The People’s War Campaign Against ’Colonialvirus’ COVID-19

After George Floyd was brutally murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25 the African working class erupted in a profound, sustained resistance. That resistance has opened up the deepest questions about this society we live in and the origins of capitalism and white power itself.

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcription of a special episode of the Omali Taught Me Sunday Study, the first in a series discussing the unity of African and Mexican people in the struggle against the colonial state.

Each August, growing numbers of Africans around the world celebrate the birth of Marcus Mosiah Garvey who was born on August 17, 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Saint Ann, Jamaica.

On July 8, 2020, actress, singer and author Naya Rivera drowned in California’s Lake Piru after saving her four-year-old son. Rivera, who identified herself as “one-quarter [African], one-quarter German, and one-half Puerto Rican,” was best known for her role of Santana Lopez on the popular musical TV series “Glee.” 

On May 28, 2020, the first known organized demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd in the city of St. Petersburg, Florida was led by the African People’s Socialist Party’s (APSP) Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai. The demonstration took place right outside the St. Petersburg Police Department (SPPD) with around 30 demonstrators. The Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM) also mobilized forces in solidarity for the event.

In 1893, Ida B. Wells exposed the links between the white nationalist mobs and the police in “Southern Horror: Lynch Law In All Its Phases.” Wells famously wrote, “Those who commit the murders write the reports.”

If the coronavirus pandemic underscores anything, it is the absolute necessity for African people to unite in our historic mission to once again become a self determining, self-governing people.

The following presentation was made by Chairman Omali Yeshitela at a press conference held on June 15, 2020 by the Uhuru Movement in response to the St. Petersburg city council’s proposal to hang a plaque on the blank wall in city hall to replace an offensive anti-African, white nationalist mural that the Chairman tore down during a demonstration in 1966.

The intensity of the spontaneous African resistance across the U.S. in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis impacted more than U.S. society. The whole world has enthusiastically expressed solidarity with Africans in the U.S. against police oppression.