I first heard Chairman Omali Yeshitela speak in Louisville, KY in 1976. I remember that he had a large map of Africa, which he used to point out the status of the liberation struggles in each part of the African continent.
I had never been an activist, but it was the period when, as the Chairman always says, “Revolution was the main trend in the world.” The heroic Vietnamese people had just politically and militarily defeated the U.S. It was a time of tremendous optimism, when oppressed peoples everywhere were winning their freedom and liberation.
The Chairman’s presentation was brilliant, scientific, and deeply motivating. He showed that we can be part of changing the world—that the new world is right before us if we embrace the worldview of the African working class and get organized to bring it about.
The Chairman laid out why the African Liberation Movement was the leading force and why white people must be under the African People’s Socialist Party’s leadership, with the mandate to organize the white population in solidarity. He taught us that “the road to socialism is painted black.”
We were not struggling against “racism,” the ideas in white people’s heads, he said. The struggle is against colonialism—the domination of African people by a foreign and alien state power for profit—something we can all fight.
The Chairman read to us from Karl Marx about the “primitive accumulation of capital,” the start-up process of colonial-capitalism, the social system responsible for all the wars, suffering, oppression, and exploitation in the world today. He taught us how the world as we know it was built from the assault on Africa, the theft of Africa’s resources, the kidnapping and enslavement of African people, and the domination of the majority of human beings on the planet for the benefit of the minority white population.
The Chairman showed how, under the leadership of the African Revolution, white people could redeem ourselves by making our self-criticism to African and oppressed peoples. He taught us that raising reparations—the return of the stolen resources of African people that are amassed in white communities and bank accounts—is in the true interest of white people.
Over the years, I have seen the Chairman’s unwavering courage, revolutionary confidence, and love of the African working class, whose destiny is to become the new ruling class that will usher in a new world without oppressors and the oppressed.
Today, the African People’s Solidarity Committee and our mass organization, the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, have actively helped to popularize the demand for revolutionary reparations throughout the U.S. and the world.
Chairman Yeshitela has given us, as white people—the colonizers—the profound historic opportunity and responsibility to end our self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world by carrying out our role in the Party’s strategy from behind enemy lines.
