Grand juries issue more licenses to kill Black people: Justice for Jayland Walker and Timothy McCree Johnson!
April 21, 2023 Stephen Millies
Akron, Ohio, April 17.
Two more atrocities prove that police in the United States almost never face any consequences for killing Black people. On April 17, grand juries refused to indict police for the deaths of Jayland Walker in Ohio and Timothy McCree Johnson in Virginia.
Twenty-five-year-old Jayland Walker was a DoorDash driver who the Akron, Ohio, cops chased shortly after midnight on June 27, 2022, for an alleged traffic violation. Walker’s real crime was Driving While Black.
After Walker got out of his car and ran, eight police officers fired 94 times at him. Forty-six of the bullets struck the Black man.
Jayland Walker’s “body was riddled from his face down to his knees,” said the Rev. Roderick Pounds, pastor at Akron’s Second Baptist Church, who saw a video of the shooting. After butchering Walker, the cops still proceeded to handcuff him.
Timothy McCree Johnson was executed in Fairfax County, Virginia―outside Washington, D.C.―on Feb. 22. The unarmed Black man got the death penalty for allegedly shoplifting a pair of sunglasses from the Nordstrom department store in a Tyson Corners shopping mall.
Even the police admit that Johnson was fatally shot after he had stopped running. He was complying with the police order to “get on the ground” when he was killed.
People in Akron took to the streets on April 17 to protest the whitewash of Jayland Walker’s killing. Cars converged on the site where Walker was shot so many times.
“I just stood there, thinking, ‘Really? Out of 46 shots, it’s OK?,” Toni Weems told the Akron Beacon-Journal. “It doesn’t make sense. How can an officer shoot somebody when they’re just running away?”
Raina Lasley thought the grand jury let the officers get away with murder. “Now everybody is going to be afraid for their lives,” said Lasley. “We can’t just let this go or it’s going to keep happening.”
Akron, Ohio, April 17.
No justice, no peace!
More protests in Akron followed on April 19. People marched and blocked intersections demanding justice. Cars formed a convoy.
Police viciously used pepper spray and so-called chemical irritants against demonstrators. That’s gas warfare against Black people.
One onlooker, William Dancy, held his fist up. “This is to let them know that we’re ready for change, we’re not going to allow this to keep going on,” he said.
People are demanding justice for Timothy Johnson in Fairfax County, Virginia, as well. During the 83-year existence of the Fairfax County police, only one cop has ever been convicted of homicide.
Officer Adam Torres was convicted of manslaughter after fatally shooting John Geer, who was standing unarmed in the doorway of his Springfield, Virginia, home. Torres spent just 10 months in jail for killing a human being.
Compare that to Timothy Jackson, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for supposedly shoplifting a $159 jacket from a New Orleans department store in 1996.
Also serving a life sentence in Louisiana is Ronald Lee Washington, who was convicted of swiping a basketball jersey from a Shreveport store. Paul Lewis Hayes got a life term in Kentucky for passing a $88.30 bad check.
A total of 3,200 inmates in the United States are serving life sentences for similar non-violent offenses.
Killer cops go free while Omali Yeshitela indicted
The Ohio and Virginia grand juries didn’t operate independently. As former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Solomon Wachtler noted, a district attorney can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
In Virginia, it was police that influenced the grand jury not to indict police Sgt. William Shifflett on manslaughter charges for killing Timothy Johnson.
Under federal law, the police killings of Jayland Walker and Timothy McCree Johnson were certainly violations of their civil rights. What’s more of a right than the right to live?
This federal civil rights statute was passed after decades of lynchers, like those who tortured 14-year-old Emmett Till to death, being let free by racist courts.
Biden called the bogus charges of war crimes issued against Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin “justified.” Biden’s Justice Department has just indicted African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela and three other activists for opposing the proxy war against Russia.
The 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden didn’t cast their ballots to jail the 81-year-old Yeshitela for exercising his right to free speech. The feds should prosecute the killer cops in Akron and Fairfax County instead.
We need to organize the power of the people to make them do it.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... e-johnson/
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Who Gets to Talk About How Police Need to Change?
A FAIR study of NYT coverage from George Floyd to Tyre Nichols
JULIE HOLLAR, HIMADRI SETH AND ISAIAH GUTMAN
The New York Times (6/3/22) often framed police reform from the perspective of Democratic politicians rather than the communities most impacted by police violence.
