This presentation took place during a December 2, 2021, webinar.
Toward Freedom has 69 years of experience publishing independent reports and analyses that document the struggles for liberation of the majority of the world’s people. Now, with a new editor, Julie Varughese, at its helm, what does the future look like for Toward Freedom and for independent media? Toward Freedom’s board of directors formally welcomed Julie as the new editor. She reported back on her time covering Nicaragua’s critical presidential election. New contributors Danny Shaw and Jacqueline Luqman also spoke on their work for Toward Freedom as it relates to the value of independent media. Danny touched on the rising Pink Tide in Latin America while Jacqueline discussed the role of the Pentagon in Hollywood.
Members of the African People’s Socialist Party alongside non-African supporters. Chairman Omali Yeshitela (front center) is in a black beret, while his wife and Deputy Chair, Ona Zené Yeshitela, stands behind him in a blue hat / credit: African People’s Socialist Party
Black political organizations and other anti-imperialist groups condemned the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raiding early Friday morning the properties of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its solidarity organization in Saint Louis, Missouri, and in Saint Petersburg, Florida.
Based on the description, APSP appears to be one of several unidentified groups and people implicated in a 25-page indictment of a Russian national, Aleksandr Ionov. The Moscow-based founder of the nonprofit Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR) has been accused of attempting to influence U.S.-based groups to turn against the United States and work in favor of Russia.
“Anyone who opposes U.S. imperialism or who has made common cause internationally is endangered,” Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley wrote on Facebook. “Not surprising that a Black organization is the first on their hit list.”
The raid began at 5 a.m. July 29 at the Saint Louis home of APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela and his wife and APSP Deputy Chair, Ona Zené Yeshitela.
Yeshitela said in a Facebook livestream later that day that the APSP was targeted for its support of Russia during the military operation the country has been undertaking in Ukraine since February 24.
Among several allegations, the FBI accused Ionov’s group of paying U.S. activists to attend two conferences in Russia. It also said Ionov helped a group conduct a tour in the United States to drum up support for a petition charging the U.S. government with committing genocide against African descendants. Yeshitela admitted meeting with Ionov twice in Russia.
“Suddenly, we’re supposed to become tools, like Black people don’t have minds of our own to find out what our reality is and who’s responsible for it,” Yeshitela said in the livestream. “It’s white people doing self-criticism and uniting to give money. That’s where the money is coming from, Uncle Sam.”
‘Crisis’ of U.S. Imperialism
Yeshitela said while the United States was targeting Black activists, it has failed diplomatically.
“They’re doing this, in part, because not a single African country—not even neocolonial sycophants—want to unite with the United States and the United Nations in terms of how they are targeting Russia in this Ukraine-Russia question,” he said, referring to the economic sanctions slapped on Russia after it entered Ukraine in February. When Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky recently held a virtual meeting with African countries, 93 percent of heads of state did not attend, despite Western pressure.
“This exposes the crisis the United States, that U.S. imperialism, is in,” said APSP Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai in a livestreamed press conference in Saint Petersburg. Anai said FBI agents lured her outside her home early Friday morning, saying her car had been broken into. Upon opening her car, they forced her to hand over her devices, she said.
Yeshitela, 80, said he and Ona were awoken Friday morning to the sound of a voice blaring through a megaphone outside their home, asking them to come outside with their hands up. Flashbang grenades were set off throughout the working-class Saint Louis neighborhood, Yeshitela added. He also said a drone almost hit Ona’s face after she opened the home’s front door. Law enforcement agents lately have deployed drones into buildings to conduct a visual search before agents enter.
Yeshitela said FBI agents handcuffed the couple and forced them to sit on the street curb while agents scoured their home. “They indicated they had a search warrant related to the indictment,” he said. The FBI freed the couple after several hours, but not without confiscating from their home all of their devices, such as computers and phones, according to Yeshitela’s livestreamed account.
The FBI was unavailable as of press time.
Black Scare, Red Scare
Black activists have long denounced the U.S. government’s anti-communist rhetoric going back to the early 20th century, saying such calls to take down communists really have translated into attempts to dismantle Black liberation movements and other liberation movements in the United States.
