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“Millennials” is a generalized and imprecise term used to describe people born between the years of 1981 and 1997. This generation lives in a time where access to information is both endless and extremely suppressed. A time when paid leave is the system’s response to videos of police shootings that have live coverage, millions of views and instant commentary. A time where hashtags can start movements and end careers.

We are a generation that demands an immediate stance in response to the world and its developments. We are a generation that was sold a message of hope and change only to be betrayed by the status quo of a corrupt system that had been turned against the interests of the people.

Presented one piece of evidence after the other, millennials are suspicious, looking to differentiate between genuine representatives of progress and those who would sell out at the expense of the people.

Despite what corporate media would have you think who millennials are, we are invested and often participate in politics. Locally this is evident from the huge millennial support of Eritha Akilé Cainion’s campaign for District 6 and Jesse Nevel’s campaign for Mayor.

This article is part of a special Black August series on TheBurningSpear.com. We encourage all our readers to help “Keep The Spear Burning” during our Black August Fund Drive. Support your black power newspaper! Sponsor a prisoner or donate today at Burningspearmarketplace.com

Black August is a commemoration begun in 1979 by Africans in prison to raise up those who have died struggling for African liberation from within prison walls or in attempts to liberate Africans from the colonial prisons like George and Jonathan Jackson.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department released to the city on the morning of Aug. 6th that six African teenagers were involved in a fatal car crash in Palm Harbor. As a result, three of the young boys were killed; one placed in critical condition and two arrested.

When I heard this, I couldn’t help but find a bit of myself dying as well, knowing that three lives were taken from this community that morning. Unfortunately, that feeling got a lot worse when I found out that these boys were illegally chased by an aggressive and trained cop squad forcing them to crash into a billboard pole, spiraling through the air and ending their short lives.

August 9, 2017 marks 3 years since the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. Young Michael was murdered by Ferguson, MO copy, Darren Wilson. 

Witnesses stated that Mike Brown was shot eight times while his hands were in the air. His rotting body was then left on the concrete for more than eight hours as an example to the Ferguson community of what the police will do if we disobey their colonial orders. 

What the police did not expect in this suburb of St. Louis, MO was resistance from the African working class community. This powerful display of African Resistance on August 9, 2014 marks one of the critical dates in Black August.

With bullhorn and banners in hand, on Saturday July 8, militant protesters marched on the spot where Houston cops murdered 38-year-old Alva Braziel on July 9, 2016.

It was a one year anniversary resistance march and rally.

For the second time in three months, a white people’s grand jury in Harris County, Houston, Texas has no-billed two cops: L. Lopez and E. Macias.

These pigs pumped fourteen bullets into the body of Alva Braziel while his hands were up.

Some of those shots hit the 38-year-old black father while he lay on the ground mortally wounded.

Nevertheless, the pigs still handcuffed him.

Back in March and again on July 29, 2017, prosecutor Kim Ogg, the new female pro-death penalty district attorney presented to grand juries cases she knew would not win indictments.

Securing indictments was never the intent.

Reinforcing the colonial relationship that Africans have to the State is always the unstated goal of unindicted police murderers.

Rapper J. Cole visited prisoners at the birthplace of Black August—San Quentin State Prison—on August 1, 2017.

Cole made the prison visit during the middle of the North American leg of his "4 Your Eyez Only tour." 

BlackAugust originated in the prison camp of San Quentin 1979. African prisoners would wear black armbands to remember the heroic, revolutionary actions of the #SoledadBrothers, the San Quentin Six, Jonathan Jackson, Khatari Gaulden and all our fallen Freedom Fighters. 

Today we raise up HarrietTubman as we celebrate Black August. The Burning Spear newspaper’s “Harriet’s Daughters” page is dedicated to the fighting African women who continue the legacy of Harriet Tubman, who was a fearless freedom fighter during the times of slavery in the U.S. 

Over the course of 10 years, Harriet Tubman made over 19 trips to the slave states of the South and helped bring over 300 Africans to the so-called “free” states of the North. 

Unfortunately, just bringing people to states where chattel slavery was illegal did not change the overall system of oppression that Africans were faced with throughout the U.S. 

Now over 150 years later we pick up where Harriet left off. 

But today as African Internationalists we understand that ours is not a struggle “from slavery to freedom” as Booker T. Washington might say. 

Rather, it is a struggle from being a free, independent and proud people with our own power and our own land, back to being a free, independent and proud people with our own power and our own land. 

A judge in  U.S. federal court ordered the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to deliver a new report on the environmental risks associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline on June 14, 2017.

This decision came down after the Indigenous group known as the Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota began a fierce resistance in 2016 that continues today against the colonial State and Energy Transfer Partners, a parasitic capitalist energy company.

The court gave the order, citing that the Army Corps of Engineers did not fully investigate the potential environmental hazards that come along with the construction of the pipeline so close to the water and natural resources on which the Standing Rock Sioux rely for survival.

The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) calls on all sisters, brothers and comrades to attend our glorious 26th Anniversary Convention. With the theme “We Must Organize The People, Now More Than Ever,” our historic two-day convention will take place on September 16th and 17th in Ferguson, St. Louis at Legacy Books and Cafe at 5249 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108.

Founded by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) in April of 1991, InPDUM was created as strategy to bring the masses of African (or black) people back into political life. As a vehicle for the masses, InPDUM is the leading mass organization in the fighting for bread, peace and black power.