Since the brutal police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the country, how have news media covered issues of policing policy and police reform?
To offer perspective on this question, FAIR looked at which kinds of sources have been most prominent in the New York Times‘ coverage of these issues, and therefore are given the most power to shape the narrative. We compared three time periods: June 2020, when the BLM protests were at their height; May–June 2022, leading up to and encompassing the two-year anniversary of those protests; and mid-January to mid-February 2023, when the police killing of Tyre Nichols was prominent in news coverage and reignited conversations around police reform.
We found that, overall, the Times leaned most heavily on official (government and law enforcement) sources when reporting on the issue of policing policy—giving the biggest platform to the targets of reform, rather than the people who would most benefit from it. We also found a prominent stress on party politics and a lack of racial and gender diversity among sources.
However, we also found that the Times‘ 2023 Tyre Nichols coverage offered a wider diversity of sources, and a greater percentage of Black sources, than in the previous time periods. This appeared to result in part from many of the articles focusing on deeper reporting on the local situation in Memphis, a majority-Black city (unlike, for instance, Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed).
In contrast, the 2022 articles focused more on policing and crime as an election topic at a national level. The 2020 articles covered the broadest range of issues and geography, but with particular attention to the protests, and the federal and local legislative responses.
The most recent coverage had more voices critical of policing policy and practices than in the previous study periods—though, at the same time, those voices came less from protests on the streets and more from advocacy groups, lawyers, academics, religious leaders and general public sources, and so shifted from the raw anger and “defund the police” demands of 2020 to less radical accountability measures.
Methodology
Eliminating passing mentions and opinion pieces, we examined New York Times news articles centrally about policing policy or reform. We found 10 articles (with 58 sources) meeting our criteria between May 1 and June 30, 2022, and 16 articles (111 sources) between January 13 and February 10, 2023 (two weeks before and after the main day of the Tyre Nichols protests). Because the Times covered the issue so extensively in 2020, we took a random sample of 25 articles (142 sources) meeting our criteria from June 2020.
Sources were coded for occupation, gender, race/ethnicity and party affiliation (for government officials and politicians). Each source could receive more than one code for occupation (e.g., academic and former law enforcement) and race/ethnicity (e.g., Black and Asian American).
The racial binary
The movement to protest racist policing has been led primarily by Black activists, many of them women. It is a movement fundamentally about race, racism and white supremacy. Yet white sources handily outnumbered Black sources in coverage of police reform in two of the three periods studied, and men outnumbered women by roughly three-to-one in all three.
Sources by Race/Ethnicity in NYT Articles on Police Reform
Of sources whose race could be identified, 52% were white and 40% Black in the 2020 data. In the 2022 data, white sources decreased slightly, but dominated Black sources by an even greater margin: 48% to 30%.
In the 2023 data, that trend reversed, and Black sources reached 66%, while white sources dropped to 31%.
One thing that didn’t change across the time periods was the New York Times‘ reliance on male sources: Men were 72% of sources with an identifiable gender in 2020, 74% in 2022 and 76% in 2023.
Policing is not a strictly Black-and-white issue, of course, and the coverage played out against the backdrop of rising xenophobia and anti-Asian hate resulting from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, with many using rising bias crimes against people perceived as Asian as an excuse to increase policing. Yet such voices were largely excluded from the conversation at the Times.
In 2020, 6% of sources were Hispanic and 2% were Indigenous; 1% were Asian-American and none were of Middle Eastern descent. In 2022, Times sources expanded a bit from the racial binary, with 14% Hispanic sources and 10% Asian-American. (No Indigenous sources or sources of Middle Eastern descent were quoted in 2022.) In 2023, that diversity disappeared, and of the 99 sources with identifiable race/ethnicity, only 2% were of Asian descent and 1% were Hispanic; none were of Indigenous or Middle Eastern descent.
Government knows best?
The bias toward white and male sources—and the decrease in white sources in 2023—can be explained partly by the New York Times‘ bias toward government and law enforcement sources, both of which are disproportionately white, male fields.
