Chairman Omali Yeshitela Speaks on Trump Assassination Attempt: “What About Free Speech, America?” 

Chairman Omali Yeshitela Speaks on Trump Assassination Attempt: “What About Free Speech, America?”

On July 13, 2024, as Donald J. Trump was delivering a campaign speech to a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, an alleged gunman on the rooftop of a building 140 yards away opened fire on the former U.S. president. Trump survived, though the shooter killed one person in the audience and critically injured two others.

The Biden administration and the FBI claim they are searching feverishly for a “motive” and have already begun to project a theory that the shooter, allegedly a 20-year-old white man named Thomas Crooks, was “operating alone,” not as part of a larger plot.

In the African People’s Socialist Party we are clear, however, that the specific motive of the shooter is not the real question. The fundamental question that is rending the social fabric of this country right now is the question of free speech. 

When Trump was shot, he was speaking. The bullets fired at Trump represent an escalation in a war against speech that exposes the deepening crisis of the U.S. social system, a crisis that has reached a point where the violent suppression of speech that has always been a reality for African and colonized peoples has now penetrated into the white colonial population and ruling class.  

For African and colonized peoples in this country, the right to free speech has never existed. To be shot at for speaking has been the norm for generations of African and Indigenous people who have spoken out in pursuit of our freedom. 

The right to speak has increasingly come under serious assault in this period of heightened repression, punctuated by the U.S. government’s attacks on our Party and our Movement on July 29, 2022 and the subsequent, bogus prosecution of myself and the Uhuru 3. 

We have often said that in the 1960s, when our Black Revolution had defeated colonialism ideologically and politically, the U.S. government abandoned the arm of criticism and replaced it with “criticism by arms.” Now “criticism by arms” is being deployed within the white ruling class between contending sectors vying for control of the State.

The notion that someone can be shot at for speaking is something that African people have always found repugnant. From the time we were brought to this country in chains, African people have faced severe restrictions on our right to speak or otherwise express ourselves. We remember Emmett Till. Under colonialism, freedom for African people has always been illegal.

When the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified by Congress in 1791, African people in the U.S. were still enslaved on plantations. The First Amendment, therefore, was not for us, but for white people. The First Amendment was created by and for white people, who had left Europe to escape the tyranny of kings, came to the U.S., stole the land from the Indigenous people and captured and enslaved African people. In running from tyranny, the colonial settlers imposed a new form of tyranny over Black and Indigenous people here. The Constitution was not for us. 

The law which has governed our relationship to this country was clarified by the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in 1857, in which the Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that the Black man had no rights the white man was bound to respect. This truth about our relationship to the colonial legal system transcended whether it was a “liberal” or “conservative” Supreme Court. It was the opinion of the Supreme Court, period. 

What changed this ruling was not another ruling, but the Civil War that concluded with the formal end of the enslavement of African people in 1865. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were ratified in that period. However, these amendments also did not confer rights upon us. Otherwise, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 would not have been necessary. This is why legal scholars have defined our relationship to the U.S. government as de jure freedom (freedom in law) but de facto unfreedom (not free in fact).

African people have always struggled for free speech. When the government attacks the Uhuru Movement for exercising free speech rights, they attack free speech rights, period. It’s not my free speech. It’s not “Black People’s free speech.” We had none, to begin with. Ultimately we are being used as surrogates to attack everyone’s right to freedom of speech.

The U.S. ruling class stages their assault on free speech by choosing what they assume to be an unpopular target: Black people. They assume whites will go along with their assault on free speech by using Black people as the target. In the real world, they are trying to get white people to act against their own interests by winning their participation in an assault on the rights of free speech which were created for white people in the first place.

They can’t take free speech away from Black people who never had it. Garvey didn’t have it. Nat Turner didn’t have it. They are using the attack on me to make an attack on the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment that is supposed to be for everyone. 

The July 29, 2022 attack on me, the African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement was an attack on our fight to win free speech rights for African people. The subsequent indictments of me, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel—the Uhuru 3— were indictments and threatened 15-year prison sentences because of our fight for free speech rights.

We, Black people, have been the torchbearers of democracy in this country. We have fought for free speech, for the right to vote and participate in the electoral process. Everything that resembles democracy in this country is a consequence of struggle by Black people. 

When the African People’s Socialist Party ran two candidates for office, the U.S. government said those campaigns were paid for by the Russians. This notion that our participation in the electoral arena was motivated by Russian direction is absurd. Nothing could be more ridiculous. How could Russians teach us anything about our struggle for democratic rights in this country? Have Russians faced water hoses and bombings of their churches for trying to vote? Nobody in the U.S. has paid a greater price for the right to vote than Black people. We fought and died for it. King was assassinated and others lost their lives. 

The free speech assault against the Uhuru Movement will not end with the attack on the Uhuru Movement. Recognition of this fact does not require that you like Trump, who is himself no friend of free speech. When they attack our free speech rights, they attack everybody’s free speech rights. When they kill King for speaking, kill Malcolm X for speaking, when the U.S. government indicts and threatens imprisonment of Omali Yeshitela for speaking, they incite anyone else to attack others for saying something they don’t like. They will call them “lone wolves,” but they are following the examples of the U.S. government who have initiated this violent assault on the right to speak with their bogus prosecution of the Uhuru 3. 

Everyone must fight for freedom of speech and association.

Years ago the U.S. government attacked our Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1996 with over 300 police forces including FBI and other federal agents because they said they were concerned about what we were going to say about the case of TyRon Lewis, an 18-year-old African who had been murdered by the police. The St. Petersburg police attacked our building and claimed that we were holding an “unlawful assembly.” It was an attack on free speech, but not a single civil libertarian defended us at that time. 

The attack on the Uhuru Movement’s right to free speech was then and is today an attack on rights that are supposed to apply to everybody. These attacks on constitutional rights will always start with the attacks on Black people and the Indigenous people. Some will say, “If they can come for the Uhuru Movement, they can come for us.” The truth is that when they come for us, they are coming for you. 

In 1893, Frederick Douglass wrote:  “Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.” 

This statement by Frederick Douglass is the fundamental question of our times. 

What about free speech, America?

Will government imprisonment and assassination continue to be acceptable templates for resolution of political differences?

As the Uhuru Movement, we are initiating a new Summer Project—a Freedom Summer, where we are calling on every freedom-loving person in the U.S. to come to St. Petersburg, Florida and participate in a SNCC-style anti-colonial freedom movement that will conclude with victory for free speech in the trial of the Uhuru 3.

Drop the charges on the Uhuru 3!
Hands Off the Uhuru Movement!
Uhuru!

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