Uhuru! To the Family and Friends of Comrade Brother President Imari Obadele, and leadership and comrades of the Black Liberation Movement,
Our heartfelt revolutionary greetings of condolences from the Central Committee and membership of the African People's Socialist Party-USA, African People's Socialist Party-Sierra Leone, and African People's Socialist Party-United Kingdom.
Our Party's relationship to this African patriot stretches nearly forty years. After years of our Party struggling, along with other organizations and freedom loving peoples globally, for Comrade President Imari's release from prison as a Prisoner of War, the United States
government was finally forced to release him.
The honor was bestowed upon our Party to be there at the gates of the super maximum security federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois to receive the Comrade Brother and deliver him to his destination. For Comrade President Imari to walk out of captivity under his own power was victory indeed for our movement to restore the African to our rightful place as leaders and shapers of human history. Our movement for Black Power!
We are here today to express our deep, undaunted, appreciation for our Comrade Brother's lifelong commitment to independence and reparations for Africans here in the U.S., although we had fundamentally different ideological and political understandings about the tactics and strategy to achieve them and what they would look like once achieved. Nevertheless, we were on the same basic trajectory for independence from U.S. colonial domination and for reparations.
We surely recognize that Comrade Brother President Imari Obadele and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa were indeed victims of the U.S. government's military assault on the African Liberation Movement through its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which either murdered our leadership while we were in our beds asleep in Chicago like in the case of Black Panther Party Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton or the attack on the Provisional Government's headquarters in Jackson, Mississippi.
This was a period when our leadership was either killed, put in prison, chased underground, or into exile abroad, like Revolutionary Cuba, or Algeria or other places on the African Continent.
But repression and imprisonment did not silence this Comrade. He diligently helped to rebuild the black liberation movement from inside the penitentiary, where virtually the entire leadership of our movement had been harbored. From his prison cell, he called for the entire pro-independence movement to join behind the national demonstration on September 4, 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia to Free Dessie Woods and Smash Colonial Violence! which was the first national pro-independence mobilization since the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties.
Our dear friend, Comrade Brother President Imari was passionate on the questions of Independence of African people colonized within U.S. borders and the just struggle for reparations. He was a soldier and a statesman.
LONG LIVE IMARI OBADELE!
LONG LIVE THE BLACK REVOLUTION!
FREE THE LAND!
Central Committee, African People’s Socialist Party