In June 2020, a majority of all sources (55%) were current or former government officials—not including law enforcement, which formed the second-largest share of sources quoted, at 17%. Two years later, government sources had dropped to 40%, while law enforcement stayed roughly the same, at 16%; politicians running for office increased from less than 1% of 2020 sources to 5% of 2022 sources. In 2023, government sources dropped yet again, to only 22% of sources, and law enforcement remained steady at 16%.
Meanwhile, activists (protesters or organizers) accounted for 10% of 2020 sources, and representatives of professional advocacy groups accounted for 11%. In 2022, when street protests were relatively much smaller compared to 2020, activist voices were missing entirely, and professional advocate sources—such as the president of the NAACP and the director of Smart Justice California—increased to 21%. In 2023, the total across these two groups increased, with advocates accounting for 21% of sources and activists for 9%, and a greater number of non-governmental sources such as lawyers, academics and religious leaders appeared than in the previous time periods.
Combined, more than 7 in 10 of all sources quoted in 2020, more than 5 in 10 in 2022, and nearly 4 in 10 in 2023 were the government and law enforcement officials the protests sought to hold accountable. Only about 2 in 10 in 2020 and 2022, and 3 in 10 in 2023, were civil society members protesting or advocating for (or, in some cases, against) reform.
Sources by Occupation in NYT Articles on Police Reform
The proportion of white sources in these stories was high among law-enforcement sources (54% in 2020, 67% in 2022, 56% in 2023) and, less uniformly, among government sources (54% in 2020, 39% in 2022, 33% in 2023). Black sources were represented most among activists (79% in 2020, 89% in 2023) and advocates (20% in 2020, 58% in 2022, 52% in 2023).
In 2020 and 2022, women were likewise better represented among activists and advocates than among government and law enforcement sources. In 2020, 47% of advocate sources and 36% of activist sources were female, as compared to 22% of government and 17% of law enforcement sources. In 2022, 50% of advocates were female, compared to 13% of government and 22% of law enforcement sources.
In 2023, however, female government sources rose to 38%, a higher proportion of women in that year than among advocates (17%) or activists (29%). (Law enforcement sources continued to be a low 17% women.)
The increases in racial and ethnic diversity from 2020 to 2022 came largely within government sources, with officials quoted including the Black mayor of New York City, Eric Adams; Asian-American House representatives Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna; and Hispanic legislators Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ted Cruz.
This diversification of government sources happened along with a shift in partisanship of sources: While Democrats dominated the conversation in 2020, with 51 sources to Republicans’ 25, Republicans were almost entirely absent in 2022, with a single source (Cruz) to Democrats’ 25. The absence of Republican sources continued in 2023, when 18 of 20 sources with party affiliations were Democrats, and one was an independent.
This near-total absence of Republicans from the conversation reflects in part the switch in power at the national level; Republicans controlled both the White House and Senate in 2020, and both had flipped to the Democrats by 2022. It also reflects the reality that the massive nature of the protests forced Republicans to address the issue of police reform in 2020, but they were no longer talking about it much in 2022—nor were outlets like the New York Times forcing them to.
Shift in sources
The striking shift in the race of sources in the 2023 time period is not only about the decrease in government sources; it appears to be partly due to the focus on Memphis, where nearly two-thirds of residents and more than half of the police force (including its police chief, and all five of the officers charged with the murder of Nichols) are Black.
The online headline of a New York Times story (1/27/23) pointed to the kind of sources whose viewpoint framed the story.
In one front-page article (2/5/23) that focused on the “Scorpion” unit that killed Tyre Nichols, headlined “Memphis Unit Driven by Fists and Violence,” a team of six Times reporters quoted 15 different sources, eight of whom were either victims of the unit or family members of victims; all victims and family members were Black. (These were coded as “General Public”: people without a particular professional or activist affiliation, but with experience relevant to the subject they are speaking on.) Only three of the total sources were government officials, and none were law enforcement.
Some articles not exclusively about the Nichols killing still focused on race. “Officers’ Race Turns Focus to System” (1/29/23) featured 14 sources across an array of nine different types of occupations; none were current or former government, and 11 were Black.
