The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement is calling on Africans and our allies from throughout the world to join us for our annual convention on September 29-30 in St Petersburg, FL.
We are fed up with seeing police violence against young black people in the news daily. Our children are facing a future of joblessness and desperation. We lost our homes in the wave of foreclosures based on discriminatory subprime loans. We are tired of the fact that Obama as the first black president has helped everyone but African people who voted him in.
The fact is we are facing the most serious economic crisis in the history of this country. The U.S. government is escalating war around the world and expecting our children to be on the frontlines of those wars. Inside the U.S., there is an ongoing war against African communities. You and I know that the police act entirely differently in our communities than in white neighborhoods.
In a country whose economy was built on our backs through our enslavement, we cannot navigate this crisis of imperialism alone. We have only one tool to ensure that our interests are met. That tool is organization formed and operating for the past 21 years in our name and for our benefit: the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement.
InPDUM recognizes that as quietly as it is kept African people can never solve our problems within the confines of a system built at our expense or inside of borders created to reap profit from our suffering.
It is estimated that it would take hundreds of years for Africans in the U.S. to breach the income gap with white people under the current system. In other words freedom for black people is not possible in America.
The only solution to our pain and suffering is a revolutionary solution. We must struggle and resist wherever we are located on the planet while we free our homeland of Africa and all its resources. African people must unite worldwide whether we are in Detroit, Brooklyn, Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil or Nairobi or Johannesburg. There is no solution for us separate from the struggle of Africans everywhere.
InPDUM’s fighting history
Since our founding by the African People’s Socialist Party in 1991, InPDUM has defended the rights of hundreds of African families who have been victimized by this war against our people. But we have not struggled simply for justice for one person but to win reparations and economic and political power for the entire African community.
Because of our stance of defending our people in St. Petersburg in 1996, more than 300 cops attacked our headquarters in an attempt to crush our movement. They failed — we prevail! We have a fighting history. We have a track record.
In Philadelphia, PA for the past 20 years we have fought for justice for victims of police violence, including:
Timothy Goode, murdered January 12, 2008;
Shareef Lee Jones, August 27, 2008;
Denill Giddings, September 23, 2008;
Michael "Butchie" Johnson, October 21, 2008;
Lamont Norman, November 15, 2008;
Lawrence Allen, shot by police on November 17, 2008 and died three months later
Kenneth DeShields, an Iraq war veteran was killed by an off-duty police lieutenant on March 19, 2010;
Vincent Parsons, April 2, 2010.
In London, we have fought for justice for Ricky Bishop and Mark Duggan, the African man whose murder by the London police sparked the famous Black August Rebellions of 2011.
In Oakland, we have stood courageously in defense of Oscar Grant, Andrew Moppin, Lesley Xavier Allen, Casper Banjo, Jose Luis Buenrostro-Gonzalez, Mac "Jody" Woodfox, Anita Gay, all murdered by police violence.
We were the lone voice of organized defense of Lovelle Mixon, a 26-year-old African man who killed four Oakland police before being assassinated by the police death squad. We support the struggle for justice for Oury Jalloh, a young African man who was burned to death while in police custody in Germany. We supported the movement to free Fred Hampton Jr. framed up in Chicago in the 1990s.
In 1996, InPDUM represented organizational leadership for the African working class during the Battle of St. Petersburg, in which young Africans from the south side of St. Pete rose up in resistance against the point-blank police murder of 18-year-old TyRon Lewis during a traffic stop in the community’s main thoroughfare.
Three weeks later, following the Grand Jury’s exoneration of the police, the community again rose up to defend the Uhuru House from a military attack by 300 highly armed police forces during a regularly scheduled InPDUM meeting. The Battle of St. Pete proved to be so significant that the then U.S. president Bill Clinton sent a member of his cabinet to investigate the matter.
For the last 21 years, InPDUM has fought tirelessly to defend the democratic rights of Africans victimized by the colonial prison system public housing and foster care system.
Since its founding, InPDUM has remained a consistent and leading force in the struggle for real political power in the hands of the African community. For years, we have held ongoing tribunals (courts) exposing the inability of the imperialist courts to bring justice to African people in the U.S. and UK, beginning the process for self-determination through which we put those governments on trial for colonialism and enslavement of African people.
With our “Touch One, Touch All” policy, when you become a member of InPDUM, struggling African people all over the U.S. and throughout the world have your back. When you join InPDUM you are no longer alone. When you join INPDUM you have joined your brothers and sisters on the four continents in which we function. That is truly powerful!
The fact is around the world we are 1.5 billion strong: together we can win — not civil rights in a parasitic system that can take away those rights anytime it wants, but victory, independence and power in our own hands.
Register for the InPDUM International Convention at inpdum.org
Uhuru!
