On April 27, 2024, Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein spoke at the University City Library in St. Louis, MO, at a community forum alongside Chairman Omali Yeshitela, leader of the Uhuru Movement, who is facing 15 years in prison on bogus charges for his lifelong work for the liberation of African people.
Stein spoke out in support of the Hands Off Uhuru campaign to demand the U.S. government end its political persecution of the African People’s Socialist Party and dismiss all charges against Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the Uhuru 3, which includes Penny Hess, Chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, and Jesse Nevel, Chair of Uhuru Solidarity Movement. Stein blasted the U.S. government’s attacks on the Uhuru Movement as “an absolute outrage.”
Nine months after the notorious FBI raids on the Uhuru Movement in July of 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a federal grand jury indictment of the Uhuru 3 on baseless charges of working as “secret foreign agents” for the Russian government in a “criminal conspiracy to sow discord in the U.S.”
Chairman Omali Yeshitela described the harrowing details of the military-style FBI assault on his home and six other Uhuru homes and offices. “I live in one of the most economically depressed parts of this city. The government came and shut down the entire neighborhood. They used flash-bang grenades, battering rams, knocked down the doors and windows of our home, tossed grenades into the stairwell of our house,” the Chairman said. “I thought they were going to kill me, like they killed Fred Hampton at 4 in the morning on December 4, 1969, in Chicago.”
“What is happening today is similar to the high tide of revolution in the 1960s. The whole thing is unraveling under their feet; the system is undergoing a crisis. From our perspective, it is a crisis of a system founded on colonialism, on the attack on Africa, the Indigenous people. America is a settler colony, the primary, leading settler colony in the world.”
“I believe in the slogan, ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine must be free,’,” the Chairman said, to bursts of applause, “and I also believe, ‘From Sea to Shining Sea, the Indigenous people must be free!’”
The FBI attacks and indictments of the Uhuru 3 are “an attack on the right of Black people to be self-determining,” said the Chairman. “Like Palestinians in Gaza, we are fighting for the capacity to feed, clothe, and house ourselves without some colonial overlord trying to determine how we should live!”
Jill Stein Unites with Anti-Colonial Struggles of Africans and Palestinians
The audience arose to a standing ovation as the Chairman returned to his seat. Other panelists included Robert Suberi of Veterans for Peace, Zaki Baruti of the Universal African People’s Organization, Don Fitz of the St. Louis Green Party, and Dr. Jill Stein herself.
Stein united with the Chairman’s African Internationalist understanding that the struggle must be waged against colonialism. “Thank you for leading the way forward,” Stein said, referring to the Chairman’s comments as “unsurpassable, stating the deep-seated crisis of colonialism and settler-colonialism, carried on across this country on the reservations where the Indigenous people have been forced and confined, to Palestine where we continue to see the struggle of the Indigenous people against a settler-colonial, ethnic nation-state of Israel.”
Stein further united with the Chairman’s analysis that colonialism is undergoing a profound crisis, stating, “We are seeing a colonial-settler empire whose control of the world has been lost! The empire is in a tail-spin, a slow-motion crash, like an airplane whose engine is no longer functioning, which is why it is doubling down with such fervor in all kinds of ways!”
Stein Arrested at WashU for Standing with Gaza
Hours after speaking at the library, Stein was arrested on the Washington University campus for joining with students to stand in solidarity with the heroic Palestinian resistance. Green Party members and supporters gathered at the Uhuru Solidarity Center on 2654 Gravois Ave in South St. Louis, one of the properties that came under siege by the FBI on July 29, 2022, for a meet-and-greet where Stein was expected to appear.
Breaking news updates in the St. Louis Post Dispatch featured photographs of Stein at the WashU encampment standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a comrade wearing a Uhuru Planet t-shirt carrying the phrase “Anti-Imperialist.” Comrades gathered in the foyer of the Solidarity Center as Chairman Yeshitela and APSC Chairwoman Penny Hess summed up the significance of Stein’s arrest at WashU. The Chairman noted that Stein’s strong opposition to the government’s assaults on the Uhuru 3 and her solidarity with Palestine both represent “unity with the struggles against colonialism” led by Africans and Palestinians fighting for their liberation and self-determination.
Barbara Chicherio of the Green Party and Uhuru Solidarity Movement organizers were among the hundreds of people who rallied outside the St. Louis County Jail in Clayton, Missouri, where Stein and over 100 students were detained until 3:00 AM. Video footage of the police repression at WashU showed the police holding up bicycles as weapons to force back the group of demonstrators, knocking Stein onto the ground. The police assaulted her and others and then charged Stein with assault.
Immediately after her release from jail, Stein spoke to The Burning Spear newspaper and encouraged her supporters to attend the trial of the Uhuru 3, which begins on September 3 in Tampa, FL. Stein saluted Chairman Yeshitela as “an incredible educator and advocate to end colonialism, to end this failing empire.”
“The peoples of the world are winning,” said the Chairman earlier in the day at the library. “Our objective is to keep struggling, keep fighting, keep winning, keep raising the struggle against colonialism! When you raise the colonial question, you raise the essential question that holds up the entire system!”