From May 26-27, the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) sponsors African Liberation Day (ALD) activities in Washington, D.C.
In addition to ALD in the U.S., the APSP is also sponsoring ALD activities in Paris, France, which will bring together Africans from Belgium, Britain, Sweden, Spain and other locations throughout Europe.
That event is scheduled for Saturday, June 2.
African Liberation Day 2012 marks 40th anniversary of three milestones in African liberation struggle
Firstly, 2012 marks the 40th Anniversary since the death of African patriot Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah.
Born a colonial subject in what was then the Gold Coast in 1909, Nkrumah, through his political actions and writings, became the lightning rod for a united and socialist Africa.
Nkrumah rose to become the first president of a flag independent Ghana in 1958, and would later be overthrown by the same neocolonial forces about whom he had written.
He died while living in exile in Guinea on April 27, 1972.
Nkrumah was the founder of African Liberation Day and the Organization of African Unity.
One of his major works, Africa Must Unite, laid the scientific basis for a united socialist Africa.
Another of his works, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, defines exactly the political norms we see on the African continent and worldwide today–from Barack Hussein Obama in the U.S., to Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Jacob Zuma in Occupied Azania (South Africa).
They all represent neocolonialism–white power in black face.
2012 also marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the African People’s Socialist Party and marks the 40th anniversary of African Liberation Day activities in the U.S.
The history of ALD in the U.S. and that of the APSP run parallel
The APSP has never strayed from the initial goals Nkrumah set for African revolutionaries everywhere.
We believe that “the total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African socialist government must be the primary objective of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world.
“It is an objective which, when achieved, will bring about the fulfillment of aspirations of Africans and people of African descent everywhere.
“It will at the same time advance the triumph of the international socialist revolution, and the onward progress toward communism, under which every society is ordered on the principle of—from each according to his (her) ability, to each according to his (her) needs.”
APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela—known then as Joe Waller— served on the first African Liberation Day National Coordinating Committee in 1972. This Coordinating Committee would later turn into the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC).
Black petty bourgeois intellectuals succumb to opportunism
Black petty bourgeois intellectuals essentially formed the ALSC. Their class interests are laid bare for all to see in the present day.
Influential organizational figures such as Dawolu Gene Locke, who later became plain old Gene Locke, as City Attorney in Houston, defended the police department from the colonized African public’s claims of police brutality.
He lost a mayoral election bid in 2011 to present Houston mayor Annise Parker, who ran as an openly gay candidate, taking much of the black vote from Locke who refused to talk about Africans during the election and even apologized for his former activist days.
They made him take back his statement: “we gonna dehonkyfy the University of Houston.”
Then there was Nelson Johnson, who, as a flaming communist in the Revolutionary Communist Party, witnessed the Klan gun down his wife during an anti-Klan street demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina. Johnson’s group had dared the Klan.
Johnson is now a Baptist preacher in Greensboro who, following the leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu in Occupied Azania, organized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission concerning the events where five members of his organization were murdered along with his wife Sandi Smith by gun-wielding Klansmen.
Two other prominent leaders of ALSC were Abdul Alkalimat (Gerald McWorter) and Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller).
Both of these former “revolutionaries” are now PhD professors at prestigious white universities in Chicago and Milwaukee respectively.
Fuller seems to be the black darling of moneyed Milwaukee.
The Revolution for them was only a fleeting illusion.
With few exceptions, they parallel the neocolonialist leadership of the Organization of African Unity that Nkrumah had to settle for as they fought against a United States of Africa.
And of course there was Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokley Carmichael). He was not a member of the initial National African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee, but his group, the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) began to organize ALD activities in Washington, D.C. in the latter half of the 1970s.
The AAPRP considered organizing all year long for an ALD rally in Washington, D.C. to be the highest form of revolutionary activity that could possibly be achieved in the U.S.
APSP organized ALD events rooted in people’s struggles
In 1977, our Party was in the midst of organizing an ALD demonstration in the Klan infested countryside of south Georgia as part of the fight to Free Dessie Woods and Smash Colonial Violence.
Our Party was told in a meeting with Willie Mukassa Ricks—to paraphrase— to drop whatever you are doing and organize for the ALD activities of the AAPRP in DC.
Of course, building the AAPRP was not on our agenda.
Our multi-faceted program included winning the people back to the Black Revolution and defending the people who had become targets of vicious counter intelligence and counterinsurgency military operations of the U.S. government and white power organizations.
The APSP left a paper trail on its tactics and strategies for black liberation in a pamphlet presented early in 1977 at a conference in Amherst, Massachusetts.
In addition, the Party built the 1977 ALD in Hawkinsville, Georgia, the second site of the Dessie Woods trial (after the government moved it from Atlanta to Alamo, Hawkinsville, Georgia).
The Hawkinsville demonstration was a build up to the big September 4, 1977 event, “Free Dessie and All Political Prisoners! Smash Colonial Violence.”
African Liberation Day should build the revolutionary party
African Liberation Day activities for the African People’s Socialist Party was designed to build a revolutionary party of cadres, tested and steeled in actual battle against the State and in defense of our courageous, but brutalized people, the African working class.
Students in the Party also understood this task.
This was an APSP-led national mobilization which brought pro-independence organizations together for the first time under the banner of revolutionary politics since the military defeat of the Black Revolution of the ‘60s.
For 40 years, the African Liberation Day activities of the African People’s Socialist Party have been designed to defend the people, to solve problems of the revolution and advance the overall struggle for black liberation and socialism.
1986 African Liberation Day takes on struggles in Philadelphia
Not the least of which were the 1986 African Liberation Day activities on the front page of
The Burning Spear newspaper with the headline, “Reinforcements are on the way!” for battered and isolated Africans in Philadelphia.
The black-led government there had dropped a bomb on the residence of the MOVE family, Africa, a year earlier and in the process murdered 13 of them, including women, children and men, and burned down an entire neighborhood.
This was the practice of black revolutionaries: coming to the aid of our people wherever we are on the planet.
Neither imperialist imposed borders nor nonsensical ideological gibberish were allowed to stand in the way of revolutionary African Internationalism blazing the correct path to African liberation.
We had to go into Philadelphia because the so-called black left
”revolutionaries” there had either joined the neocolonialist camp of the newly elected black mayor Wilson W. Goode, or they had packed up their bags and headed to the “black belt south” to convert Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee into the New African Nation.
The APSP is still in Philly today building revolutionary programs that will destroy colonialism and neocolonialism forever.
The African People’s Socialist Party organizes annual African Liberation Day activities in Washington, D.C.
Unlike the AAPRP, we invite the entire pro-independence black movement. Not only to build the APSP, but as stated in Tactics and Strategy, to establish the leadership of the pro-independence movement which for so long has been in the hands of the integrationists, so-called white left communists and the white power democratic party, now led by Barack Hussein Obama.
Indeed, this 40th commemoration of African Liberation Day in the U.S.; the 40th anniversary of the death of our leader Kwame Nkrumah and the 40th anniversary of the founding of the African People’s Socialist Party deserve the recognition we are properly giving them.
Come join this great movement for African redemption and freedom in Washington, DC. and in Paris, France.
FORWARD TO D.C.!
FORWARD TO PARIS!
LONG LIVE NKRUMAH!
LONG LIVE AFRICAN INTERNATIONALISM!
BUILD THE AFRICAN SOCIALIST INTERNATIONAL!