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.
A protest took place November 25, 2021, denouncing violence against women in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. Dominican leftist, feminist, anti-racist and Haitian immigrant community organizations participated in the march under the slogan “Haitian Lives Matter” and confronted the government’s immigration policy / credit: Vladimir Fuentes
Correction: The definition of Haitians of Dominican descent has been clarified. The length of the constructed portion of the border fence has been corrected. The name that Dominican officials had given for a victim has been updated, based on newly obtained information.
Whenever Malena goes to work or heads out to study, she tries to leave her home very early and return after dark. The 33-year-old mother of five does so for fear of being detained by the Dominican Republic’s immigration agents, even though she is Dominican.
Born and raised in a batey, a settlement around a sugar mill in the San Pedro de Macorís province, Malena is the daughter of Haitian sugar cane workers who arrived in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, during the U.S.-backed Dominican dictatorship of Joaquin Balaguer.
Malena now lives in La Romana, also in the eastern part of the country. She has three sisters, two of whom have an identification card, acquired through a regularization plan for foreigners. Meanwhile, she and her other sister don’t have any documents. Close encounters with immigration authorities are normal.
“On a trip to the capital, Migration [officers] stopped the bus,” Malena recounted. “They said to a young man: ‘Papers, moreno!’ And since he only had a Haitian ID card, they took him off the bus. They only look for Black people. Luckily, they didn’t look at me. Sometimes by WhatsApp, I’m warned not to pass through some place because Migration is there. It’s always a danger.”
Malena and her sisters are some of the more than 200,000 people affected in the last 10 years by Constitutional Court ruling 168-13, according to estimates of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. This ruling deprived Dominicans of Haitian descent who had been born after 1929 of their citizenship. As such, the impacts of statelessness are rampant.
“My children have no papers,” Malena said. “Without papers, you can’t have health insurance. You can’t have a good job. I had to repeat 8th grade because I couldn’t take the national test. The same thing happened to my son.”
A Dominican soldier stands by a border wall the Dominican Republic built to keep out Haitian migrants / credit: La Prensa Latina
Mass Deportations
Since 2021, the government of Luis Abinader has been promoting a campaign of mass deportations of the Haitian immigrant community. This also affects Dominicans of Haitian descent. Those are people who were born in the Dominican Republic, have Haitian parents or grandparents, and often are stateless, as in Malena’s case. The head of the General Directorate of Migration, Venancio Alcántara, declared recently that between August and April, more than 200,000 Haitians had been deported. “A record in the history of this institution.”
This statistic shows its true dimensions when contrasted with the size of the Haitian migrant community and the population of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Although no recent official figures exist, Dominican Ambassador to Spain Juan Bolívar wrote an opinion piece in June that estimated both populations, when counted together, at less than 900,000 people, or about 8 percent of the country’s population of 10.6 million. Bolívar’s estimation is based on the 2017 National Immigrant Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office.
That means 22 percent of Haitians had been deported between August and April.
This is why Dominican and Haitian organizations have warned of the danger that the mass deportation campaign could turn into a process of open ethnic cleansing and consolidate an apartheid regime, as previously reported in Toward Freedom.
The red dot indicates the location of the border towns of Anse-A-Pitres in Haiti and Pedernales in the Dominican Republic / source: Google Maps
Extortions, Theft and Violence at the Border
One of the flagship projects of the Dominican government is the expansion of a border fence. Previous governments built the first 23 kilometers (14 miles). Now, fence construction is continuing, so it can cover 164 kilometers (101 miles). The Abinader government insists in forums, such as the United Nations, on the need for the “international community” to militarily occupy and “pacify” Haiti, complaining about the “burden” the neighboring country represents for the Dominican Republic.
However, the violence of the Dominican state has crossed the border into Haiti.
On March 19, members of the Dominican military attacked the Haitian border village of Tilory in the north, killing two people—Guerrier Kiki and Joseph Irano—and wounding others in their attempt to suppress a protest. According to a statement signed by Dominican and Haitian organizations, the Dominican military regularly engages in extortion and theft, including the seizure of motorcycles and other property, which led to the protest.
This is not the only recent cross-border incident. On August 5, an agent of the Dominican Directorate General of Customs (DGA) shot and killed 23-year-old Haitian, Irmmcher Cherenfant, at the border crossing between Pedernales and Anse-A-Pitres, in the southern end of the north-to-south Dominican-Haitian border. Dominican officials identified Cherenfant as Georges Clairinoir. The DGA and the Dominican Ministry of Defense justified Cherenfant’s killing as an instance of self-defense. Dominican social organizations questioned this version, pointing out contradictions in the official communiqués.
A human rights defender from Anse-A-Pitres who spoke with witnesses said the conflict began when the victim refused to pay a customs guard to be allowed to transport a power generator purchased in the Dominican Republic. After Cherenfant was killed, a struggle ensued, in which the guard was disarmed by Haitians. Subsequently, the Dominican military fired weapons of war indiscriminately into Haitian territory, injuring two people. The human rights defender, who works for a local organization, asked not to be identified for security reasons.
The Dominican government paid a compensation of 400,000 pesos (approximately $7,200) to Cherenfant’s wife the following week. But when the community mobilized on August 12 against military violence and in memory of the victim, the Dominican military threatened some of the protest organizers that they would be prohibited from entering Dominican territory.
A protest held in 2022 Anse-A-Pitres, Haiti after a Dominican customs guard killed a Haitian / credit: Jean Aicard Pierre
‘A Vibrant Democracy’
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Santo Domingo on April 12 and met with Abinader. According to State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, they discussed their “deep ties” and “shared democratic values,” as well as regional security issues, including the “urgent situation in Haiti.”
During her visit, Sherman recorded a video message in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, extolling the country as a tourist attraction and calling the political regime a “vibrant and energetic democracy… a strong and exceptional partner with the United States of America.”
In her tour of the colonial zone, Sherman can be seen escorted by the mayor of the National District, Carolina Mejia, a member of the ruling Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), and by Kin Sánchez, a guide of the Tourism Cluster. Significantly, Sánchez was part of a mob led by the neo-fascist organization, Antigua Orden Dominicana, which attacked and shouted racist slogans against a cultural activity held on October 12 that was intended to commemorate Indigenous resistance. The complicity of the National Police caused nationwide repercussions.
After Sherman’s visit, Republican U.S. Congressmember Maria Elvira Salazar and Democratic U.S. Congressmember Adriano Espaillat, announced the U.S. State Department would withdraw a November 19 travel alert warning Black tourists of racial profiling by Dominican immigration authorities. The April 17 travel advisory only mentions risks related to criminality. Dominican Tourism Minister David Collado welcomed the move as a “very positive and appropriate” measure, describing the U.S. as a “strategic partner.”
Meanwhile, two days after Sherman’s visit, Haitian driver Louis Charleson was shot and killed by a military officer in the Dominican border town of Jimaní following a traffic altercation. A young Haitian man was wounded, too. The Haitian Support Group for Returnees and Refugees (GARR) denounced the impunity that covers the Dominican military and police in the border area. The agent who murdered Irmmcher Cherenfant last year in Pedernales continues to hold the same position at the Directorate General of Customs. He has not been dismissed or prosecuted.
“As always, Dominican officials present the simplistic argument of self-defense to comfort the offending soldiers with impunity,” GARR stated.
Vladimir Fuentes is the pen name of a freelance journalist based in the Dominican Republic.
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.