“In reality, what anti-communism/anti-Marxism does is to transform anything counter-hegemonic or non-conforming into subversion, foreignness, or disloyalty by punishing it as communist, communist inspired, or communist infiltrated and therefore illegal, illicit or criminal,” said Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly in a recent talk.
Burden-Stelly, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Wayne State University, has written a soon-to-be-released book, Black Scare, Red Scare (2023). It attempts to document how the U.S. government’s anti-communist policies repress Black and other oppressed people for organizing for their liberation. This, she has said, helps to protect what she calls “racial capitalism,” in which the most degrading labor is forced upon increasingly exploited racialized groups.
U.S. Government’s ‘Hysterical Response’
Black political groups denounced large segments of the U.S. political left for believing Black activists are stooges of Russia, or the former Soviet Union.
“We agree that APSP doesn’t have to apologize for fighting for justice for all oppressed and particularly African People like our ancestors Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panther Party who were spied on, jailed and assassinated for standing up for the freedom and justice for African People worldwide,” said the central committee of Pan-Africanist organization All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in a statement issued Saturday.
Activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., who were called communists, were assassinated. Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, who advocated for the unification of Africa under Pan-Africanism and the end of European colonialism in Africa, was briefly imprisoned in Atlanta for what some consider the politically motivated charge of mail fraud. Trinidad and Tobago-born U.S.-based communist Claudia Jones—after whom Toward Freedom‘s summer editorial internship was named—was deported to the United Kingdom for her activism.
“We believe this repression to be a hysterical response to the United States’ loss of legitimacy in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism and U.S. global hegemony,” said the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP)’s Coordinating Committee in a statement released Saturday. “The unleashing of policing and counterintelligence forces domestically and increased militarism and warmongering abroad in the name of national security are the only avenues left to the U.S. ruling class that is engulfed in an irreversible economic crisis. They represent the hallmarks of a naked fascism that the U.S. ruling class appears to be increasingly committed to in order to maintain the rule of capital.”
Then BAP added a warning in its statement.
“While it is APSP today, it will ultimately be the rest of us tomorrow. Resistance is our only option.”
Salvador Allende (center, hat in hand) / credit: Naul Ojeda via National Security Archives, George Washington University
Australian embassy officials in Peru were surprised when they met Dr. Rodrigo Acuña’s revolutionary Chilean parents. They wondered how the both of them had managed to escape the 1973 U.S.-backed coup unharmed. But before approving their refugee application, embassy officials isolated Acuña’s mother, asking her to promise she wouldn’t engage in political activities in Australia. Later, on the flight to Sydney, his father ended up having what Acuña describes as a “post-traumatic stress disorder episode.”
“When he arrived at Sydney International Airport, he had to be placed on a stretcher and given medical attention,” Acuña told Toward Freedom. “That’s how my family arrived in Sydney, Australia.”
Now, Acuña, an academic, is part of a group representing Chilean exiles in Australia. The group has written an open letter to Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne, expressing its dismay at revelations Australia may have collaborated with the United States in the events that led to the removal of democratically-elected Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende.
The letter includes several demands, the most controversial being files be fully declassified and details about Australia’s involvement with the CIA and the Pinochet regime be made available to the public.
Declassified documents already reveal the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) were complicit in undermining the government of the sovereign Latin American country in the run-up to the military coup.
The last known photograph of Chilean President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, inspecting La Moneda, the presidential palace, shortly before his death
Documents prove ASIS installed offices in Santiago, Chile, from 1970 to 1973, with the sole purpose of undermining Allende’s socialist project, leading up to and even after the coup. For example, Australian parliament member E. Gough Whitlam stated in 1977, “… Australian intelligence personnel were still working as proxies and nominees of the CIA in destabilizing the government of Chile.” However, ASIS could not be reached for comment.
The fall-out that followed the coup was devastating for the normally politically stable country that, until then, had enjoyed a tradition of democracy. Allende was voted into presidency in 1970 with a social-justice agenda that included nationalizing its assets, including its lucrative copper mines, in which U.S. copper conglomerate Anaconda held a huge stake. Chile’s incoming radical agenda threatened the markets and international investors, so the United States began pouring huge sums of money into destabilizing Allende’s Popular Unity administration. Tactics included public relations smear campaigns via CIA-funded right-wing newspaper El Mercurio.
