Jacqueline Luqman on the U.S. State Controlling Hollywood

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.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in The Burning Spear. Light edits have been made to conform this piece to TF’s style.

This month, Regions Bank, a financial institution with branches in the U.S. South and Midwest, notified the Black nonprofit, African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF), that the bank was “exiting” its 20-year relationship, closing accounts, withdrawing lines of credit and canceling mortgage loans.

This assault on the ability of African people to build economic self-reliance was the latest in a series of actions revealing government and corporate cooperation targeting the Black community programs of the Uhuru (Freedom) Movement, including its popular Women’s Health Center, Black Power Vanguard Basketball Court, “One Africa! One Nation!” Marketplaces, Gary Brooks Community Garden, Uhuru Jiko Commercial Kitchens and Bakery Cafe, Akwaaba Hall events venues, Black Power 96 radio station, Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles stores, Uhuru Foods & Pies and Uhuru House community centers for Black people.

Facebook has blocked the ability for supporters to crowdfund for Uhuru programs through their personal pages. GoFundMe froze over $9,000 in donations for the Hands Off Uhuru! Legal Defense Fund for more than three months until the group’s lawyers took legal action to get the funds released. The Stripe payment processing company also blocked contributions to the group for a period of time.

On February 14, the Pinellas County Commission revoked $36,801 in funding that had been previously approved for WBPU 96.3 FM Black community radio station in St. Petersburg, Florida, after expressing political opposition to its association with the Black power Uhuru Movement.

These economic sanctions have come on the heels of a series of violent government-initiated attacks on the Uhuru Movement that began in earnest with the July 29 militarized FBI raid on seven Uhuru properties. That also includes two acts of arson, one arrest and interrogation, censorship in the removal of a change.org petition, and a U.S. State Department announcement of a $10 million reward for information that could tie Uhuru leaders to Russian government interference in U.S. elections and public opinion influencing.

Ona Zené Yeshitela, Board President of APEDF, says, “Our organization has built over 50 economic institutions, financed through our own fundraising work and the donations of thousands of people. These banks don’t want Black people to be able to feed, clothe and house ourselves. They do not want money circulating in the Black community.”

Omali Yeshitela is founder of the Uhuru Movement and Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party. He is considered the primary target of the FBI raids and reportedly pending indictments on charges of serving as a pawn of the Russian government. A 1960s field organizer registering voters with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the 81-year-old Yeshitela has fought for Black Power for over 50 years.

He charges, “These banks are collaborating with the government to deny Black people the right to have free healthcare, to have economic development in our communities, for our children to have safe basketball courts. They want us on welfare. But we’ve got a right to have our own power. These banks are imposing economic sanctions on our movement because we are engaged in unifying the African Nation that represents an existential threat to the continuation of the colonial mode of production on which they are built and maintained.”

Yeshitela likens the economic aggression against Uhuru Movement institutions to those the U.S. government and society made against Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the bombing of Tulsa’s “Black wall street” and the destruction of the Black Panther Party Black-community survival programs.

He accuses the U.S. government of imposing economic sanctions against the Black-led Uhuru Movement, as they do against countries that do not bow to U.S. world domination, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, China and Russia.

The actions of Regions Bank and other financial institutions come after widespread public exposure of the role of the slave trade in the birth of the U.S. banking and insurance industries and during a time of growing demands for reparations to Black people for slavery and colonialism.

A campaign has been launched to defend the Uhuru Movement, its leaders and institutions, chronicled at HandsOffUhuru.org. Supporters are raising funds for legal defense, mobilizing for protest demonstration at U.S. federal buildings, organizing call-ins to government officials and demanding “Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!”

Burning Spear is the official organ of the African People’s Socialist Party.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

This film can be viewed on several platforms.

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.”