Toward Freedom welcomed Jacqueline Luqman onto the board of directors on March 17. Jacqueline brings a background in activism and in journalism, and describes herself as a “Pan-Africanist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary.”Jacqueline co-hosts the weekday radio show, “By Any Means Necessary,” on Radio Sputnik as well as the weekly Black Power Media show, “Luqman Nation.” She also is the organizer of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Black Alliance for Peace and is an organizer with Pan-African Community Action. Besides all that, Jacqueline is the moderator and member of the Board of Social Action of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C.
Here’s what Jacqueline told Toward Freedom’s editor, Julie Varughese.
What got you interested in joining Toward Freedom’s board of directors?
I enjoyed the content of the publication and particularly like how Toward Freedom incorporates entertainment critique with political commentary.
Your background is in activism and in journalism. How do you reconcile what are normally seen as mutually exclusive endeavors?
Activism is the response to issues being reported in the news that are the result of politics and policies. Activism is the response to the injustice of those politics and policies on communities that have little to no say in how those policies are made. So reporting on the impact of those policies and politics on the people in the streets is a necessary aspect of activism, as it connects people who are doing the work with many who may not know what is even going on.
Tell us about Bruskie.
He is my 10-year-old furbaby. He thinks he is a person. He may be channeling my late husband, Abdus. But he is a complete 100-pound clown and big baby. He also is a very good Protest Dog, except when other people’s dogs are around, and then he forgets that he’s supposed to be Comrade To All Man and Dogkind. He’s working on that.
What is the next big story Toward Freedom should try to pursue?
The impact the war in Ukraine has had on de-prioritizing the U.S. dollar in developing countries in Africa; multi-polar solidarity among Global South and African nations, and in and between working-class movements in those countries; as well as the role of China as the new leader of the multi-polar world and what that means to the international working class.
This article was produced by Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service.
The Workers’ Party of Tunisia and several human rights groups have strongly objected to a deal proposed by European countries on the movement of migrants. They have called it a violation of sovereignty and the human rights of refugees.
On June 11, top European Union (EU) officials visited Tunisia and issued a joint statement after meeting President Kais Saied, saying that both parties have agreed to work jointly to end “irregular migration.”
Critics of the deal claim that the EU is using Tunisia’s precarious economic condition to force it to control the movement of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea in exchange for financial support, just like they did with Turkey and Libya.
The Workers’ Party claimed in a statement on June 15 that any such deal will make Tunisia a “policeman” patrolling its borders so that people trying to escape their deteriorating economic conditions can be stopped from going to Europe and punished.
Reports indicate that the EU is pushing Tunisia to establish a harsh border policy in exchange for its support for the country’s stalled bid to obtain a $1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.
Tunisia’s loan has been stalled for months due to Saied’s reluctance to implement the reforms demanded by the IMF. Saied is reportedly worried that his government—already facing large-scale popular resistance since his political coup in July 2021—will face another popular upsurge if the IMF’s demands to cut subsidies for essential commodities such as flour and fuel, cuts to social services, and privatization are implemented.
From Here to Equality by William A. Darity, Jr., and A. Kristen Mullen (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)
This year represents a pivotal moment in U.S. history and presents a unique opportunity to explore the primary cause behind its great wealth. In August 1619, about 20 enslaved Africans aboard an English ship called “White Lion” arrived from present-day Angola on the shores of what is now Hampton, Virginia. Over the next three centuries, multitudes of enslaved Africans would go on to endure some of the most oppressive, degrading and inhumane treatment in world history under the rule of U.S. law, while helping build the economic foundation that would allow the United States to become one of the wealthiest countries.
On July 4, 1776, the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed into law, thus declaring the original 13 colonies free from British rule and paving the way for the formation of the United States of America. July 4, 2022, marked the 246th anniversary of this document. What cannot be overlooked is the amount of time that has passed between July 1776 and now: 246 years and three months. In the meantime, slavery in United States officially began in August 1619 and was legally abolished on December 18, 1865, due to the 13th Amendment. From August 1619 to December 18, 1865, is a timespan of 246 years and four months. That means that the institution of slavery in the United States is one month older than the country’s history as a state free from British rule.
The nearly equidistant relationship between the duration of slavery and the history of the United States as a “free nation” is relevant for several reasons. History is essentially the study of events that have taken place over a given time-period. Some people seek to minimize U.S. slavery’s economic and social impact by pushing it into the distant past. When Joe Biden was running for the U.S. presidency in 2020, his remarks from the 1970s about reparations resurfaced: “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” At the time, the United States was barely 100 years removed from slavery. The issue with his declaration is it not only lacks a factual foundation. It also goes against the wartime order of “40 acres and a mule” that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman made in 1865 during the Civil War. Following his presidential victory in 1865, Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that reversed Sherman’s attempt to redistribute land to former slaves. Nearly all the land redistributed during the war was restored to its pre-war white owners.
What makes From Here to Equality (2020) poignant is its ability to effectively quantify the economic and social impact of slavery, while elucidating a simple and just solution: Reparations. The book begins with Darity and Mullen highlighting initial attempts for reparations by Black activists like Frederick Douglass, Callie D. Guy House and others following the aftermath of slavery. In 1898, House joined forces with Isaiah Dickerson to charter the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association (MRBP) in Nashville, Tennessee. According to Darity and Mullen (pg. 24), the MRBP’s mission was four-fold:
“identify ex-slaves and add their names to the petition for a pension;
lobby Congress to provide pensions for the nation’s estimated 1.9 million ex-slaves—21 percent of all African-Americans by 1899;
start local chapters and provide members with financial assistance when they became incapacitated by illness; and
provide a burial assistance payment when the member died.”
