On December 8, 2017, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) launched a dynamic campaign to raise $25,000 in the first phase of a $300,000 effort to fund the Black Power Blueprint, a revolutionary program of economic and political power led by and for the African working class in St. Louis.
Members of the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) and the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM), the white organizations of the Party, are leading the Black Power Blueprint Reparations Campaign, specifically calling on white people to contribute resources as a stand for reparations to African people.
More than $4,000 was raised on the first day of the campaign through three electrifying online events featuring APSP’s Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Party Secretary General Gazi Kodzo, International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement President Kalambayi Andenet and St. Louis APSP member Ticharwa Masimba.
The fund drive will continue through February 2018 and everyone is urged to contribute all you can at www.youcaring.com/blackpowerblueprint!
Overturning the “two Americas”—no one must live at expense of others
The Black Power Blueprint is situated on the north side of St. Louis’ infamous “Delmar Divide,” where Delmar Avenue separates a luxurious white neighborhood from the deeply impoverished African community.
The Blueprint is a dynamic project involving African workers and Black Star Industries; the economic front of the African People’s Socialist Party, headed up by the energetic and brilliant Ona Zene’ Yeshitela, the Deputy Chair of the Party.
In partnership with the nonprofit African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF) Black Power Blueprint purchases city-owned and other abandoned buildings and renovates or demolishes them to be used for black community projects such as the Uhuru House center at 4101 West Florissant Avenue.
Currently, the Uhuru House is undergoing major renovations to make the hundred-year-old building that had been abandoned for 11 years into a beautiful, state-of-the-art center for events, receptions, birthdays and anniversaries.
The Uhuru House will also serve as the Midwest headquarters of the African People’s Socialist Party and as the office of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement.
Crews of African bricklayers, roofers, plumbers and sheet rockers, along with scores of volunteers are working to transform the building.
On the first floor of the Uhuru House will be Akwaaba Hall, complete with spotlights, natural oak flooring, exposed brick walls and a stage—perfect for community events of all kinds.
Across the street, two abandoned buildings will be demolished to make room for a community garden and the One Africa! One Nation! Marketplace which will be a venue for African vendors to build their businesses and engage in community commerce.
At 3723 Goodfellow Avenue, the Black Power Blueprint has purchased an enormous visible building that will undergo renovations to become the home of the Party’s Uhuru Foods and Pies; a Black Star institution that has been in existence in Oakland, CA for more than 35 years.
The building will house a fully-equipped bakery, kitchen and café as well as the African Independence Workforce Program that will hire African men and women escaping capture from the colonial prison system.
Black Power Blueprint also bought several single and multi-family houses to begin to address the urgent need for African community housing.
Black Power Blueprint means African workers’ power
Deputy Chair Ona Zene’ is making reality of the vision of Chairman Omali Yeshitela who wrote, “[o]ur economic institutions speak to the possibility of Africans to achieve economic self-reliance, to be in charge of our own affairs.”
Unlike any other movement in the world today, the Black Power Blueprint is building people’s power, enabling the African working class to begin to control their own lives, govern their own communities and feed, clothe and house their own people.
Black Power Blueprint actually contends with this parasitic and dehumanizing capitalist social system built and maintained on enslavement, genocide, colonialism and terror of African and oppressed peoples.
It is a revolutionary process that is part of the Party’s struggle for the total liberation and unification of Africa and all African people under a genuinely socialist society, ending forever the system of oppressors and the oppressed and colonizers and the colonized.
Missouri was a state where slavery was legal, and on the eve of the Civil War, 10 percent of the state’s population was enslaved African people.
In the 1800s, the Jesuit priests at St. Louis University owned 24 African human beings.
Missouri is where Judge Taney ruled in the Dred Scott decision that African people had no rights and were bound to respect white people
In the 1950s, St. Louis had a population of 850,000, but during the black revolutionary period of the 1960s, white people fled the city for the suburbs in droves.
By the end of the 60s, there were only 250,000 mostly impoverished African people left in the city’s devastated neighborhoods.
It was in Ferguson, one of the city’s suburbs, where police murdered Mike Brown on August 9, 2014 and left him to lie in his own blood for four hours in the summer sun.
African workers confronted this colonial violence with fierce resistance.
Today, St. Louis is doing everything possible to gentrify the African community, enticing young and prosperous white people to buy up property, forcing out the historic African community.
The Black Power Blueprint is the only program capable of pushing back the wave of gentrification and taking back the African community!
It’s in our interest to pay reparations!
It is a matter of historical fact that all white people sit on the pedestal of the oppression of African people benefitting from an economic system built on slavery, genocide, colonialism and theft of resources.
Every dream and aspiration that we have comes at the expense of African and colonized people.
As white working people, we not only climbed up the ladder of success on the backs of Africans, we also participated in lynching, burning, raping and slaughtering African men, women and children.
We owe reparations to African people.
This is how we end our self-imposed isolation from the majority of the people on the planet and participate in building a future of peace and shared prosperity.
This is how we join the rest of the world for the first time and break our unity with our own vicious, violent, brutal and increasingly desperate ruling class, the enemy of humanity.
There is much more work to be done, and Black Star industry is funded only by the people.
Your reparations will contribute to painting, heating and air conditioning, new windows, plumbing as well as the demolition of the adjacent buildings.
Go to www.youcaring.com/blackpowerblueprint today and return the stolen loot to the African Revolution.
Unity through Reparations!
