Geography

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—Residents are soon to fill their ballots and cast their votes for the local elections. For the past few weeks, candidates running for City Council of their respective districts and the mayoral position have been engaged in debates and forums to present their platforms to the public and state why they should be elected.

On Monday, July 17, 2017, candidates running for District City Council met at City Hall to do the same. The candidates include James Scott, Gina Driscoll, James Jackson, Robert Blackmon, Corey Givens, Maria Scruggs, Justin Bean and 20-year old Eritha “Akilé” Cainion.

The forum was sponsored by the League of Women’s Voters and was hosted by Stephanie Owens. It lasted a little over one hour.

It was apparent, early on, that the only candidate in this race with true support from the masses is Eritha “Akilé” Cainion—whose platform is appropriately titled “Radical Times, Radical Solutions.” Her supporters, referred to as the “Akilé Squad,” were about two thirds of the audience.

ZAKYNTHOS, GR.—A 22-year-old African man, Bakari Henderson, was beaten to death outside of a bar in Laganas, Greece on July 7, 2017.

Various bourgeois U.S. media outlets have reported Bakari’s death as a “Brawl that killed American” or “Death of U.S. tourist in Greece”; but Bakari Henderson was killed because he was an African.

It was July 10, 2017, a rainy night in Florida’s fourth largest city, St. Petersburg.

The Hilton hotel was the battleground for for two political debates, one featuring the District 6 Seat and one for the Mayor. This all may sound like the backdrop to a typical evening of political banter, but this evening was anything but normal.

While Coastal Living recently ranked St. Petersburg as one of the best 20 places to live calling it a cosmopolitan city that “strikes a balance between historic, small-scale neighborhoods and big-city pleasures.”

There’s just one problem… this cosmopolitan city does not care about the black culture and they aren’t very “worldly” towards the black community. The building of Tropicana Field where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play baseball displaced a thriving African Gas Plant District, which has confined the black community to south part of the city which has no grocery stores for low income or working class African people to go for food. But unfettered, dog eat dog capitalism wants more.

A building spree of $500,000 to $600,000 luxury condominiums are being put up to put out the black community. So sorry Coastal Living your balance of small-scaled neighborhoods and big city pleasures is full of shit and is for a white audience only.

And now the Black Community has been backed into a corner and they are coming out swinging, and full-on revolting. This movement is being led by the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement which is running candidates in the District 6 (Eritha “Akilé” Cainion) and Mayoral Race (Jesse Nevel).

The violence that erupted in opposition to this The Group of Twenty (G20) forum which took place on Friday, July 7th and Saturday July 8th 7 in Hamburg, Germany made headlines in most national news broadcasted around the world. 

"Cars and barricades ablaze, shops plundered, water cannons in constant operation, injuries, devastated city quarters, heavily-armed special police units: The images of the violence in Hamburg have circled the globe. And they stood in stark contrast to those of the 20 heads of state and government who, at the same time, were listening to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in Hamburg's chic new Elbphilharmonie concert hall. Classical music inside, clashes outside." (Spiegel.de) July 8, 2017. 

The Black Community Control of Police (BCCP) working group of the Black is Back Coalition (BIBC) organized a march and rally for Black Community Control of the Police in Philadelphia, PA on Saturday, June 24th.

The mobilization was entitled “Pigs in Our Hood Aint No Good—March on Ridge Ave!”

The rally was held at the community lot on 24th St and Cecil B Moore Ave deep within the oppressed and exploited North Philadelphia section of the city.

This lot was recently liberated by the Coalition, as we took initiative to clean up the trash from the grounds and decorate the wall with the red, black and green flag.

Several other organizations and collectives joined the BIBC, including the Philadelphia REAL Justice, RBG Fridays, Philly Socialists and others, some of whom made solidarity statements during the rally and other points of the mobilization.

On Monday, July 10th the voice of the black working class shattered the stifling “decorum” set by the St. Petersburg, FL League of Women Voters and the Downtown Neighborhood Association.

The African People’s Socialist Party – Occupied Azania is happy to announce that the very first African Liberation Day (ALD) in Occupied Azania (South Africa) and possibly the entire African continent was successfully held!

We held our historic ALD celebration on the 27th of May, 2017. The events leading up to it saw us struggling within our Movement to get organizers to assist in work like agitation and propaganda and logistics as well as meeting new forces that held the fort even though they had just learned about the Uhuru Movement. Although these were contradictions (both negative and positive), we succeeded in our objective.

We held the celebration at Kagiso in Gauteng Province on Saturday from 8 AM to 3:30 PM. African people came from Johannesburg and Kagiso itself, Fochville and the Vaal. The African People’s Socialist Party had been preparing this event for three months and was able to put up posters, social media as well as spread the word tactically wherever its members were.

This past June and July, cities around the world held ‘Pride’ parades; celebrations of resistance to the restrictive sexual norms of European culture. To their supporters, the parades were living monuments to a righteous struggle for inclusion in a predominantly heterosexual society.

For colonized workers, however, including same-gender-loving (SGL) and gender non-conforming (GNC) colonized people, this brand of inclusion into the status quo is an assault on their lives and their communities.

The primary day-in day-out struggle for colonized workers, is not for ‘inclusion’ in parasitic capitalism. For them, true liberation and self-determination means seizing State power and overturning the very system of capitalism built and sustained entirely by their oppression.

A fire broke out in the Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey building located in West London on the early morning of Tuesday June 14, 2017 at about 1am.

The fire spread extremely quickly, engulfing the entire building in a matter of 15 minutes and condemning its inhabitants to a certain death.

The infamous building, demonized by both the government and the media, was mainly inhabited by poor and working class people from colonized places in Africa, Syria, the Caribbean, South Asia and elsewhere, along with poor white workers.

We united with all the demands from victims of this colonial mayhem, such as to be rehoused in the same borough.

We united to charge the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management organization KCMO, a subcontractor company that managed the Grenfell Tower on behalf of the Kensington and Chelsea local council–for murders!