However, many people within the U.S. government felt threatened by the organization’s push for reparations.
As a result, House was convicted and jailed for almost a year due to claims that (pg. 25) “they (MRBP) had obtained money from the formerly enslaved by fraudulent circulars proclaiming that pensions and reparations were forthcoming.” The practice of U.S. government officials interfering with organizations that seek the liberation of Black people would continue well into the 1900s. Black leaders like Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others would all experience U.S. government repression. In 1999, the U.S. government was found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Dr. King.
From Here to Equality effectively articulates the relationship between slavery and the extreme wealth gap that exists between Black people and white people. (pg. 26)
“It is important to acknowledge that whites control political and economic power in this country. No shift in the power relationship will be possible unless the society as a whole takes action to transform the structural conditions to make racial equality a real possibility. Given the existing distribution of financial and real resources, blacks cannot close the racial wealth gap by independent and autonomous action.”
According to the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, “median black household net worth ($17,600) is only one-tenth of white net worth ($171,000).” The main reason is because after slavery ended, no lasting reparations were given to Black people in the form of land or wealth. Therefore, the myth that Black people can close the wealth gap through “hard work and determination” is completely illogical.
From Here to Equality is unlike any other book written about slavery, its impact on the global economy, and what’s owed to the descendants of slaves. The present moment represents a unique opportunity for the U.S. government to earnestly reckon with one of the greatest sins of its past and implement a reparations program that can help repair the conditions of Black people in the United States. Darity and Mullen close out their work by introducing (pg. 487) “several compelling calculations for monetary restitution.”
One of the more conservative estimates shows that each eligible Black descendant of U.S. slavery is owed $267,000. While H.R. 40, the 2021 congressional bill that establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans is a step in the right direction, significant pressure should be applied to not only Congress but all politicians to ensure that reparations are paid out to the Black descendants of U.S. slavery.
Timothy Harun is a writer and actor based in Los Angeles. He holds a B.A. in journalism from Hampton University.
People take part in a protest against the military offensive led by Libyan National Army commander Khalifa Haftar, at Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli, Libya, on May 17, 2019 / credit: Xinhua/Amru Salahuddien
Editor’s Note: The following opinion was first published in Black Agenda Report.
If U.S. imperialism could only be said to be one thing, it is audacious. Recently U.S. rulers have been making a fuss over Russian troops on their own border with Ukraine, while 1,000 U.S. National Guard soldiers were deployed to the Horn of Africa, in countries where the U.S. shares no borders and is actually more than 7,396 miles away.
Ever since its government was destroyed in 2011 in the first operation of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), Libya has been the quintessential victim of U.S. audacity in Africa. Now, led by the United States, Western officials have been talking up a UN-led peace process in Libya that insists on “inclusive” and “credible” elections starting on December 24, despite serious disputes over how they should be held.
Of course the Libyan people should have the right to decide their leaders, forms of government, and politics. In fact, however, it is extremely difficult to see through the murk created by the inhumanity of the U.S.-EU-NATO axis of domination.
But what sort of process for nominating candidates are the Libyan people able to exercise? How credible and inclusive can an election be that is cast in the midst of a civil war and with the United States presiding over the country’s affairs like a Godfather?
The imperialist structure responsible for leading the overthrow of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya , AFRICOM, just backed the election efforts of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Richard Norland. This was after Norland took to Twitter to scold those discrediting the elections saying, “We call on all parties to de-escalate tensions and to respect the Libyan-led, legal, and administrative electoral processes underway.”
For these emissaries of empire, such statements are mere words of formality, empty rhetoric meant to minimize the glare of the contradiction: they created a failed state.
Reports have surfaced about the likely re-emergence of violence which has been on pause during a very fragile ceasefire. There have been stolen voter cards , an allegedly politically motivated disqualification of 25 of the 98 presidential hopefuls by the election commission, a chaotic appeals process, and, of course, a delay in the final list of candidates.
Then there were also the road blocks by gunmen backing eastern military chief and former CIA operative Khalifa Haftar to prevent travel to a court in the southern city of Sebha set to examine the appeal by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi to run for president. It is no surprise that Haftar himself is also a presidential candidate.
Initially Saif al-Islam, son of the murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, was being excluded from a bid for presidency by the High Elections Commission. Before a Libyan court ruled on December 2 that Gaddafi can run for president, the case had endured an armed attack on the Sebha Court of Appeals followed by a protest in front of the Sebha Court at the end of November, organized by the people of the city of Ghat against the closure of the court by force.
The protesters, in support of Saif Gaddafi, demanding free and fair elections, and an impartial judiciary said, “…there are those who want to occupy the country and restore colonialism again, and who threaten to divide the country according to the interests of the international powers.”
Black and Brown people of the Global South know full well about what the protesters from Ghat are protesting. The capitalist, white surpremacist order has to disparage people-centered projects and legitimize anything in the interest of racist neoliberalism.
Some of the most transparent and participatory elections in the world, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, are denounced and demonized by the same international powers, its institutional extensions like the OAS, and its corporate media mouthpieces. Beneath that newswire is the irony of a Libya literally destroyed by the same forces. Now, ten years later, it is being forced into a largely illegitimate process.
The title “dictator” is bandied around for all leaders not compliant to Western interests, as was commonly done to the late Muammar Gaddafi. A common sense question one might ask is: Why go through such lengths to prevent the candidacy of the son of a dictator supposedly intent on reestablishing his father’s dynasty?
Once the non-white working class inside the belly of the beast realize that the United States is an undemocratic oligarchy that cannot pretend to offer, to the rest of the world, a nonexistent “democracy,” then it will begin to see that the internationalist fight to support the people of Libya is the same as the domestic fight to liberate those struggling for justice.
