A CALL TO BUILD FOR AFRICAN LIBERATION DAY 2007!
As we move forward to build African Liberation Day 2007, we want to keep the community up to speed with all the developments and progress of our work. The following is a document that has been in wide circulation throughout the Internet.
However, there have been some changes in the world that we want conveyed in our communication on the net. Firstly, several more organizations and individuals have offered up their endorsement for ALD. We also wanted to recognize errors that we have made in the spellings of a few organizations that have offered their endorsements already. Also, the date for the International Tribunal on Reparations for Afrikan People (ITRAP) is scheduled now for June 7-10th in Berlin, Germany.
Lastly, we have added to our list of workshops the question of political prisoners and prisoners of war. The workshop will be led by the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement, which has been leading the struggle to free the Liberty City 7 (visit http://inpdum.org/campaigns/lc7). The LC7 are a group of young African men from Miami, FL (by way of Haiti) that have been wrongly accused by the U.S. government of being terrorists — and as a consequence of these bogus charges they have been sitting in a federal prison since last June. You will be receiving regular updates between now and May 26th to prepare you for what is sure to be the most important mass mobilization of the 21st century!
Diop Olugbala
National Organizer of ALD 2007--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uhuru! Comrades, Friends, Sisters and Brothers,
By now you may have received our call to participate in African Liberation Day (ALD) at Anacostia Park in Washington, DC on Saturday, May 26, 2007. We are writing you again with the greatest sense of urgency as the African Liberation Movement enters what we in the Uhuru Movement characterize as the “final offensive.” This is a period in which white power is suffering a serious crisis that is rooted in the uprising of oppressed people throughout the world reclaiming our resources and struggling for control over our own lives. From Iraq to Nepal, imperialism is being dealt deafening blows. This is a period in which a dying imperialism is in, as Kwame Nkrumah correctly stated, its “final stage” of neo-colonialism (white power in black face).
For African people this is a period of great danger, yet great opportunity. However, what will enable us to emerge from this struggle victorious is the work we do now. It is in this context that the Uhuru Movement is organizing the ALD.
We have much work to do, Africans. We can no longer afford to march just for the sake of marching. We must march with the intention of walking through the doors of a new period in history — a period in which the African will know freedom, dignity and pride.
Building a successful African Liberation Day may be seen as just one of the many steps we must take towards that door. African Liberation Day 2007 must be and will be a call to action and plan for action. The following are a few of the workshops that will follow the ALD rally itself:
The Struggle in Guinea-Conakry!
In Africa, mass uprisings are becoming more and more recurrent, as the masses of our people confront neo-colonialism with righteous resistance. In Guinea-Conakry, the Uhuru Movement has been on the ground providing leadership to the African workers and poor peasants in a struggle with neo-colonialism for State power and control of African resources. Comrade Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, Director of the Africanist Movement and leader of the Uhuru Movement in West Africa, will be arriving straight from Sierra Leone to provide a report on the latest developments at the ALD. For more info visit
http://asiuhuru.org/guinea/statement_20070215.shtml.
International Tribunal on Reparations for Afrikan People (ITRAP)
On June 7th-10th of this year, the international African community will be holding the International Tribunal on Reparations for Afrikan People in Berlin, Germany.
This is a court in which African people will put white power on trial for the 400 years of crimes against our people.
For more info visit
http://apspuhuru.org/tribunal.
Red Cross Can't Cross Us No More! 
We are building an All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP) whose task is to solve the environmental, medical and industrial problems confronting African people throughout Africa. Because of the AAPDEP, no longer will we have to rely on a UN airplane to drop bags of rice and white flour on our starving people. No longer will we have to wait on the Red Cross to save us from a hurricane. African people will have control of our own futures and our own welfare.
The Only One That Belongs in Prison is the U.S. Education System!In the U.S., much of the struggle for African liberation has been concentrated in the struggle for the ability to educate our own children in our own interests. The International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) has been on the forefront of this struggle for more than 15 years.
