This is a condensed transcription of Attorney Mutaqee Akbar’s presentation given at the Black is Back Coalition’s 17th Annual Conference on August 23-24. Attorney Akbar was one of the lawyers who defended the Uhuru 3 in the anti-colonial free speech trial of the century.
When I got the emails about joining the legal team for the Uhuru 3, I initially thought it was spam. And I ignored several emails before I just [said] “let me see what this guy’s talking about.” And so I responded, and I ended up talking, and they told me what it was about. And I heard Russia, and I heard a federal indictment. I heard these things, and I was like, “I’m going to let you know if I can do this or not.” And then I went to my law partner at the time, and she was like, “Absolutely not. Nothing dealing with Russia. No, we’re not doing it.”
And then I went and talked to my dad about it, and he was like, “I got some concerns, really think about it.” And so I did. So I thought about it.
I’ve known about the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) for years, before Dead Prez, through Dead Prez, and known about the work just being in the community because we’ve always been in the community as a family.
So we know about all the revolutionaries and the righteous folks and the righteous organizations. So, in thinking about it, I was just like, “What did I get my degree for if I can’t use it for a case like this? If I can’t use it to fight against issues like this?”
At the time when we first got the call, it was just the search warrants, and it was the potential for an indictment. And of course, at the time, it was always like, “What can we do at this stage?” That was the question that the Uhuru 4 at the time had: what can we do? What can we do to stop this? Y’all need to stop this.
This is the federal government. They’re coming, and there’s not much that we could do to stop it, but we could prepare. And prepare is what we did. We met monthly for about a year and a half, two years. And then it got into almost weekly, whether it was on Zoom, whether it was in person. And the information we got was literally terabytes, terabytes. They said that it was probably equivalent to a million books’ worth of evidence that we got, and trying to comb through.
Jesse [Nevel] came to Tallahassee, and we met for a whole weekend and still couldn’t get through it all to try to determine what it is that they’re talking about. What we ultimately found out was that they didn’t have anything. It was all a bunch of fluff. But they gave us a bunch of stuff to look through to try to figure it out.
Between the search warrant and the trial, when we had these meetings, a part of those meetings was the legal team and the clients, plus other members of the organization; we always talked about strategy from a bird’s-eye view. But one of the things that we ultimately had to determine was whether we were going to shy away from the work of the organization or whether we were going to highlight the work of the organization.
And as an attorney, sometimes you want to be strategic and you want to say, “Well, we’re trying to think ahead to what this jury would look like.” And this is Tampa, Florida; it’s Hillsboro, it’s a lot of retirees. We knew it would be a lot of older white people. They might hear words like “Uhuru,” and freeze up, or they might hear things like self-determination and freeze up, or get scared or want to indict just ‘cuz.
Or they hear Russia, they hear you’re having conversations with Russia, they hear you’re doing these marches. They see all those things, and they might just find you guilty just ‘cuz. And we had those discussions.
But y’all know who else was in the room in these conversations. And that wasn’t an option. Even when we said, “Well, look at it like this, Chairman,” he’s like, “Nope, that’s not an option. We need to highlight what we do as an organization. And as a matter of fact, y’all come to St. Louis.”
And so he brought all the attorneys up to St. Louis, and this was prior to some of those conversations. But when we went to St. Louis and we went on the tours and we saw the businesses and we saw the doulas, we saw the Akwaaba Hall, we saw the bakery, we saw all the things; we saw how they transformed a community that was dilapidated; how [the Party] turned that community into a flourishing community with the gardens and the basketball courts and all those things.
So when I went to St. Louis, I immediately said, “Well, this is why they’re coming after y’all.”
Like this is what this indictment is about. It’s not about who you’re having a conversation with across the sea. It’s who you’re having a conversation with right in this community. Because you’re turning people who turned these communities into what they are, into people who are rebuilding these communities and having pride in these communities and investing in these communities and making it into something that they can do for themselves as far as self-determination and independence.
That’s the real threat. It’s not the conversation or the email or two that went over to some guy who happened to be from Russia. It’s that self-determination and that building of a community that was the real threat.
So that’s what I immediately understood by traveling to St. Louis and then going to St. Petersburg and seeing the work that was going on there. So we had to strategically figure out what was the best way to highlight the work of the organization and not shy away from it, and understand why the Chairman [Omali] knew it was important to go that route.
When I stood up and said “Uhuru means freedom” as my first words in the trial, it was to say that we’re not going to run away from what you’re going to hear today. We’re not going to run away from the work of this organization. And I strongly believe that strategy was the best strategy.
Because that became the conversation. I’m sure that’s what the jurors walked away from there talking about—this work, this is the work that this organization was doing. The judge, even he was going on the newsletter and the website afterwards because he commented on how they drew him on the bench. So we knew he was going on the website, which means he’s looking at the work that this organization was doing. And he said, “Yeah, I’m familiar, they’re usually called the Uhurus. I’m familiar with the organization.” He said that in jury selection. So this federal judge is familiar with the organization and who they are.
So we wanted to make sure that the jury was also familiar with the organization and who they are. We went a week and a half of testimony from the federal witnesses. And every time we questioned them, we went back to the work of the organization.
“Well, didn’t they actually do these marches? And during these times that they were doing these marches, weren’t black boys getting killed almost on a monthly basis? And that’s what they were fighting against. And that’s what they were fighting for.”
And federal agents were like, “Yeah, this work was necessary. Yes, these things were going on. Yes, they were raising money for that. Yes, they were raising awareness on those issues.”
Federal agents had to agree to everything that was in the discovery. They were agreeing with you: yes, these things were actually happening. These things were happening before they even had a conversation with this Russian guy that they keep highlighting. Yes, those things were happening.
They actually contacted the African People’s Socialist Party because they were interested in this work. They understood our government was—it was police killings of Black men all over this country during that time, and that was a thing that was actually going on. So all of this is true and we didn’t back away from it.
So that was the highlight.
I think another huge part of the trial was when we showed the video from the tour, the bus tour. And when we showed that video, it was the group standing around the young lady who they just met. I think it was in Chicago. And the young lady, she was just like in the video, “Man, this meant so much to me. I wasn’t even supposed to come out today, but I came out and I ran into y’all and y’all just gave me so much hope. I didn’t even know groups like this even existed. But seeing this group, y’all just gave me so much hope to continue the work that I’m trying to do in Chicago.”
And we highlighted that video as one of the final videos. And even in closing, we ended with that video to show the value of what the organization is about. And to show the value, not only what the organization is about, but also to show that this work that they’re trying to say was being financed from Russia [is work] that this organization has been doing for the last 40 years. So we highlighted all of those things strategically in order to put the revolution on the front of the conversation as opposed to us backing away or trying to defend what they’re saying the entire time.
We really didn’t have to defend and say, “No, we’re not Russian agents.” We really just said, “Look at the work that we’ve been doing this whole time,” to exemplify the work that the APSP has been doing. So that was the strategy of the trial. The strategy of the trial was to highlight the work that’s been going on the entire time. And again, it was a risky strategy, but it was one that was important. And it was one also where if the worst-case scenario would have happened, if the jury would have just gotten it wrong and the Uhuru 3 would have been found guilty, they would have been found guilty knowing that we stood up for highlighting the work that was being done and not backing down from it, and kind of stood up and ran through it the entire time.
