The work of the New York based December 12th Movement around the issue of reparations through the organizations of the United Nations and elsewhere throughout the world is the driving force for a major initiative to advance the struggle for reparations to African people for the crimes committed against us by the leading European colonial powers of the world, including the U.S.
The December 12th Movement is calling on the peoples of the world, especially Africans, to mark the 25th anniversary of the August 2001 Declaration and Plan of Action agreed on by the majority of the peoples of the world at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa.
Not surprisingly, hostile disagreement came from the white nationalist illegitimate settler states of Israel and the US who refused to participate in this incredible conference that highlighted the profound role of African enslavement and forced dispersal around the world in shaping the political and economic contours that continue to roil the world.
On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Durban-inspired historic African Union resolution presented by Ghana, declaring the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and racialized chattel slavery to be “the gravest crime against humanity.” The measure passed with 123 votes in favor, 3 against (the United States, Israel and Argentina), and 52 abstentions.
The African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement under our leadership have enthusiastically united with the December 12th Movement initiative. It is an initiative that is consistent with the ground-breaking reparations related work that our Party launched in the mid 1970s, resulting in the 1982 World Tribunal on Reparations for African People in the U.S held in Brooklyn, New York and annually in various other cities throughout the U.S. for the next 11 years or more, and continuing up to now.
In 1982 our Party’s World Tribunal marked the first time in history that the value of stolen labor of African people within the U.S. was actually quantified, through a transparent scientific process of calculation that concluded a reparations debt owed to African people of $4.1 trillion for labor alone.
It was a groundbreaking process that resulted in an attack on our Party and Movement by the U.S. government some 40 years later in 2022 when the fissures within a colonial mode of production provided an existential crisis as colonized peoples everywhere–from Afghanistan and Palestine to Venezuela and St. Louis, Missouri–intensified our common struggle against colonialism as masses of our people were brought into conscious organized unity with our movement for self-determination, the highest expression of democracy for colonized people.
The August 29, 2026 commemoration called for by the December 12th organization calls on all African organizations and enemies of the existing social system initiated by Portugal 600 years ago with the attack on Africa that began the trans-Atlantic system of selling our people and the future of our children, to hold up and build on the determination of this United Nations Durban conference that declared African enslavement and the trans-Atlantic slave trade are crimes against humanity for which there is no statute of limitations. Criminals can still be prosecuted under international law!
Karl Marx, the revolutionary philosopher and major contributor to the science of political economy, declared that turning Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, was one of the factors that constituted in political economy the equivalence of original sin in theology. This, along with the internment of the Indigenous people of the “Americas” in mines to bring up gold and silver for our colonizers and the brutal, genocidal conquest and looting of “East India,” are the factors that created a world economy for the first time in history, and what we now know as the colonial mode of production upon which everything else relies for its existence.
The African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement implore every organization to join in the commemorative initiative to hold city or regional rallies to tell the world we have not forgotten the Durban Declaration and Plan of Action and that our demand for reparations is firmer now than ever.
Many people, especially leaders of the ruling Democratic Party, are attempting to paint the current attacks on exposure of the history of our oppression as something that began with the present US colonial administration under Donald John Trump, as though it is an anomaly. The US president in August 2001 was also a Republican, characterized as a “moderate” colonizer. However, both colonial ruling parties have been authors and executors of our oppression since Africans were forcibly brought into this relationship with what is now called “America” at gunpoint.
The attempt by the current US regime to cover up the crimes against our people is not original or peculiar to the Trump administration as some apologists of U.S. colonialism would have us believe.
The July 29, 2022 military-style raid by U.S. federal agents on the homes of my wife, Ona Zene Yeshitela and myself, along with the homes of Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel in St. Louis that occurred simultaneously with the pre-dawn raids on the home of Akile Anai in St.Petersburg, Florida, were violent attempts by the Democratic Party administration of Joseph Robinette Biden and Kamala Harris to stop the African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement from criticizing and exposing the historical oppression of African people in the U.S. and globally by the U.S. government.
The desperate and frantic efforts to silence us with federal indictments, arrests and criminal trials that threatened 15-year prison sentences and half-million dollar fines, speak eloquently to the fear our freedom struggle represents for the stability of this U.S.-led global system of colonial conquest, parasitism and despair.
Unable to refute our charges of U.S. genocide against African people colonized domestically in the U.S., the U.S. colonial government attempted to dismiss all evidence of our oppressive conditions of existence by declaring all claims by black people of mistreatment of our people in the U.S. were manufactured by the Russian government for whom we were unregistered agents.
A jury found me, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel not guilty of being unregistered agents, the charge that carried a potential 10-year prison sentence upon conviction, but guilty of conspiring to not register as a foreign Russian agent! The flimsiness of the case is further exposed by the fact that the U.S. decided not to indict or bring Akile Anai, who was one of the initial 4 “unindicted co-conspirators, to trial at all.
On November 13, 1982, 19 years prior to the UN Durban World Conference Against Racism, our Brooklyn World Tribunal on Reparations for African People in the U.S. included the following testimony anticipating what would be the conclusions reached in Durban in 2001:
“If we are to charge the United States government with crimes against our people which have become traditional over nearly 400 years, we must begin with the origin of the problem, and there is no way we can possibly do this without showing the connection between the attack on Africa, the initiation of the slave trade, and their fundamental, decisive role in the development of the capitalist system and the loss of freedom for black people throughout the world.
The looting and pillage of Africa by Europe gave birth to the world capitalist system, and the trade in African flesh gave birth to the world economy which even now defines the conditions of existence for most peoples of the world. Karl Marx, historian, economist and philosopher of the 19th century, made these telling remarks concerning the development of European and U.S. capitalism:
‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation, the necessary conditions for capitalist production.
“Marx also noted: ‘Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.’
“Finally, we have Marx making this statement: ‘Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.’
“Sisters and Brothers; Africans and Peoples of the World: These proceedings on today and tomorrow constitute the World Tribunal on Reparations for Black People in the United States. Such being the case, it is absolutely essential that we reveal the basis of our claim for reparations. Consequently, I must say a bit more about the origin of our claim, such origin being tied to the European invasion of Africa and the world trade in African bodies. It was this invasion and trade which got us here in the U.S. and began the struggle we are involved in now—in Miami, Florida; Brooklyn, New York; Norfolk, Virginia; Oakland, California; Birmingham, Alabama, and throughout the U.S. It was this invasion and trade which are the source of U.S. and European wealth and the poverty and oppression of African people throughout the world.”
