It’s April 4, 1968, when Chairman Omali Yeshitela travels on a Greyhound bus to Gainesville, Florida, to speak at a demonstration. Only four days out of prison on an appeal bond for the case of the torn-down mural (more about this later), the Chairman learns that Civil Rights era leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of his hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The rally in Gainesville, initially planned to deal with the arrests of four African men, quickly changed its character to reflect the news of King’s murder. Two days later, 17-year-old Lil Bobby Hutton of the Black Panther Party is killed by the police in Oakland, California.
On April 8, 1968, four days after King’s murder, Chairman Omali was arrested, this time on charges of “inciting to riot” for having spoken at the rally in Gainesville. Upon his release on another appeal bond for the riot charge, Chairman Omali prepared to attend the Sanitation Workers struggle that was heating up in St. Petersburg, Florida—a struggle that King himself had been involved in, in Memphis, TN. To prevent his participation, Florida’s then-attorney general revoked the Chairman’s bond and had him rearrested after having been released for only six hours.
These near-bicoastal assassinations and series of jailings of our leadership represented the unceasing war being made on the Black Liberation Movement by the U.S. government, heightened during the period of the 1960s when anti-colonial revolution was the main trend in the world.
Though significant, their murders and arrests would nowhere near represent the full extent of the U.S. government’s attacks on our Movement. In 1961, Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who fought for Congo’s independence from Belgian colonialism, was brutally assassinated with his remains dug up, hacked into pieces, and dissolved in sulphuric acid.
Back in the U.S., the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which birthed the “Black Power” slogan, saw the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—organizers with SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Their bodies were found on June 21, 1964, in Meridian, MS.
Malcolm X would be killed the following year, on February 21, 1965, and Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana and fighter for one, Socialist Africa, would see his government overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup in 1966.
On December 29, 1966, Chairman Omali, as a leading member of SNCC in St. Petersburg, FL, led the charge into the city hall government building and tore down the white nationalist 8×10 mural that hung on its walls. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.
Che Guevara of the Cuban Revolution was executed on October 9, 1967, by a special attachment of the Bolivian army backed by the CIA. Nineteen days later, Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA, was arrested.
In 1968, Chairman Omali founded the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO) and organized primarily throughout the southern U.S. During this period, JOMO members were frequently attacked, and personal homes and JOMO offices raided.
Toward the latter half of the 1960s, our Movement saw a surge of arrests and assassinations of Black Panther Party (BPP) members, as the BPP was generally recognized as the vanguard for our struggle at that time. The Panther 21 in New York, which included Afeni Shakur (then pregnant with her son and rap artist, Tupac Shakur) and Sundiata Acoli, were indicted on frame-up charges in April 1969.
In the same year, BPP leader Fred Hampton was shot and killed, along with comrade Mark Clark, in the predawn of December 4, 1969, in Chicago, IL.
This is not an exhaustive list of the deaths and imprisonments we suffered, and neither should it suggest that the counterinsurgency war made against our Movement concluded in 1969. But something important occurred following the military and ideological defeat of the Black Revolution—from the ashes, the African People’s Socialist Party emerged.
Our Party is the revolutionary continuum.
The Black Revolution did not die or perish behind bars, despite the U.S. government’s best efforts. Chairman Omali Yeshitela did not surrender our struggle. He continued to fight.
In May 1972, three Florida-based organizations (JOMO, the Gainesville Black Study Group led by Katura Carey, and the Black Rights Fighters of Fort Myers led by Lawrence Mann) would merge to form the African People’s Socialist Party, the Uhuru Movement, to forward and complete the struggle against colonialism.
Our Party assumed the role of the vanguard—the advanced detachment of the African working class—was to put revolution back on the agenda after its near total abandonment with the installment of the African petty bourgeois, sellout class following the murder and imprisonment of our leaders.
It was our Party, through the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela, that redefined the task of the Black Liberation Movement as one to fight against colonialism. Only after the destruction of colonialism can African people know true freedom, peace, and prosperity.
It is evident today, as anti-colonial struggles define the state of the world and the path toward a liberated future, that making the struggle against colonialism was and continues to be the correct position.
Our Party picking up the pieces and leading our struggle is the basis for the FBI attacks made against us, most visibly in 2022. Just as we represent the historical continuum of the Black Revolution, the U.S. government’s bogus charges levied against our Chairman and the Uhuru 3 represent the continuum of U.S. counterinsurgency.
This time, however, their efforts cannot succeed. Our Movement is firmer now than we have ever been, now that we have a clear trajectory and a revolutionary theory, African Internationalism, that guides our practice.
Chairman Omali stated, “They put out the main flame in the 1960s, but we represented the ember.”
More than an ember now, the Uhuru Movement is a blazing inferno, lighting our path toward the future.
We are winning.
Freedom in our lifetime!
Join the African People’s Socialist Party: APSPUhuru.org
