The One Africa! One Nation! Marketplace in front of the Uhuru House at the Gary Brooks Community Garden in the majority-Black north side of Saint Louis, Missouri / credit: Black Power Blueprint
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.
Uhuru Wa Kulea African Women’s Health Center under construction in North St. Louis. It is being built as part of the Black Power Blueprint by the APSP to address the issue of infant and maternal mortality / credit: Burning Spear
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.
A community basketball court named, “Black Power Vanguard Basketball Court,” finished construction in 2022 in the majority-Black north side of Saint Louis, Missouri, as part of Black Power Blueprint / credit: Black Power Blueprint
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.”
A volunteer work day at the Gary Brooks Community Garden in the majority-Black north side of Saint Louis, Missouri / credit: Burning Spear
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.”
The African Doula Project trained 14 African women to become doulas/midwives at a session held at Akwaaba Hall/Uhuru House in the majority-Black north side of Saint Louis on the day of the FBI raid against the Uhuru Movement on July 29 / credit: Burning Spear
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.
A four-plex apartment building in the majority-Black north side Saint Louis that serves as housing for the African Independence Workforce Program, creating jobs for those re-entering the community from the U.S. prison system / credit: Burning Spear
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.
Photograph of Mykael Ash’s painting that depicts the 1917 East Saint Louis Massacre / credit: Frances Madeson
Every year on July 2, the extended family of 67-year-old Dhati Kennedy gathers on the banks of the Mississippi River to pray, sing and place a memorial wreath in the muddy waters.
“My father’s people came up from the South looking for a better life,” Kennedy told Toward Freedom. “But the perceived advancement of Black people at that time was often met with violence—and state sanctioned violence.”
About 60 family members clad in white join Kennedy every year to honor their grandfather, who died a hero defending the family from a pogrom waged by thousands of white people who swarmed Black neighborhoods on that day in 1917 in East Saint Louis, a riverfront city in Illinois. They also mourn and celebrate their grandmother, who helped pilot the family’s makeshift raft across the river to the larger city of Saint Louis in Missouri. This feat came after police closed the Eads Bridge, in what has been viewed as a way to prevent East Saint Louis’ Black residents from escaping. His grandmother was a widow for just a few weeks, though, before dying of pneumonia.
Escaping White Terror
Kennedy’s father, Samuel, was 7 years old when he and his siblings hung onto a vessel made out of doors ripped from their hinges. Having heard screams and gunshots, Kennedy’s teenage brothers scrambled to build the raft the family used to escape. Many witness accounts reported white gunmen setting ablaze the homes of Black families and shooting them as they fled the inferno with children in their arms.
Earlier in the day, Kennedy’s grandfather lost his life after luring six of the white killers away from his wife and children. He killed two of the attackers before the others murdered him.
“We give thanks to God and to our ancestors. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here now. We pour libations and say, ‘Ashé,’” Kennedy said, describing the African spiritual act of pouring liquid that has been blessed to honor ancestors. Ashé is a Yoruba concept that originated in what is now Nigeria. It is used to describe the force of the universe. To some, it can mean, “So be it.”
Dhati Kennedy / credit: Frances Madeson
Little-Known History’s Impact
It’s a heavy legacy, one that Kennedy tries to wear as lightly as possible, so he can persevere in his lifelong mission to spread knowledge about this history.
The descendants and their supporters’ efforts reached a pinnacle in 2017, the massacre’s centenary year. Interviews and articles abounded in local, national and international media. Plus, ceremonies culminated in a march featuring thousands of people from both sides of the river.
Yet, five years later, the East Saint Louis Race Massacre is still not taught in the Illinois public-school history curriculum. Neither are the histories of similar atrocities that killed Black people and destroyed homes and businesses in other cities in Illinois, such as Evanston, Springfield and Chicago.
“We know that what happened in 1917 had an impact on this region economically, politically, socially, demographically—and had a huge impact psychologically,” Kennedy explained. “If you truly want to end racism, let’s tell the truth. Let’s get it all out there. Prejudice from individuals? That’s not the thing. It’s the systemic stuff holding us down that hurts us most.”
What Led to the Race Massacre
In the days preceding the 1917 race massacre, striking white workers from Aluminum Ore Company were out patrolling Black neighborhoods in a Ford Model-T car, firing potshots at Black workers, who—with few other options for employment—had been hired to replace them. Wage-seeking white men had become scabs, too. But the strikers terrorized the Black community. The East St. Louis Daily Journal, a local newspaper, had also run a series vilifying Black people migrating from southern states, calling them “Black colonizers” and blaming them for a crime wave. In May 1917, the paper had on several occasions claimed to predict future race riots, according to historian Charles L. Lumpkins.
The community was not completely defenseless, however, as some of the local Black men had served in World War I. While they didn’t have big armaments, they could stand guard outside their houses and shoot back with their squirrel-hunting rifles. Some were crack shots. On July 1, when two such Black defenders aimed fire at two white men in a Model-T they’d assumed had come gunning for Black workers, they accidentally killed two undercover police officers driving an unmarked car.