The focus on the Tyre Nichols killing also translated at the Times into more of a focus on police accountability, compared with coverage that did not center on police killings. In the absence of a police killing, an article (1/27/23) focused on policing policy appeared under the print-edition headline, “Heavier Police Presence Sees Success as Crime Drops in New York Subways.” It featured four New York government officials, two of whom touted increased policing. Only one advocate questioned those officials, calling for more frequent subway and bus service as an alternative form of public safety. The headline reflects whose narrative was given more credence by the Times.
That such an article so credulous of increased policing, and so light on critical sources, could appear against the backdrop of the Tyre Nichols story illustrates the blinkered nature of the Times‘ improved coverage. While high-profile incidents of police violence might narrowly prompt more critical coverage, systemic shifts in reporting face an uphill battle against corporate media’s longstanding reliance on and trust in government and law enforcement sources to establish the narrative on policing.
From ‘defund’ to party politics to reform
In 2020, when protests against police violence erupted across the country, the New York Times covered issues of policing policy and reform with a heavy tilt toward government and law-enforcement sources, and toward white sources.
Activists voicing their grievances against racist, violent policing, and making demands that such policing be rethought in more radical ways, occasionally found their way into the paper of record. Black Futures Lab’s Alicia Garza, for example, was quoted by the Times (6/21/20): “The continual push to shield the police from responsibility helps explain why a lot of people feel now that the police can’t be reformed.”
When “tough on crime” billionaire Rick Caruso did better than expected in the LA mayoral primary, the New York Times headlined this as a sign that a “restless Democratic electorate” was “concerned about public safety.” When Caruso lost the general election to Karen Bass, the Times (11/16/22) did not frame this as a sign that the electorate was concerned about reforming police after all.
But their voices were largely drowned out by government officials, many of whom wanted nothing more than to make the protests go away, like Minneapolis city council member Steve Fletcher (6/5/20):
It’s very easy as an activist to call for the abolishment of the police. It is a heavier decision when you realize that it’s your constituents that are going to be the victims of crime you can’t respond to if you dismantle that without an alternative.
In letting government sources dominate again in 2022, Times coverage turned primarily to party politics, rather than investigations into whether reforms had been enacted, and whether or how police tactics had changed. The idea of defunding the police shifted from being presented as a concept to be debated to little more than a political punching bag, with law enforcement sources like former New York police commissioner Bill Bratton (6/9/22) calling the Defund movement “toxic.” Most Democrats distanced themselves from the movement, as when Joe Biden (5/31/22) was quoted: “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them.”
When Tyre Nichols was killed by police in 2023, it was not against a backdrop of an election season, nor did it spark protests at the scale of 2020. This time, Times coverage dug a bit deeper at the local level, turning to a wider variety of sources, and resulting in a greater emphasis on the need for police accountability.
While at least one source (1/29/23) called for defunding the police, most critical voices called more generally for accountability, and expressed frustration at the lack of any effective reforms since 2020. For instance, in an article headlined “Many Efforts at Police Reform Remain Stalled” (2/9/23), the president of the NAACP was quoted: “Far too many Black people have lost their lives due to police violence, and yet I cannot name a single law that has been passed to address this issue.”
The shift to a more diverse set of sources on the issue at the Times, during this one-month time period, is commendable. While the circumstances and location of Tyre Nichols’ killing offered strong opportunities to bring in more Black sources, the Times could easily have fallen back on its usual reliance on official sources, as it did in 2020 and 2022. Now it’s incumbent upon the Times to apply that more diverse and critical approach across all policing stories—not only when similarly high-profile police killings rock the country.
https://fair.org/home/who-gets-to-talk- ... to-change/
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Indictment of African People’s Socialist Party is a Racist Assault on the Black Liberation Movement (Statement)
APRIL 23, 2023
Four leaders of African People's Socialist Party who have been indicted by FBI for "spreading Russian propaganda." Photo: The Burning Spear.
By Black Alliance for Peace – Apr 19, 2023
The Black Alliance for Peace unequivocally condemns and opposes the recent indictment of four members of the African People’s Socialist Party, alongside three Russian nationals.
The unsealed indictment states that on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, levied charges of “conspiring to covertly sow discord in US society, spread Russian propaganda and interfere illegally in U.S. elections.” While no evidence of conspiracy, propagandizing, or interference has been presented, the APSP and its members have the right, as all US citizens do, to freely criticize US domestic and foreign policy.
