral video footage of Chauvin pinning Floyd down before his death on Monday sparked nationwide protests, some of which have turned violent.

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Cops involved in George Floyd death invoke Fifth Amendment right - Filmy One

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he expects "there will be charges" filed against all four Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd, though he cautioned that they would wait for a "very strong case" before doing so. Floyd, 46, died on Memorial Day after he was confronted by four police officers for allegedly trying to buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill at a shop located in the 3700 Block of Chicago Avenue South. In a now-viral video that has been viewed millions of times, Floyd is seen getting dragged out of his car and made to lie on the ground, at which point an officer, later identified as Derek Chauvin, kneels on his neck.

The 46-year-old can be heard pleading to Chauvin that he couldn't breathe before eventually passing out and becoming unresponsive. He was declared dead at the Hennepin County Medical Center a short time later. The incident was widely condemned, with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stating it was "completely and utterly messed up" and that Chauvin "officer failed in the most basic human sense." He later called for prosecutors to arrest and charge all the officers involved in Floyd's death. "If most people, particularly people of color, had done what a police officer did late Monday, they'd already be behind bars," he tweeted. "That's why today I'm calling on Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman to charge the arresting officer in this case."

Following widespread protests across the country, which turned violent in Minneapolis and saw demonstrators burn down a police precinct, Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter on Friday, May 29. Ben Crump, the attorney representing Floyd's family, said they were relieved Chauvin was arrested but that he should be charged with first-degree murder."The family does not trust the Minneapolis police department or anyone affiliated with the Minneapolis police department," he said. "We understand they did the same thing to Eric Garner and we're not going to allow that to happen this time."

However, Ellison told CNN that they need a "very strong case" before announcing further charges. "Everybody believes that this is a violation of Mr Floyd," he said. "And I believe that everybody wants to see these charges filed as soon as they can be. But again, I do want to say we have seen cases that seem so clear go south." He conceded that "unfortunately, it is taking more time than any of us want" and that he sympathizes with everybody who is "demanding charges." While Chauvin has been arrested, and the three other officers involved in the incident -- J Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao -- have been fired, all have indicated that they will not be cooperating with the investigation. "Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman says the officers involved in #GeorgeFloyd death are not cooperating with law enforcement," Fox9 reporter Courtney Godfrey tweeted. "They are pleading the 5th." The Fifth Amendment prohibits defendants from self-incrimination and double jeopardy and mandates due process of law for anyone facing criminal charges.

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Cops involved in George Floyd's death refused to cooperate with investigation, pleading the 5th: Minnesota AG - MEAWW

A Southern Tenant Farmers Union meeting in Arkansas, 1937. (Archive Photos / Getty Images)

This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly. W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia, S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy required challenging and remaking the larger system of exploitative capitalism that had subjected black and white Southerners to centuries of injustice. With the Congress of Industrial Organizations executing its Operation Dixie to organize industrial workers in the South that year and with African American veterans back from the war embarking on their own militant and heroic struggle for human rights there, Du Boiss insistence that the South had become the center of a new battle for freedom was in no way far from the truth.Ad Policy Books in Review

Part of the reason for this was that the struggle for civil rights and racial equality in the South had long been linked to activity in the economic sphere, where millions of white and black Southerners worked as sharecroppers and factory employees and in various low-wage jobs. During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the region the nations No. 1 economic problem, and there had always been an undercurrent of Southern-based radicalism that sought wide-ranging changenot only civil and political rights but also economic and social ones.

To add to this, beginning in the 1930s, many of the leaders and organizers in the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow were members of the Communist Party or its fellow travelers. From Harlem in New York City to Birmingham, Ala., black and white Communists organized across racial and class lines throughout the Great Depression and World War II to fight fascism abroad and hunger and racism at home. By the time the Southern Negro Youth Congress was organized, many involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement had been active in earlier Communist and Communist-affiliated groups. Others who were radicalized by the trial of the Scottsboro Boys and the Angelo Herndon case were exposed to many radical economic ideas and felt a particular loyalty to the left, having witnessed in both trials the Communist Party backing lawyers to take up the cause of black civil and legal rights in the South.