We are currently in the advanced stages of a class action lawsuit against the Pinellas County School District. We are charging the school district with the systematic forcing out of African students from the education system. Our slogan is "First They Fail Us, Then They Jail Us." Statistical evidence has proven how African children are almost guaranteed to do worse in the schools the more time they spend there. This evidence proves that the problem does not start with our children or our homes, but with the quality of the "education system" itself.
At the same time, InPDUM is leading the struggle to push back the attacks the U.S. education system is making against our community. In Philadelphia and Queens, New York, InPDUM is organizing Tribunals for Reparations to African People for the crimes committed against us by the local school systems there.
We are also involved in the struggle to defend Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old African girl from Paris, Texas who was sentenced to 7 years in a Texas state penitentiary for defending herself from a high school hall monitor who assaulted her. Although the massive outcry of the African community throughout this country has forced the State to release Shaquanda, she still faces constant terror at the hands of the State for her act of righteous resistance.
African Liberation Day holds up Shaquanda as a hero and a political prisoner that should be defended by the international African community. We are currently struggling to bring Shaquanda and her mother Creola Cotton to ALD 2007 to speak on behalf of the millions of Africans who have been victimized by the colonial prison and school systems of the U.S. government.
We Need Millions More...for Revolution!The African People's Socialist Party (APSP) and the Uhuru Movement have taken on the task of building the ALD because it is the single most important mobilization of African people in the U.S. Unlike many of the marches, mobilizations and rallies that have been called in the last 10 years, the ALD promises to be a groundbreaking experience in terms of its agenda centered around making actual work happen to change our conditions.
The APSP has summed up the ALD as having a historical mission of putting the question of African liberation through revolution back into the minds of the masses of our people. This is a historic mission because our oppression has a historic basis.
We were not always oppressed. And the fact is that there has never been a time since our bondage that African people were not fighting for our freedom. Our struggle reached perhaps its highest stage with the development of the Black Power Revolution of the 1960’s. This was a period during which masses of African people worldwide were in motion, fighting for political and economic independence.
This was also the period in which our glorious liberation movement was met with the most vicious opposition by our national oppressor. Organizations like the U.S. government and other Western European States launched counterinsurgent attacks on our movement to guarantee that there would be no success in the African Liberation Movement.
These attacks included public assassinations of most of our best and bravest leaders, including Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. It resulted in countless arrests of African freedom fighters and the destruction of revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party.
The war did not end there. It also involved a chemical warfare against the African community — heroin in the 70's and crack in the 80's — all of which created the justification for the militarization of our communities by forces like the police and other federal agencies responsible for enforcing colonial laws in our communities.
Perhaps more harmful than any police shooting or drug placed in our community was the State’s strategy of neo-colonialism in which it put forth the African middle class/sellout sector of our community as the leadership of our people. So while they killed Malcolm with one hand, they tell you to vote for Barack Obama with the other.
Although our movement and people were served a most scathing defeat, we were not destroyed. In fact, our movement has grown wiser and much more sophisticated out of the necessity to withstand this counterinsurgency.
We are now building an international revolutionary organization of professional revolutionaries who are united through will and discipline to liberate and unify our mother Africa. The fact is that there has never been a revolution without the leadership of a revolutionary organization, and for African people, this revolution must be international in scope and nature.
Largely because of the philosophy of African Internationalism, developed by Omali Yeshitela, and the work done by the APSP to build the African Socialist International (
www.asiuhuru.org), Africans will never again have to struggle in isolation from one another. In the Uhuru Movement we have a saying: Touch One, Touch All! That means if imperialism hits us in South Africa, we strike back in the South Bronx! This understanding rests upon the work done by revolutionaries of earlier periods.
Marcus Garvey laid the foundation for everything we do today. Our only task now is to bring revolutionary science, analysis and practice to our people. It is not only our responsibility as revolutionaries and freedom fighters to struggle, but to struggle for power that can permanently transform reality for our people.
