Above photo: Comrade Zayi addresses attendees at the Eyes of the Rainbow screening The Burning Spear.
The Freedom Summer Project 2024: This Time til it’s Won!
On July 29, 2022 the U.S. government initiated violent military-style assaults on seven offices and homes of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement in two cities and states – St. Louis, Missouri and St. Petersburg, Florida.
Nine months later three members of the Uhuru Movement, African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela and Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel, two white leaders of the Party’s solidarity front, were indicted under charges of being Russian agents.
This is one way the colonial government is attempting to stifle any criticism of the U.S. for its ongoing mistreatment of African people within this country. It is also a way to muzzle our criticism of the bloody war the US/NATO is making against Russia in Ukraine. It is also an attempt to quell our participation in elections as a means to change our conditions.
Today’s struggle for African liberation is reaching back into the future to navigate our way through this turbulent and crisis-driven moment. We have seen these kinds of turbulent periods before. And we know how to fight and win.
This is a call for you to come to St. Petersburg, Florida today to participate in Freedom Summer. It is a summer of intense political organizing and mobilizing that takes its name and spirit from the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964.
The Mississippi Freedom Summer was held during a pre-cyberspace period when real organizers worked among real people providing organization and political education. It won ordinary oppressed and sometimes terrified Africans into organized mass resistance; it launched the political participation of the most downtrodden sector of our people. Freedom Summer 1964 challenged the status quo of this vicious anti-black colonial oppression carried out by colonizer citizens and the colonial state itself.
The St. Petersburg, Florida Freedom Summer of 2024 is taking place in the embers left burning from the revolutionary period of the 1960s that was eventually crushed with mass and targeted jailings, assassinations and grotesque African national oppression. The counterinsurgency against our movement included flooding the African colony with drugs and a drug economy that killed many and demoralized almost the entire African population.
As a consequence of the successful chemical warfare in the form of a drug economy, the heroic struggles of our people during the 1960s was now replaced in popular imagination by the false narrative of an entire domestically enslaved African population suddenly becoming pathologically depraved due to drug use and associated criminality from cradle to grave.
Suddenly oppressed and colonized African people became the oppressors that all white people, the government and colonial state should fear.
It was a period that would see the creation and deployment of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) police organizations as military instruments of domestic colonial oppression. They created designer laws especially manufactured to negate constitutional rights for African people, including free speech, association and assembly, and protection from double jeopardy and unreasonable search and seizure. It was a period of political repression resulting in a 500 percent increase in the U.S. prison population.
Today’s moment in history is characterized by a convergence of political and historical forces that represent an uneasy equilibrium for this parasitic social system. We will not allow a dreaded and oppressive past to block the emergence of a righteous future of black liberation and happiness.
The 2024 Freedom Summer project includes critical events and peoples’ mobilizations building up to the bogus September trial of Chairman Omali Yeshitela along with African People’s Solidarity Committee Chair Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair, Jesse Nevel, two white people organized under the leadership of African People’s Socialist Party.
Every day the Uhuru Movement is mobilizing the community and bringing forces into St. Petersburg from around the country for a Freedom Summer of full-out activity, including door-to-door organizing, political rallies and Sunday mass meetings and mass political education sessions. In the style of the 1960s Freedom Summer movement, we will also be organizing mass transportation to and from the Sept. 3rd trial and other direct community work that includes phone banking and streetcorner meetings.
With Freedom Summer we will do everything necessary to bring our people and others back into active political life in defense of our rights to organize and speak out for the freedom of speech to advocate and organize for our total liberation from colonialism, based on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Like SNCC during the Freedom Summer in 1964 we will fight for the right to participate in elections to advance our legitimate struggle.
Sixty years ago, in 1964, voting and black repression were among the issues that motivated hundreds of young people, many of whom were white, to venture into Mississippi to join with the movement to organize with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and others to publicize the oppression of our people and to win democratic rights, including the right to vote.
Three people, two of whom – Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — were white men, along with James Chaney were brutally slaughtered by law enforcement-related Klansmen.
Freedom Summer continues to live on today because white colonial repression and our resistance to colonial repression continues to live on.
Omali Yeshitela, the leader of the Uhuru Movement, currently under indictment and facing trial on September 3rd in Tampa, Florida, is a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that played the major role in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
SNCC was the bridge advancing the mass movement of our people beyond anti-racism Civil Rights to the anti-colonial Black Power demand that has brought us to this place today.
Evidence that the past resides in the present is the fact that sixty years later the struggle for black freedom in the U.S. continues to aggravate the political terrain and expose the putrid and oppressive colonial underbelly of a system that clothes itself with democratic affectations.
In the current period the ubiquitous police murders of African men and women have continued to spark major urban uprisings in Baltimore, Minneapolis, Ferguson, Missouri, and other places.
Police terror is only one of the reasons that despite the fact that Africans only constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population according to census data, we represent at least 37 percent of the people in U.S. jails or prisons, 30 percent of the people on probation or parole and 48 percent of the people serving life sentences in U.S. prisons.