So when Du Bois spoke before a crowd of young black activists in the mid-1940s, he was preaching to the choir, because an ever-growing number of radical Southerners already agreed with him that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too. As Du Bois told them, the first and greatestallies are the white working classes about you, which had also been exploited by wealthy capitalists interested in dividing the Souths working class.

Mary Stantons new book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 19301950, helps recover this history through the story of one of the partys most important sections: District 17, a regional unit of the national party that was headquartered in industrial Birmingham and sought to coordinate efforts to organize white and black Southerners in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. During the Depression, World War II, and the early postwar years, the group was at the forefront of the struggle throughout the Deep South against police brutality, lynchings, and anti-free-speech laws. In terms of the number of members, it often punched above its weight: James S. Allen, a Communist organizer who wrote the memoir Organizing in the Depression South, estimated that in 1931 the party had fewer than 500 members in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. By chronicling the partys successful efforts to establish a foothold in Alabama during the 1930s and 40s, Stanton shows us that Communist organizers adopted a variety of organizing tools and resourcesincluding the International Labor Defense (ILD), the American section of the Cominterns legal armin order to win black Americans their rights and freedom in court. Highlighting how these black and white Communists built a multiracial movement through a series of highly publicized trials, Stanton illuminates how Communists in Alabama and elsewhere in the United States used the law not only to bring international attention to the worst of Jim Crow segregation but also to build solidarity across race and class lines. By doing the hard work of pursuing a legal strategy closely tied to a media strategy of publicizing numerous social injustices, Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Based primarily in Northern cities, the Communist Party started to plan its organizing campaign in the South in the early 1930s, a new view of the South as a key area of activism that Harry Haywood, a prominent black Communist based in Chicago, promulgated in The Communist in his 1933 essay The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States. His 1948 book Negro Liberation insisted, among other things, that American radicals needed to turn their attention to the fight for black political and economic rights in the so-called Black Belt, the fertile land sweeping south from Virginia through the heart of the former Confederacy to Louisiana. There a nation within a nation stood, and Communists, Haywood argued, could join in its struggle for self-determinationand by doing so build a base for revolution.

Haywoods arguments made a profound impression on his fellow Communists, both black and white, in the North. He first came across this idea while living in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and seeing the autonomous republics within the USSR, which provided a model for what he desired for African Americans in the South. The Depression only sharpened this insight. Hoping to expand the partys membership and reach in the rest of the United States, Haywood saw an opportunity to do just that by organizing the South.Current Issue

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However, as the Communist organizers arrived in different Southern cities, they found that they had to make changes on the fly to the idea Haywood promoted. As Stanton tells us, many of the black sharecroppers, miners, and industrial workers they encountered did not want to opt out of the system but rather to opt into it: They wanted to participate in the nations prosperity, to claim constitutional guarantees, and to assume a rightful place in society. This discovery left a profound mark on early Communist organizers and shaped much of the work they did in the South and in the North as well. Instead of focusing on an all-out revolution against Jim Crows entrenched segregation, they sought to help black Americans win their economic, political, and legal rights. Rather than a violent overthrow of the system, they mostly attempted to use various means of protest to win major victories on behalf of social and political reform.

Nationally, the Communists accepted this Popular Front approach, seeking to pursue social justice in all of its manifestations, and the experience of the Alabama Communists played an important role in shaping this evolution in American Communist thinking and in helping the party, as its vanguard, test the applications of this new approach. The Alabama Communist Party, after all, made up a considerable part of District 17. The threats these activists and their allies faced were stark. Even at the height of its popularity during the Great Depression, it was risky being a member of the Communist Party anywhere in the country, and organizing for civil rights and economic reform in Alabama was an even more dangerous prospect. District 17 became ground zero for the new reformism that ran through the party. Communists there could become active in both civil rights and labor organizing; they could reach out to black and white Southerners alike, form trade unions, and provide them with legal defense. As a result, they were a constant target of harassment and beatings, so much so that Stanton compares District17 to a firehousein a perennial state of emergency, running on adrenalin.

Stanton begins Red, Black, White with the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial. In 1931, nine young African American men were accused by two white women of raping them while they rode on a train traveling through Tennessee and Alabama. The NAACP was initially reluctant to take the case, so the ILD rushed to the Scottsboro Boys defense. The case soon rocketed to international prominence, primarily because of the unrelenting efforts of local Communist activists and the ILDs skillful use of publicity. Eventually, the state gave posthumous pardons to several of the young menOzie Powell, Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, Andy Wright.