It’s estimated the United States spent $8 million on misinformation campaigning during Allende’s three years in office. Though much is known about the U.S. role in Allende’s ouster, what Australia’s surveillance agency did is much less widely understood.
That’s why Acuña said it’s important to denounce Australia’s role in the violent 1973 coup.
“How dare Australia interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state in a region as far away as Latin America to please a request from Washington,” he said. “The Allende government was far from perfect, but it was democratically elected by the people of Chile.”
The documents released to Dr. Clinton Fernandes, former intelligence analyst and Australian academic, are just the tip of the iceberg. His repeated requests for further declassification have been denied on grounds the revelations are far too damaging and “must remain secret.” But Chilean coup victims strongly disagree.
“This denunciation of ASIS’ role in the 1973 coup in Chile must be made because we, as first-, second- or even third-generation Chileans, have the right to express it,” Acuña said.
The bombing of La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace in Santiago, on September 11, 1973 / credit: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional/Wikipedia
Australia’s Double Talk
Australia is no stranger to taking in Chilean political exiles. The first one was ex-Chilean President General Ramón Freire in 1838. In the aftermath of the 1973 coup, between 100,000 to 500,000 Chileans were expelled from the country or displaced across the globe.
Many sought refuge in the United States and in Europe (Sweden, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom), while around 6,000 were taken in by Australia. The newly arrived refugees experienced severe trauma, because their friends and family members had been disappeared, and the majority had been tortured.
However, alongside refugees, Australia also took in a number of former Chilean secret-service agents responsible for the torture, interrogation and possibly the disappearance of left-wing activists in Chile. For example, Bondi Nannie Adriana Rivas is fighting extradition to Chile, where she will face charges of crimes against humanity. She worked at Cuartel Simón Bolívar, the infamous interrogation center in the capital of Santiago, as secretary to Manuel Contreras, the notorious head of operations for Chile’s secret police, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). Rivas is accused of participating in the torture and kidnapping of seven members of the Communist Party, including Victor Diaz, who, like many of Pinochet’s victims, remains missing.
Lawyer Adriana Navarro and Acuña state in the letter that unknown agents harassed many Chilean political exiles in Australia because they supported the return of democracy to Chile. Their political activities included writing letters to local parliament ministers and staging protests in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Canberra. Acuña said he suspects that like how Australia’s intelligence organizations have a close relationship with the CIA to share intelligence, the ASIS likely also has a close relationship with U.S. allies like Chile.
“That is the only logical explanation as to how someone with such a profile like Rivas even made it into Australia in the first place,” Acuña said. “We Chilean-Australians would not have any dignity or self-respect if we did not denounce in the harshest language Australia’s role in the violent coup in Chile in 1973, demanded an apology and asked for a full declassification of ASIS activities in Chile in the 1970s.”
However, the official state position that revelations may severely harm Australia’s reputation means campaigners may face a lengthy legal battle to uncover the truth.
Carole Concha Bell is an Anglo-Chilean writer and Ph.D. student at King’s College London.
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.
Millions of people in the United States believe the justice system—from the cops in the street right on up to the judges in the courthouse—is fair and unbiased. Millions of people also believe systemic racial and class biases are relics of a bygone era washed away by progressivism, the election of the First Black President, and the great healer called Time.
But those millions of people need to wake up and watch Jason Pollock’s documentary, “Finding Kendrick Johnson” (2021), for a healthy and horrifying dose of reality.
Poster for documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
The film begins with Kendrick Johnson, a 17-year-old Black student, who was found dead in 2013 inside a rolled-up mat that was propped up against a little-used wall in the gymnasium of Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia.
If the justice system in this country was fair, this documentary would not exist. But it does because everything about this case—from the moment Kendrick’s body was found—reveals how this system still is excruciatingly racist and classist.
The callousness of the police, officials at Lowndes High School and even other parents is revealed early in the documentary. For example, the police dismissed Kendrick’s mother, Jacqueline Johnson, when she reported her son had not returned home, which was unlike him. Police said Kendrick was probably “laid up with some fast-tail girl.” Later, when Kendrick’s body was found in the gym during school hours, neither the police nor school administrators locked down or closed the school, allowing classes to go on as if everything was normal. Meanwhile, police refused to allow Kendrick’s mother into the gym to see her son’s body and openly disrespected her grief. Then as a local TV news station reported news of Kendrick’s death, one of the parents—a white woman—tearfully told the reporter she was thankful it wasn’t her son. She also wondered how people would retaliate, even though no one knew what happened. Why would she assume anyone would retaliate? Why did she feel comfortable saying she was thankful it wasn’t her son, rather than express any sympathy for the mother whose son had been found dead?