Not since the Palmer Raids of the early 20th century, nor since the indictment of WEB DuBois in 1951, or the confiscation of Paul Robeson’s US passport during the anti-communist “McCarthyist” era, has there been such a hysterical response to African people asserting their rights and freedom of speech in the United States. This renewed attack against anti-imperialist Africans, framed within the absurd notion of “Russian influence,” comes as capitalism decays and US global hegemony loses its hold on the world. The attacks on the APSP and the Uhuru Movement are part of a historical tendency to align African political activists with US “adversary” states to marginalize African internationalism (including solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, for example) and to suppress Black radicalism.
It is also an assault on the efforts of Africans organizing against the violence and murders suffered at the hands of the US state. Indeed, Africans do not need Russia to tell them they are suffering the brunt of violence in the heart of the US empire!
BAP demands the indictment be dismissed, and Uhuru must be free!
For further reading on this case, please read BAP’s July 30 statement that commented on the initial FBI raid of the APSP’s properties.
https://blackallianceforpeace.com/bapst ... tywithapsp
https://orinocotribune.com/indictment-o ... statement/
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Is This Man a Russian Agent Operating in the Black Community of St. Louis?
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 24, 2023 1
Omali Yeshitela [Source: sfbayview.com]
The Justice Department has just indicted him and three other members of the African People’s Socialist Party for advancing Russian propaganda—though it looks more like the Biden administration was looking for a scapegoat to justify its anti-Russia offensive and found one in a familiar place.
On April 18, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of four leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) along with three Russian nationals for allegedly working on behalf of the Russian government and Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in a “malign influence campaign” designed to “sow discord” and “advance Russian propaganda.”
The Department of Justice claims that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed APSP Chair Omali Yeshitela and three other APSP members (Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus C. Romain, Jr.—aka Gazi Kodzo)—to act as unregistered (and therefore illegal) agents of the Russian government and that they covertly funded and directed candidates for local office in the U.S.
Kurt Ronnow [Source: linkedin.com]
The charges carry a maximum of ten years in prison.
Kurt Ronnow, the Acting Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, said that the announcement “paints a harrowing picture of Russian government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit U.S. citizens to their efforts.”
According to prosecutors, one of the Russians charged, Aleksandr Ionov, operated an entity called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which recruited U.S.-based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was strong support in the U.S. for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and backed efforts such as a 2015 United Nations petition to decry the “genocide of African people” in the U.S, and a reparations tour by the APSP.
Aleksandr Ionov [Source: bbc.com]
Yeshitela allegedly traveled from Tampa to Moscow in May 2015 on an all-expenses paid trip to a conference on separatism and to meet with Ionov and other Russians in order to “communicate on future cooperation,” according to an Ionov email.
Omali Yeshitela [Source: typworld.com]
Ionov is allegedly close with accused Russian agent Maria Butina and Yevgeny Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef,” who is under U.S. sanctions for the Kremlin’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, and promoted California’s secession by paying for posters advertising a pro-secession rally that took place in Sacramento on Valentine’s Day in 2018.
What followed from Yeshitela’s 2015 meeting with Ionov in Moscow, according to the indictment, was covert Russian funding and support for various activities in the U.S. until the summer of 2022, including demonstrations at the California and Georgia state capitals and at an unnamed social media company in San Francisco, which had placed restrictions on posts that supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Jesse Nevel [Source: uhurusolidarity.org]
In August 2016, Ionov is said to have directed the APSP to publish a statement of support of Russia’s Olympic team as it faced a doping scandal. The article published in The Burning Spear, the APSP’s newspaper, was titled: “Imperialists Ban Russia from 2016 Olympic Games!” APSP says ‘let Russia play!’”
Source: uhurusolidarity.org]
Augustus C. Romain, Jr.—aka Gazi Kodzo [Source: theothermccain.com]
The APSP is said to have taken around $7,000 from Russian government sources overall, although it is not clear from the indictment how Yeshitela or anyone in the APSP would have known that Ionov’s group was a front for the FSB—if that is indeed the case.
After Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, Yeshitela appeared at two web conferences with Ionov (“Live with Russia” and “Negating Colonial Lies”).