The achievements of the ILD helped the Communist Party build some support among African Americans across the country, and Stanton traces how Communist organizers in Birmingham and the rest of District 17 used it to fuel activist campaigns throughout the Deep South. Even with the ILDs organizing, however, the Birmingham organizers struggled to craft a party structure that was able to withstand the heat of the anti-communism and anti-black racism that pervaded Alabamas political system in the 1930s and 40s. The party organization that had been developed in the North proved important in supporting the partys efforts in the South. Faced with laws explicitly designed to crack down on radical organizing, the national party sent lawyers to defend the organizers and helped publicize their cases. But District17 often found that it had to innovate its own tactics: investigating the lynchings and other murders of African Americans in the state, organizing local sharecropper unions and a reading group, and enlisting sympathetic local lawyers.Related Article

Stanton also discusses District 17s attempts to investigate police brutality in cities like Memphis in the 1930s. The hostility that the Communist organizers faced was attributable to their radical stance on racial equality as well as to their attempts to organize Southern workers. They were operating in a one-party system that constantly monitored and suppressed all forms of radical organizing, and the ghosts of the past haunted their work. In 1919 in Elaine, Ark., radicals were victims of the Red Summer racial pogrom sparked by attempts to organize black sharecroppers.

The struggles of union workers in Gastonia, N.C., in 1929 and the collapse of the textile workers strike in 1934 likewise showed how hostile Southern authorities were to any labor organizing, and many Communists there were forced to try a variety of tactics untested in the North. Often stretched thin trying to help out wherever they could, they ended up having to live in a state of what Stanton calls mind-numbing fear, but they nonetheless persevered and helped thousands in the American South make their desires for freedom known across the world.

While offering us a close view of local organizing, Stanton never loses sight of the larger story of American communism. She also situates District 17s activism within a larger history of radical activism and protest in the Deep South that helped plant the seeds for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The members of District 17 and the people they served recognized that theirs was but a local phase of a much broader worldwide struggle against not just fascism but all forms of imperialist and racist domination. Du Bois was not alone in making the connections between local struggles against Jim Crow and international struggles against capitalism. Black Southerners defended Ethiopia after it was invaded by Italy in 1935 and journeyed to Spain to fight Francos forces in the Spanish Civil War. They all saw their fight as the same one, against the same enemy, on multiple fronts.

As Stanton shows near the end of the book, the forces of reaction in the South were aware of this larger struggle, too, even as their attempts to crush the Communists and drive back interracial organizing became more successful in the postwar years, when Northerners and Southerners alike targeted labor and socialist organizers across the country, essentially forcing the left underground. The Second Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s dealt some severe blows, but the Communist Party left a legacy of grassroots organizing and agitation that would become part of the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Other books have covered at least a portion of this terrain before. Robin D.G. Kelleys landmark Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression is the best-known work on the partys operations in Alabama in this period. Glenda Gilmores Defying Dixie, John Egertons Speak Now Against the Day, and Patricia Sullivans Days of Hope also note that the fight against Jim Crow did not begin with the Supreme Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Taken together, these books tell a rich story that is often neglected or minimized in the mainstream narratives of Southern history. By excavating the roots of civil rights activism in the South that reach back to the 1930s, they remind us that the struggle for political and civil rights there was almost always twinned with the struggle for economic and social rights.

The role that Communists played in the civil rights movement of the postwar years is often suppressed or glossed over, if mentioned at all. Red, Black, White prompts us to remember a different Southern past, and Stanton shows us the more practical and down-to-earth nature of Communist organizing in the South as well. The partys activists arrived in the region with an ideological view of class struggle but adapted their tactics and strategy after listening to people on the ground. Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will is the memorable phrase coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but it could just as easily have been uttered by Alabamas Communists, both those from the South and those who traveled there to help organize it. These Communists risked nearly everything, and they did so knowing full well that their ideals might never be realized in their lifetimes. But they nonetheless persisted. Whether trying to save someone from lynching or struggling to organize workers in a Birmingham steel plant, it was, for nearly all of them, a matter of life or death.