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
But this was the attitude of not only those at every level of authority. This also was the way much of the community that was not connected to the Johnson family related to the case as the family doggedly pursued the truth behind Kendrick’s murder.
And it is accurate to characterize what happened to Kendrick Johnson as a murder. As the documentary points out, the police quickly gave an explanation for Kendrick’s death, in what could not under any circumstances be called an investigation. That is ridiculous from a purely logical standpoint. As the documentary goes on to reveal, no physical or forensic evidence from the scene corroborated the explanation.
Kendrick’s father, Kenneth, raised grave questions about how the medical examiner’s office handled his son’s body. He also realized the official police narrative that no foul play was involved was grotesquely untrue.
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
Pollock offers a gripping examination of the similarities between Kendrick Johnson’s case and that of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman lied that he inappropriately interacted with her. Pollock also places the questionable actions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) within the context of the racism upon which the agency was founded and continues to carry out.
We also witness the lonesome pursuit for justice that Kendrick’s family embarked on. We are shown a grieving family, knowing their child has died from circumstances that are neither natural nor accidental, regardless of what the police continued to say. And so, they fought for the truth the only way they knew how: Through protest and direct action. Beginning with sidewalk sign-holding and community marches, to ultimately blocking the entrance to the courthouse to demand an actual investigation into their son’s death, the contempt with which they were treated by the cops, the school administrators, and the racist community was stomach-churning to watch, but too important to turn away from. We are reminded these protests took place in 2014 and 2015 in a community where Kendrick’s aunt recounted white community members still request Black employees not wait on them in stores.
Still from documentary film, “Finding Kendrick Johnson”
And Pollock also connects modern-day racism to the long history of racism and lynching in the area around Valdosta, Georgia, highlighting the town is named after a slave-owner’s plantation. It becomes clear while the town is majority Black, the political power continues to reside in the hands of the white minority, because that is what white supremacy is.
The vice-grip on power that white supremacy has in the town remains so tight, when Kendrick’s family paid an independent investigator for a second autopsy because of the sham city investigation, they found out their son’s remains were desecrated in the process and his organs were replaced by crumpled balls of newspaper. Yet, no one has been held accountable for that desecration.
Pollock goes on to expose the heights that white supremacy reaches outside of Valdosta to protect the two white boys implicated in Kendrick’s death. This is because not only are they white, they are sons of an FBI agent, Rick Bell. Bell resigned as a result of the investigation into his involvement as well as his sons’ connection. But the large web of complicity involving the people who refused to investigate Bell and his sons includes seven judges who recused themselves from the case. SEVEN.
But it is the evidence uncovered by Pollock—an independent filmmaker—that makes the documentary truly worth the emotional investment required to sit through it. Not because the evidence legitimizes the allegations of a cover-up that Kendrick’s family makes. How the facts have been tossed around like a nuclear potato over the years makes it clear a cover-up was involved.
Pollock did not find evidence because an informer clandestinely provided documents or because they were secretly accessed in a hack. All it took was researching the FBI’s case files. Just another addition to the lexicon of the FBI’s racist legacy. This entire case should serve as another reminder of why we don’t trust the police to serve the interest of the people.
Seeing the evidence the FBI refused to pursue was too much for the parents. A Black homicide detective, who once served in Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, was so shocked at seeing footage that was withheld from him during his independent investigation, he was overcome with emotion. But this should be a lesson for Black people trying to change the system from the inside: The inside won’t ever treat us like them. We are never as “inside” the system as we think we are.
The ending of the documentary, with the family talking to the now-deceased Kendrick, is just heartbreaking. But it also speaks to the strength and enduring love of family, even in the face of the horrific injustice we have had to deal with in this god-forsaken white-supremacist country. We should not still have to have this kind of strength. But as this documentary, “Finding Kendrick Johnson,” proves, we do.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary.”
