Memorial services will be held for Connie Tucker at 4pm Friday, October 2, 2015 at the Gregory B. Levett and Sons Funeral Home, 4347 Flatshoals Road, Decatur, Georgia 30034.
On October 3 a Celebration of Life Jam Session will be held at the Star Theater from 6 pm-until, at 840 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd. Atlanta, Ga 30310.
The Connie Tucker 65th Birthday Celebration will occur on October 14 at The Bridge Theatre, 9 US Highway 80 East Selma, Alabama 36701 at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the Bloody Sunday March of 1965.
Connie Tucker, a celebrated U.S. political prisoner during the period of the Black Revolution of the 1960s, was diagnosed with lung cancer on July 21, 2015. She passed away in Atlanta on September 26, 2015 while under the loving care of her daughters Olimatta Taal and Maiyai Taal Hocheimy,
Sister Connie was predeceased by her mother Bernice Nall Tucker and father Otis Spencer Jr. Her survivors include husband, Saihou Omar Taal, daughters, Olimatta Taal, Jamaica; Maiyai Taal Hocheimy, son in law Fady Hocheimy Gambia and grandchildren Yolanie Hocheimy and Nolan Hocheimy, surrogate son Momodou Taal, sisters Gwen Nall NiiLampti, Barbra Blair Tucker, Stella Irving, and a great number of nieces, nephews, and community family.
Connie Tucker was no ordinary woman. Although only five foot two inches tall, she achieved heroic stature in pursuit of the rights of our people and justice for the oppressed and exploited of the world.
Many came to know her for the work she did around the issue of environmental justice. In 1992 Sister Connie worked as coordinator of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice.
Leading its Environmental Justice Project she helped to organize the largest environmental justice conference of it’s kind at the time. After becoming director of the Southern Organizing Committee she grew its environmental justice network to one of the largest grassroots efforts in the U.S.
However, Sister Connie’s dedication to her people and the fight against oppression began much earlier. She worked with voter registration projects in her youth and was an activist within the black student movement in high school and college.
A co-founder of the Black Youth for Peace and Power in Tampa, Florida, an organization that was under constant attack by the Tampa Police intelligence arm, Connie was framed up and given a 5-year prison sentence during a time when all of white America was terrified by the militant struggle being waged for black power.
The Black Youth for Peace and Power was seen as such a threat to the intelligence arm of the Tampa Police Department that some of its members were threatened with and then arrested for spitting on the sidewalk!
Given a 5-year prison sentence for a crime that never happened, the twenty-year-old Connie Tucker, by now the Florida State Chairwoman of the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO)), became one of the iconic political prisoners of the extraordinary revolutionary period of the 1960’s.
Later, in 1972, Connie Tucker would become a founding member of the African People’s Socialist Party.
Sister Connie was not simply a well-known figurehead. Her activism, leadership and courage enraged our oppressors and thrilled and encouraged Africans and all oppressed and exploited people who knew of her work.
Connie was an exceptional organizer who traveled throughout the U.S. and the state of Florida building organizations around political prisoners, police terror, black students and tenant’s rights.
This is why this extraordinary woman became one of the targets of federal, state and local authorities that resulted in imprisonment, assassinations and, ultimately, the defeat of the Black Revolution of the Sixties that is only now recovering with a new influx of young people trying to find their way forward on the path already paved by Connie Tucker and others like her.
Among the notables with whom Connie worked were Kwame Toure, Imari Obadele, Chokwe Lumumba, Willie Mukasa Ricks, Ann Braden, Linda Leaks, Omali Yeshitela, Senator Hank Sanders, Faya Rose Toure, Rev. C.T. Vivian, Ron Daniels, James Orange, Fulani Sunni-Ali, Richard Moore, Mildred McClain, Beni Ivey, Barbara Meyer, Tom Goldtooth, and many others.
For more information, contact Maiyai Taal Hocheimy at 404-820-3559 or Olimatta Taal 404-862-2466. P.O.Box 5303, Atlanta, Georgia 31107, or olimatta@gmail.com.