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The Lost History of Southern Communism - The Nation

In the run-up to Chinas 13th National Peoples Congress on May 22, the chairman of its Standing Committee, Li Zhanshu, said how important it was that the session was being held in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic. Li remarked the session was being held at a time when overseas Covid-19 epidemic situations remain grim and complex, while in China major strategic achievements have been made.

Such differentiation between China and the rest of the world is likely to become more prominent in Chinese Communist Party, commonly known as CCP, rhetoric as the nations success is attributed to its socialist political system. The English version of the Peoples Daily commented in its coverage of the National Peoples Congress that foreigners will be looking to Chinas socialist system for enlightenment and guidance as they emerge from the shadow of the pandemic.

The CCP is now proclaiming its success over Covid-19 as a victory for President Xi Jinpings brand of Marxism.

Early in the war against coronavirus, it was predicted that the CCP would be one of the most high-profile casualties. But rumours of the CCPs demise were premature. As China deployed an increasingly vast and sophisticated surveillance system, the pandemic has accelerated the partys authority and control, not caused it to crumble.

While many countries declared war on Covid-19, China stressed it was a Peoples War. Such an analogy recalls the rhetoric of Mao Zedong, who called for a Peoples War to liberate China from the Imperial Japanese in 1938.

By talking about the pandemic in the same language, Xi identified the magnitude of the threat posed by Covid-19. But he also signified that the war would be waged according to the spirit, ideology and beliefs of the CCP and in an effort infused with Chinese socialist characteristics. Victory in this war will be a vindication of Xis Marxist strategy.

As a researcher of the uses of contemporary Marxism in bolstering ideas of citizen obligation and state legitimacy, I am looking at how China channels revolutionary analogies. Seventy years after the founding of the Peoples Republic, Xi has been notable in his efforts to re-establish Marxism at the heart of Chinese politics.

One of the key rationales Xi gives for the strengthening of Marxism is that the ideology can restore Chinas social cohesion. This is required to address the ills of hedonism, extravagance and corruption which have infected China as an inevitable result of opening up to the West.

As China recovers, its success in containing the virus is being put down to the devotion and solidarity of the people. Such claims are not unfounded: a World Health Organization-China joint mission report particularly praised the Chinese peoples solidarity and collective action during the pandemic. Such praise for solidarity will doubtless vindicate Xis efforts in creating a more cohesive and collectively minded populace.

Xi consistently asserts that Chinese leadership is guided by Marxisms scientific truth. An ambiguous term, Xi often explains this approach as one that uses Marxist theory to identify the best way to solve practical challenges. As the CCP deploys a mix of advanced technology and traditional socialist organisational models to tackle Covid-19, this will doubtless exemplify such practical use of Marxism.

Successfully tackling the outbreak is vital for the CCPs domestic legitimacy. Since the early years of the Peoples Republic of China, the promise of eradicating disease and improving the health of all has been at the centre of communist propaganda. Such focus has created an inextricable link between health and Chinese politics. Given this link, the war against Covid-19 was of vital importance for the CCPs legitimacy. Nonetheless, the global nature of the pandemic means that the success China has will also be judged in relation to how other countries, especially Western liberal states, handle the crisis.

Chinese state media claimed Chinas low death rate relative to other hard-hit countries was due to the superiority of socialist Chinas institutional framework. Such assertions have been made in the context of an ideological war with the West, stressing the benefits of Chinese socialism in relation to the weaknesses of Western capitalism.

In the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily, this political message was explicit: Covid-19 should make the people of Hong Kong, who have long been under the influence of Western ideology, recognise the benefits of the alternative socialist system.

In Marxist philosophy, progress comes through conflict. Chinese officials have evoked such belief, quoting Friedrich Engels in particular to claim that Comrade Xis new era will emerge stronger from its struggle with Covid-19. The CCP is already in the process of drafting a book to be published in multiple languages showcasing the key role of the CCP and Chinas socialist system in defeating the virus.

Rather than causing communist China to crumble, the virus will likely serve as a catalyst in Xis bid to present his brand of Marxism as a challenge to the global capitalist system.

