By African People’s Solidarity Committee Chairwoman Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel
Inspired by Che Guevara’s “Solidarity means sharing the same fate, whether in victory or death.”
Why were Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Jesse Nevel and I targeted by the FBI, raided by armed agents and police, indicted, tried and convicted of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government?
The “crime” laid out by the DOJ was our words, speech, and beliefs. We have been convicted of conspiracy “to defraud the U.S. government” with no criminal object of the supposed alleged crime. We were convicted of a thought crime and are facing up to five years in prison. Our sentencing is scheduled for December 16, 2024 in the Tampa Federal Courthouse.
Chairman Omali spent his entire adult life, since the 1960s speaking, writing, touring, organizing, and building programs and institutions by and for the African working class.
Jesse and I are members of the white solidarity organizations under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party; Jesse heads the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) and I chair the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC).
The Chairman has brought science and organization to the struggle for African Liberation. He has shown that black people are African people who were assaulted by Europeans who kidnapped and human trafficked them around the world for immense profit. It was this blood-stained profit that laid the foundation of the current wealth of the Western world and capitalism.
The Chairman has never called for assimilation or integration, anti-racism or black separatism. He shows that the only way African people– within or without Africa–can change their conditions is through political and economic power.
He believes that Africa is the homeland of every African on the planet and that the major, overarching contradiction facing every black person everywhere is colonialism, not racism, the ideas in white people’s heads.
Colonialism is “control by a government or power over a dependent people.” It occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population with violence and exploiting it, enforcing its own language, economy and cultural values upon the colonized.
The only antidote for colonialism is exercising the power in the hands of African people. As such, the Party’s Black Power Blueprint has created a community basketball court, a community garden, and murals and is building a workforce program and a Doula program It is an undeniable, provable historical fact that the U.S. was built on the stolen land of the Indigenous people and the stolen labor of African people.
America owes African people for centuries of stolen labor from chattel slavery to Jim Crow and convict leasing and today when the average gap between assets held by white people vs African people is $190,000 per family, according to the Pew Resource Center.
Chairman Omali walks in the footsteps of Marcus Garvey, who in the 1920s built the largest black organization in history. Garvey created a brilliant do-for-self organization with his 11 million members from around the world.
In the 1970s Chairman Omali was among the first to popularize the demand for reparations, responsible for making it a household word. The Chairman held the First Tribunal on Reparations to African People in New York in 1982.
Recognizing that colonizers live at the expense of the colonized, the Chairman created the APSC and the USM, putting the white movement for social justice and socialism under the leadership of the African Liberation Movement.
From APSC’s founding, we have been called on by the Party to go into the white community with the message of anti-colonial solidarity with African Liberation, reparations to African people and political and economic power in the hands of the African working class. We have struggled for white reparations to African people, holding annual walks against genocide, marches for reparations and solidarity conferences.
The U.S. government is falsely claiming that somehow beginning in 2014, Russia all of a sudden began telling the Chairman and APSC what to do. The government claims that the Chairman suddenly gave up his agency, as if African people can’t define and struggle against their oppressive conditions and white people can’t unite with the black-led struggle against colonial violence and for national liberation.
On Sept. 12 of this year we won a major victory when the jury acquitted the Uhuru 3 of the major charge of being “Russian agents.”
This is a mixed victory, however, as we have been convicted of a “thought crime”: “conspiring to commit an offense against the United States.”
Ade Griffin asserted to the jury in her closing arguments during the Uhuru 3 trial: Chairman Omali Yeshitela “is not for sale! He is a revolutionary.”
At the same time, the jury was confused and misled by the lies of the prosecutors leading the jurors to render an inconsistent verdict convicting us of a nonexistent “conspiracy.”
The U.S. government has used “conspiracy” laws historically to attack the African Liberation Movement, from the New York Panther 21 to the Uhuru 3. Because the bogus primary charge that the Uhuru 3 were taking orders from Russia was thoroughly debunked in court, the prosecutors used the “conspiracy” charge to criminalize the mere thought of struggling for African freedom.
The “Russian agents” charge used the law to cover the real political attack on the anti-colonial struggle by African people for self-determination, reparations and liberation.
The resulting threat to the First Amendment right to free speech and political association is serious for the African Liberation Movement ane for all organizations and individuals working for change across the political spectrum.
Only the movement of the people can stop the colonial government.
It is time to escalate the Hands Off Uhuru anti-colonial free speech counteroffensive, mobilizing the masses to stand with Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the Uhuru 3 and cause the judge to throw out this case before the scheduled sentencing on December 16.
Go to HandsOffUhuru.org. Donate to the committee; hold an event, get involved in protecting true free speech for all! Not one day in prison for Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hess or Jesse Nevel! Free the Uhuru 3. Hands off the Uhuru Movement. Hands off the African community. Fight for freedom of speech and thought! Fight for reparations to African people! Uhuru!
Penny Hess is Chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee and author of the book Overturning the Culture of Violence. She is also Editor of the White Solidarity with Black Power column that appears in The Burning Spear newspaper.