The African working class is now in position to carry out our historical mission of destroying white power and imperialism once and for all. However, in order to do this, we must resurrect revolution from the ashes of defeat. This requires bringing the masses of African people back into conscious motion for independence.
We have seen evidence, since the early 1990’s, of an increased participation among the African community in militant opposition to white power and imperialism’s domination over our existence. Such evidence can be found in the Los Angeles rebellions of 1992, which was the African community’s response to a clear act of State violence and terror against our people. We have seen evidence even in the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March. While the MMM was not at all a call for the people to resist or even criticize our oppression, it was significant for its massive turnout, and was a sign of the people’s willingness to struggle again.
GET ON THE BUS!ALD is scheduled to be held in its traditional home of Washington, D.C. on Saturday, May 26, 2007. It will be a day full of speaking and performance as well as strategizing and organizing. There are ALD committees in several cities throughout the U.S. — including Philadelphia, NYC, Alabama, Dallas, Oakland, Florida and Baltimore — all of which have committed to bring busloads of Africans to DC. We are calling on all freedom-loving Africans and the organizations they represent to endorse and participate in what is sure to be a historical event. For more information contact
alduhuru@yahoo.com call 301-695-2930 or visit
www.ALDuhuru.org.
In unity and struggle,
Diop Olugbala
National Organizer of African Liberation Day 2007
Partial List of Endorsers:African People’s Socialist Party
NCOBRA Washington D.C. Branch
Imam Jamil Action Network
New Black Panther Party
Ujamaa Shule Washington, D.C.
UNIA - Woodson-Banneker-Jackson-Bey Division #330 Washington, D.C.
Organization of Black Unity Washington, D.C.
African World Book Center: Everyone's Place Baltimore, MD
Extended Black Family Movement Patterson, NJ
UNIA - Thomas W. Harvey Memorial Division Philadelphia, PA
African American Freedom and Reconstruction League Philadelphia, PA
International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Community Assistance for Prisoners Philadelphia, PA
New Afrikan Liberation Front Philadelphia, PA
National Religious Leaders of African Ancestry Concerned About Darfur, Sudan
New York City Councilman Charles Barron
International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, International Office St. Petersburg, FL
All African People's Development and Empowerment Project (AAPDEP)
African Socialist International London UK
UhuruRadio.com
Burning Spear Productions St. Petersburg, FL
Pan African Alliance Miami, FL
Take Back the Land Coalition Miami, FL
People's Organization for Progress Newark, NJ
African Heartbeat Shule London, UK
National Democratic Action Movement Gambia, Ousainou
Fannie Lou Hamer Academy Etta, Mississippi
Nuwaubian Nation Washington, D.C.
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
Haitian Priority Project Washington, D.C.
Power U Miami, FL
Center for Pan-African Development Miami, FL
Bolivarian Youth Miami, FL
Liberty City 7 Defense Committee
Speakers include:Omali Yeshitela Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and the African Socialist International
Chernoh Alpha M. Bah Director of the Africanist Movement, West Africa
Dr. Aisha Fields Director of the All African People’s Development and Empowerment Project
Wautella ibn Yusuf Co-Chair of the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA)
Malik Zulu Shabazz Chairman of the New Black Panther Party
Pam Africa President of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Hodari Abdul Ali Imam Jamil Action Network
Lawrence Hamm People’s Organization for Progress
Max Rameau Take Back the Land Coalition
Chimurenga Waller President of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement
New York City Councilman Charles Barron
Shaquanda Cotton 14-year-old imprisoned in Texas for pushing a high school hall monitor in self-defense
Representative of Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization(IFCO)
Representative from the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
Representative from the Organization of Black Unity
Representative from the Extended Black Family Movement
Representative from the African American Freedom and Reconstruction League
Representative from Community Assistance for Prisoners
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