Ionov’s group additionally allegedly provided clandestine funding to an APSP candidate who ran for St. Petersburg City Council in 2019, Eritha Akilé Cainion, who held a news conference in 2022 in which she said—accurately—that “world colonial powers have been collaborating against Russia” for more than a century.
Eritha Akilé Cainion [Source: floridapolitics.com]
Flowing From the Russia Gate Hysteria—or Was it a Trap?
Mr. Ionov denounced his indictment on Facebook, saying that “I have never met such nonsense and deception. There are no specific names of officials, there is no evidence of funding and there are no intelligible arguments.”
He went on: “The Ukrainian crisis has driven American officials crazy! Comrades, now you see what kind of ‘democracy’ exists in the USA!”
Grayzone Project founder Max Blumenthal tweeted after the announcement of the indictment: “this fake and racist case [against the APSP] flows from the Russiagate hysteria that convinced millions of Americans that Russia was paying dissident groups to destabilize the U.S. political system. The FBI was unable to find anything real, so it went after the African People’s Socialist Party.”
Max Blumenthal [Source: dailynorthwestern.com]
Blumenthal appears to be correct but there is another possibility that Ionov is a double agent or asset of U.S. intelligence services, or was subjected to blackmail by them, and that Yeshitela and the APSP were lured into a trap.
Why otherwise would the Russians court, or prey on, an obscure African-American socialist organization in a decidedly capitalist country with little influence over anything? And support causes with no chance like California secession, or political candidates with no hope in a city council race?
Caitlin Johnstone [Source: everipedia.org]
Blogger Caitlin Johnstone pointed to the hypocrisy of the U.S. government in that it is constantly engaging in foreign influence operations through outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was set up to help foment coups and color revolutions and advance U.S. information interests overtly in ways the CIA used to do covertly. According to Johnstone, when foreign governments try to stop this activity, the U.S. State Department invokes “free speech,” which it evidently cares little about in the case of the APSP.[1]
FBI Pre-Dawn Raid and Its Antecedents
As a prelude to the April 18 indictments, the FBI mounted a violent pre-dawn raid on Yeshitela’s home in the eastern part of St. Louis on July 29. Combat-clad agents equipped with automatic weapons smashed windows, broke down the door, and set off deadly military-grade flash-bang explosives (aka “concussion grenades”).
The FBI made a big show of the raid before the entire community, occupying a neighbor’s yard and smashing down his door as well.
Combat clad FBI agents raiding Yehitela’s home. [Source: news.stlouispublicradio.org]
Then they humiliated Yeshitela and his wife by forcing them outside at gunpoint, handcuffing them in front of their neighbors, and forcing them to wait as the FBI agents ransacked their home and removed computer equipment, APSP files, and other electronic devices.
Omali Yeshitela stands before his home and speaks to supporters after FBI raid on July 29. [Source: stltoday.com]
The July 29 spectacle was not Yeshitela’s first experience being targeted by police for his political activism. Working as an organizer with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s when he went by Joe Waller, Yeshitela was arrested for tearing down a racist mural on the St. Petersburg, Florida, city hall building during a demonstration.
Omali Yeshitela speaking before crowd in late 1960s. [Source: apspuhuru.org]
When Yeshitela got out of prison, he organized a Black Power organization that became a victim of the FBI’s notorious counter-intelligence operation (COINTELPRO).
Economic Self-Empowerment
Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, the APSP was officially founded in 1972 with the goal of liberating Black people from the scourge of white supremacy, colonialism and neo-colonialism in the U.S. and around the world.
[Source: wrongkindofgreen.org]
In the 1980s, the group set up successful African-American-controlled economic institutions such as the Uhuru Bakery Café in Oakland, and established the first tribunal demanding reparations for people of African descent.
APSP furniture stores, which have been successful in Oakland and Philadelphia. [Source: apspuhuru.org]
The group has also built basketball courts, and established a program to train African-American women as midwives to try to help offset high infant mortality rates in the northern part of St. Louis along with other job training programs to help former Black prisoners reintegrate into society.
