Uhuru Movement

Throughout the years, The Burning Spear newspaper has played a key role in expressing the unity of the Party’s theory and practice.

After the influential newspapers of the Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam had been effectively neutralized, The Burning Spear continued to project the ever-developing aims of our movement, not as eulogizer of the fallen or the past, but as the primary advocate of the basic ideals that the U.S. counterinsurgency was designed to silence.

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 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.

The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations (BIB) is holding our Annual Conference at Chicago State University on August 12 and 13, 2017. The theme of the conference is “The Ballot and the Bullet: Elections, War and peace in the era of Donald Trump.”

The theme of our Conference contains within it the critical matters of this period that must be addressed to move our struggle for black liberation forward.

The SEIU’s People’s Budget Review held a local forum on Thursday June 15th at The Sunshine Center so that the nine district 6 candidates could have an opportunity to hear out the concerns of the community. The description of the event read: “You’ll be able to engage in dialogue with candidates for the District 6 race and hear them respond to how they will be supporting the People’s agenda.”

The open forum quickly became a battle royale. Most candidates were obviously fighting in the interest of prime real estate, while others were engaged in a vested struggle against police violence and gentrification.

There has been much discussion in both bourgeois and independent media centered around the bodies and identities of transgender people.

This has especially been the case over the course of the current political period generally characterized by deepening imperialist instability as well as conscious and unconscious struggle against the status quo.

We see the visibility of transgender and gender nonconforming people in popular culture.

We also see the LGBTQIA+ struggle for equality against discriminatory policies such as the so-called bathroom bills.

These bills, under the pretense of public safety, deny transgender and gender nonconforming people the right to utilize the public restroom accommodations that best correspond to their gendered identity.

Somewhere amidst the bourgeois feminist milieu is mention of the persisting murder, dehumanization and brutalization of African transgender people.

It is through African Internationalism that the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), the Uhuru Movement and its component mass organizations have on different fronts offered a dialectical and historical materialist accounting of the colonial, capitalist social system that gives life to the oppression of African and other colonized people throughout the world