The next day, the duo’s error unleashed a mob of thousands of white people. In the end, more than 100 Black residents were slaughtered. Black adults and children reportedly had been beheaded, burned alive and drowned. Some were beaten with clubs and stones, while others were hung from street lamps. This came while officials either turned a blind eye or made matters worse by—for example—closing the main route of escape.
An estimated $400,000 worth of homes and businesses were destroyed. That would amount to $9.6 million today. The destruction displaced an estimated 6,000 Black East Saint Louisans.
“Much of the neighborhood where my father lived is vacant lots now,” Kennedy said. “Just acres and acres of vacant lots.”
A snapshot 105 years later leads to a tally of compounding losses: The East Saint Louis economy is limping along while the landscape remains blighted. Its population shrunk by 58 percent from 60,000 people in 1917 to 25,000 people in 2020. Plus, almost a third of its overwhelmingly Black residents live beneath the federal poverty line.
“It’s the wealthy who benefit from the turmoil that everyone else is in,” Kennedy said.
A political cartoon about the East Saint Louis massacre of 1917. The original caption read, “Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?” That referred to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s catch-phrase (“The world must be made safe for democracy”) to convince the U.S. Congress to declare war on Germany, allowing the United States to become a combatant in World War I / credit: William Charles Morris for the New York Evening Mail
The Role of Reparations
Jeffrey “JD” Dixon is director of Empire 13, a grassroots activist organization originally formed to combat racial discrimination at Empire Comfort Systems, a nearby manufacturer. Then we have the Rev. Dr. Larita Rice Barnes of Metro East Organizing Coalition, a faith-based grassroots organization working for racial and economic dignity. Both organizations form part of a coalition building a political program from the ashes of the 1917 massacre. They believe the community deserves recompense for the cruelty and crimes that smashed the city like an insect, but never eradicated its heart.
“East Saint Louis is a city that’s so full of love that—no matter where you go—even to the gang bangers, which we have, there’s a spot of love,” Barnes said. “And even though [the] media has amped up a lot of negativity, we are striving to tell our own story, and share the truth about our people. We are known as the City of Champions.”
She’s referring to jazz composer Miles Davis; choreographer Katherine Dunham; and R&B legends Ike and Tina Turner. They had either been raised in the city or lived there. That’s not to mention a slew of athletes, including Major League Baseball players.
“We need economic relief and economic justice,” Dixon said. “America is an economic powerhouse because of slave labor, because of systemic economic oppression of Black labor—be it from lower wages, mass incarceration, icing us out of government contracts. Our Black communities have a Third-World country status, and we’re treated like second-class citizens.”
Dixon is still incensed Black residents of East Saint Louis could not cover damages through their property insurance policies because insurers said they needed riot insurance.
“There was no accountability for the hundreds of lives that were lost or for the millions of dollars of properties destroyed, the generational wealth lost from businesses and homes that could’ve been passed down to the next generation,” Dixon said. “Some of those businesses could’ve been Fortune 500 companies.”
A screen shot of a petition to Illinois elected officials, demanding reparations for the victims and descendants of the 1917 East Saint Louis Massacre
What Justice Might Look Like
Barnes and Dixon’s program stresses new ways to redirect public resources to the communities that have suffered the most systemic economic oppression. That could include direct payments, business and home loans on advantageous terms, grants, restoration of felon rights, and state legislation against race-based discrimination.
To commemorate the massacre, the group held a march through the old Black neighborhoods. Once teeming with homes and businesses, it is now an urban landscape of vacant lots. In an attempt to reclaim the streets and unite the past with the present with every step and chant, a few dozen marchers who braved the pouring rain on Saturday called out: “We are the people. The mighty, mighty people. Fighting for justice. Justice for the people.”
Barnes has considered that race-based reparations can cause resentment, and that an alternative course to improve the material conditions of Black people may be to lift up the multi-racial working class. But she is concerned about Black people who languish in poverty, beneath the working class.
“I believe in lifting from the bottom up, and reaching those closest to the pain,” she explained. “Working class-based reparations would fail to reach some people, and we can’t build successfully by leaving people behind.”
Barnes brought the struggle for reparations back to the memory of their ancestors.
“It was something that they wanted and couldn’t achieve,” she said. “But perhaps we can.”
Frances Madeson writes about liberation struggles and the arts that inspire them. She is the author of the comic political novel, Cooperative Village. Follow her on Twitter at@FrancesMadeson.
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.”
Sean Blackmon, activist, organizer and broadcaster, currently serving as co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary”; Jacqueline Luqman, Black Alliance for Peace Mid-Atlantic Region Co-Coordinator, co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary” and host of “Luqman Nation” on the Black Power Media YouTube channel; Kamau Franklin, former practicing attorney, first program director of New York City Police-Watch and co-founder of Black Power Media; and Karanja Gaçuça, a U.S.-based Kenyan journalist, publisher of thebriefscoop.com and executive editor of panafricmedia.org; discussed the power of story at the first-ever African Peoples’ Forum. The event was held December 11 at the Eritrean Civic & Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. Journalist Hermela Aregawi and activist Yolian Ogbu moderated.
The first and second panels can be viewed here and here.
TF editor Julie Varughese reported on this event being held to counter the Biden administration’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit.
