The African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) is the organization of white people formed by and under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). APSC organizes in the white community for reparations to African people.
One of the important milestones on the road to the formation of the African People’s Solidarity Committee by the African People’s Socialist Party-USA (APSP USA) was the Vine City Paper, written in 1966 by the Atlanta Project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leading Black organization of the time.
The Vine City Paper popularized the demand for “Black Power,” expelling white members from SNCC and calling on them to return to the white community to organize other white people in solidarity with the Black Power Movement—a mandate that white people never fulfilled on their own.
The 1960s was a time when, as Chairman Omali Yeshitela often describes, “revolution was the main trend in the world.”
This revolution was anti-colonial, led by poor and working-class African, Indigenous, and colonized peoples globally. It was a period when the heroic peoples of China, Vietnam, and India led historic struggles for freedom from centuries of brutal colonial domination, the economic engine of imperialism—a reality Chairman Yeshitela defines as the “colonial mode of production.”
African people, colonized inside the U.S., Africa, and throughout the world, played a pivotal and leading role in this global upheaval against colonialism’s parasitic pedestal.
In 1966, the bold and challenging cry for “Black Power” from the African working class inside the U.S. permanently changed the political landscape. The uncompromising Black Power demand emerged from massive urban uprisings in African communities and rural areas within the U.S., across Africa, and globally.
The demand for Black Power signaled the end of the Civil Rights Movement, which merely sought anti-racist assimilation into the existing system. “Black Power” heralded the demand for self-government and self-determination—power for African people in their own hands—for the first time since Marcus Garvey’s movement of the 1920s.
Chairman Yeshitela has consistently demonstrated scientifically that the condition facing African people globally is colonialism. Through the concept of the “colonial mode of production,” he illustrates that colonialism is not merely a phase from the past but the fundamental characteristic underlying African oppression and white wealth.
Young African people inside the U.S. entered political life at a time when the demands of the majority of humanity shaped the global political agenda, exposing military occupation, economic impoverishment, and powerlessness.
The entire white ruling class and many white people faced a profound crisis as the pedestal of their prosperity and well-being was deeply threatened from below.
The white left, with its opportunist and interventionist relationship to the African Liberation Movement, was challenged and defeated.
As the Vine City Paper described, African people seized control of their movement in this country, where they had “never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference.”
As a young SNCC member in Florida in the 1960s, Chairman Yeshitela was among the first to popularize the understanding that Black people inside the U.S. are African people, part of the African Nation forcibly dispersed around the world.
Chairman Yeshitela has consistently demonstrated scientifically that the condition facing African people globally is colonialism. Through the concept of the “colonial mode of production,” he illustrates that colonialism is not merely a phase from the past but the fundamental characteristic underlying African oppression and white wealth.
The SNCC organizers stated, “white people who desire change in this country should go where that problem is most manifest. That problem is not in the Black community. White people should go into white communities, where whites have created power explicitly to deny Black people human dignity and self-determination.”
The Vine City Paper marked the emergence of Black Power. White people were expelled from SNCC, where previously they had enjoyed equal or even leading status. Reports indicate that the expulsion resulted in anger, depression, and tears among many white members.
The demand was for white people to return to their communities and organize their own people to support the rising Black movement, defining the struggle of that time.
However, as Chairman Omali Yeshitela later observed, white people did not organize solidarity with African workers upon returning to their communities. Although the Black movement was the leading force challenging the ruling class and sparking other progressive movements—from the antiwar movement to women’s and LGBT liberation movements—white people built their movements not in solidarity with African people but at their expense.
In 1976, ten years after the Vine City Paper, Chairman Omali Yeshitela established the African People’s Solidarity Committee under the direct leadership of the Party. Its strategic mandate was to enter the white community “behind enemy lines” to represent Black Power in white face, to organize white solidarity with Black liberation, and to raise reparations for stolen African labor and resources.
Next year, the African People’s Solidarity Committee will celebrate its 50th anniversary and continue organizing white people for reparations to African people throughout the U.S. and beyond.