We charge genocide today just as Africans did in 1951 with a petition to the UN just three years after the Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN, and just as the African People’s Socialist Party did at the First Tribunal on Reparations for African People in 1982 where the UN Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide was used to indict the colonial government for its treatment of Africans colonized within the U.S.
This glaring number of Africans being killed or kept in prison is one example of the U.S. government’s genocidal treatment of African people, as defined in the UN Genocide Convention: “killing members of the group; …causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group…imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” etc.
The work of the Mississippi Freedom Summer contributed to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. It was also a precursor of the Black Power Movement that exploded to public attention in Mississippi in 1966.
Freedom Summer 2024 includes work throughout the U.S. and the international community, but especially in St. Petersburg, Florida to educate people about the Uhuru 3 case. We will win as many supporters as possible to the trial in Tampa, Florida beginning September 3rd. All of this work is being done under the theme: “All out for the trial of the Uhuru 3.”
The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations (BIBC), which opposed the colonial attack on our movement from the very beginning, has brought its August 10-11 Annual National Conference to St. Petersburg, Florida, under the umbrella of Freedom Summer.
The Coalition’s slogan for its National Conference and the attendant work to mobilize its members, base and the general African population is: “Advancing the Right to Anti-Colonial Free Speech! Not One Step Backwards! Forward to September 3rd!”
The 2024 Freedom Summer in St. Petersburg, Florida will feature volunteers working to promote and support the City Council candidacy of Eritha “Akile” Cainion. Akile’s 2017 and 2019 campaign opposed de-population of African communities, commonly known as “gentrification” and called for reparations to African people for land stolen and an entire African community razed to build a baseball stadium. The indictment of the Uhuru 3 included a criminalization of our participation in these city elections that put reparations on the ballot for the first time in history.
The election primary will occur on August 20. The election campaign is a continuation of our fight to force the U.S. to live up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Akile’s candidacy is a demand and referendum on universal suffrage within the U.S. that allows for independent participation in the democratic process that so many Africans died to make possible.
Freedom Summer also includes the work to build a massive, thousands-strong August 31 mobilization in St. Petersburg, Florida. It is a mobilization that will bring people and organizations representative of the entire spectrum of progressive and anti-colonial politics together under the slogan: “Not One Step Backwards,” a declaration of general recognition that the attack on the African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement is a poorly disguised effort of pushing back every right of the people that was won through black struggle against the colonial system in the 1950s and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
All the work of the Summer Project revolves around the need to get people to the September 3rd trial and political work in St. Petersburg, Florida and Tampa Bay where the trial is occurring. Participants will not only support the case up to the time of the trial, but be engaged in on-the-ground work, rallies and forums throughout the duration of the trial, which has been scheduled for four weeks.
Every Sunday for the duration of the trial there will be mass community meetings used to mobilize, educate and organize the people to active participation for self-liberation.
Freedom Summer forums will include political education that will reveal the colonial basis of the brutal white nationalist massacre currently happening in Palestine and how the system currently slaughtering Palestinians is rooted in the colonial mode of production given birth by the more than 600-year long war against Africa that we still experience.
The forums will also address the brutal exploitation and oppression of our comrades in the anti-colonial struggle, including here inside U.S. borders – the Mexican and other peoples who are indigenous to this land.
We will also discuss the struggle of African people in Africa that is so central to U.S. foreign policy. Africa’s centrality is rooted in the fact that the U.S. was founded and built on the twin pillars of stolen African people and stolen land from the indigenous people. In fact, the stolen labor that built the U.S. economy is the basis of Africa and African people’s poverty and oppression today.
This is a crucial factor that is responsible for the fact that African generals from the heads of the Department of Defense, Africa Command and Joint Chiefs of Staff join with Kamala Harris as the neocolonial public face of U.S. colonial exploitation and oppression of Africa, Africans, and the colonized peoples of the world.
Here is our work and why each of you must heed this call to use this attack on our people and our movement for liberation as a wakeup message that beckons us to victory, to completion of the Black Revolution of the Sixties unleashed by the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
The Uhuru 3 have an extraordinary team of lawyers that is quite capable of defeating the colonizers in court based on their own law. But this is a political case where the state uses the law as cover for lawlessness by the colonizers.
In order to win, the Uhuru 3 lawyers must be armed with the obvious political support of masses of Africans and others whose participation exposes to the state that we know who the real criminals are. We must put the state in a position that every effort made to railroad the Uhuru 3 by targeting constitutionally protected speech and actions exposes the rot of the system and deepens the crisis that has already driven it to frenzy.
More info on the case of the Uhuru 3 available at http://www.handsoffuhuru.org
Victory is Ours! Hesitation is Betrayal!
Forward to August 31st! Forward to September 3rd!
Fight back with Akile! To the streets and homes of the people. Organize and win!