Ruairidh Brown, Academic Tutor and Year One Coordinator in International Studies, University of Nottingham.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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China is using its coronavirus wins to push Xis brand of communism on the international stage - Scroll.in

The lockdowns and death in China began long before the first case of COVID-19 was ever reported. Though Xinjiang province is nearly 2,000 miles northwest of Wuhan where COVID-19 was first found, its also home to another virus in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom. Officially an atheist country, China technically recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. But while China seemingly promotes freedom of religion, nothing could be further from the truth.

These faiths teachings look very different in China, which routinely takes draconian measures to ensure each faith bows not to their God but to Chinas government officials and their communist ideals. The most prominent example of persecution is in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic and religious minorities live, including Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic minority group. The CCP began a crackdown on the Uighurs after clashes between the Uighur ethnic minority and Chinese police in Xinjiangs capital Urumqi in 2009. Afterwards, police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting off all cell phone service. The Uighurs plight has only worsened in recent years.

In 2014, President Xi Jinping gave a number of private speeches to CCP officials on the dangers of the Uighurs, calling on the CCP to unleash the tools of dictatorship to eliminate radical Islam in Xinjiang. Xi and the CCP believed the Uighurs and Muslims were extremists who threatened the country, though many reports said CCP police were largely responsible for the clashes in Urumqi.

Xi likened Islamic extremism to a virus-like contagion. Addressing it, Xi said, would require a period of painful, interventionary treatment. Though the Uighurs had lived in this region since ancient times, their presence in China was now considered nothing more than a dangerous disease threatening the CCP and one which needed to be eradicated at all costs. Alarmingly, reports have surfaced of a genocide against the Uighurs. This should have human rights activists and the world very concerned.

Right now, nearly a million Uighurs sit in indoctrination camps, essentially concentration camps designed for brainwashing, forced labor and ridding the Uighurs of their religious differences. These concentration camps have the largest network since the Holocaust. Most days in these camps are spent listening to lectures against the Islamic religion, studying CCP propaganda and singing songs praising President Xi, wishing him a long life. Children are separated from their parents, who are sent to work in factories with no permission to quit unless approved by several government officials.

It doesnt take much for Uighurs to be sent to these camps, either. Reasons for detainment can be faith-based, like reciting Arabic prayers or simply based on physical appearance, like having long beards (a common characteristic for Islamic minorities) or refusing to smoke or drink alcohol. Residents in Xinjiang can see their Uighur neighbors one day, only to have them disappear the next, with no information of their whereabouts. Most are sent to the indoctrination camps or to forced labor factories, where they make materials for well-known companies like Apple and Nike. Other religions in China are also being persecuted by the CCP.

As Christianity grows in China, theyve also become targets. Reports detail crosses being burned in Christian churches, often replaced with the Chinese flag or photos of Xi. Christians are forced to renounce their faith. Churches are required to install facial-recognition cameras. If they refuse, the CCP quickly shuts them down. When bibles were pulled from online bookstores in China, Beijing released new guidelines encouraging churches to localize religion, practice the core values of socialism and actively explore religious thought according to China's national circumstances.

Other religions are also being victimized. In Tibet, over 1.2 million Buddhists have been killed since 1949. Nearly 6,000 monasteries and shrines have been destroyed. The State Department's 2018 report on international religious freedom describes the repression of Buddhists in Tibet as severe, with reports of forced disappearance, prolonged detention without trial and arrests based on individuals faith.

The list of violent persecution seems endless. One thing is clear: In China, differences in thought are not celebrated theyre eliminated -- and religions wanting to exist must celebrate communism at their core. When we discuss repression and authoritarianism in the world, we must look at religious minorities in China. They are victims of the ruthless communist ideology which leaves no room for freedom in any way, shape or form. Chinas government must answer for this systemic oppression and end it immediately.

This is why Congress intends to pass legislation imposing sanctions on any government including Chinas found persecuting Uighurs and other minorities. If we believe we must defend the truly defenseless, we must stand up for the Uighurs and religious minorities in China. They deserve freedom and the world demands it.

Congressman Michael WaltzMichael WaltzThe real virus to the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom 125 lawmakers urge Trump administration to support National Guard troops amid pandemic Trump campaign launches new fundraising program with House Republicans MORE represents Floridas 6th District in Congress and is a member of the China Task Force.

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