Community basketball court[Source: handsoffuhuru.org]
Uhuru Wa Kulea African Women's Health CenterUhuru 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 issues of infant and maternal mortality. [Source: handsoffuhuru.org]
Gary Brooks Community GardenCommunity garden. [Source: handsoffuhuru.org]
Building Relationships with Whomever We Want
Akilé Anai is the APSP leader in St. Petersburg named in the indictment as having received Russian money when she ran unsuccessfully for the city council in 2019 on a reparations platform (she received 18% of the vote). Having her car seized during the FBI’s July 29 raid, she said that the APFP “can have relationships with whomever we want to,” and that the FBI’s actions were part of a “propaganda war being waged against Russia every single day throughout the news.”
Akilé Anai [Source: uhurusolidarity.org]
COINTELPRO Redux
Ajamu Baraka, leader of the Black Alliance for Peace, tweeted after the July raid that Black radicals were being targeted again for “not falling in line with the U.S. imperial agenda on Ukraine.”
Ajamu Baraka [Source: hamptonthink.org]
Attorney and organizer Kamau Franklin stated: “This is a COINTELPRO operation, one meant to destroy Black organizations.”
[Source: loveancestry.com]
The COINTELPRO operation has included the issuance of sanctions on the APSP, which has had loans withheld by Regions Bank, been blocked by Facebook from doing crowd-funding, had more than $9,000 in donations frozen by GoFundMe, been blocked from processing payments by Stripe, and had $36,801 in funding revoked by the Pinellas County Commission that had previously been approved for a Black community radio station.
[Source: handsoffuhuru.org]
Marcus Garvey—a victim of economic aggression in his day. [Source: nationalhumanitiescenter.org]
Omali Yeshitela likens the economic aggression to that which the U.S. government and society directed against Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s, and to the bombing of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” and the destruction of the Black Panther Party’s Black community survival programs.
Yeshitela told CovertAction Magazine in an interview last August that the government’s charge that the African People’s Socialist Party was being used as a pawn for Russian interference in U.S. elections was “ridiculous” and “bogus,” and that the FBI raid on his home was “an attack on the Black liberation movement” and the work that the APSP was doing to uplift the impoverished people of the northern part of St. Louis [and St. Petersburg], former slaves who live in extraordinarily bad conditions.
Noting that, during the raid, the police targeted him with a laser beam and that his wife was nearly knocked over by a drone, Yeshitela pointed to a plan in the 1970s, promoted by St. Louis city leaders such as future House Majority leader Richard Gephardt (1989-1995), that aimed to build up the southern part of St. Louis, where Whites lived, and demolish thousands of homes in the northern part of St. Louis, where the Blacks lived. The rehabilitation of decaying buildings there was considered “uneconomical.’”
What was left of Black Wall Street after the Tulsa Race Massacre. [Source: edition.cnn.com]
Richard Gephardt [Source: montgomeryrarebooks.com]
Besides shooting down Black youth like Michael Brown, the city has since taken over more and more of the Blacks’ land, Yeshitela said. They destroyed whole communities by driving up taxes to levels Blacks could not afford, building such monstrosities as the National Geospatial-Intelligence agency, a military installation involved in U.S. wars in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.
The government today very clearly, Yeshitela noted, is trying to create fear in the White population by linking Blacks to the Russians so as to discredit their efforts to fight back. “By defining us as enemies of the state,” they could justify “seizing our communications and computers [of the APSP] and stealing forty years of our archives, which wipes out part of our history.”
As If Black People Have No Agency
Yeshitela posted a video on Facebook after the FBI’s raid in which he acknowledged meeting Ionov in 2015 in Moscow at a conference involving questions of self-determination and colonialism.
Armored car in front of Yeshitela’s home during FBI raid. [Source: Photo courtesy of Burning Spear Media]
Yeshitela said that he supports Russia against Ukraine, as it was the U.S. which provoked the conflict by overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine which, since the coup in 2014, has “killed 13,000 to 14,000 Russians or Ukrainians who supported Russia in eastern Ukraine.”
According to Yeshitela, it was hypocritical to condemn him for going to Russia when Whites were never condemned for going to Israel, which occupies Arab lands in historic Palestine. The APSP “supports Russia in Ukraine just like it supports the self-determination of the Palestinians; and the people of Nicaragua when they made a revolution against U.S. puppets there, and people fighting against oppression everywhere.”
Yeshitela reminded his audience that “it was the U.S. government—and not the Russian government—which overthrew democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, which mounted a coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and which killed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as 30 members of the Black Panther Party—including Fred Hampton—in one year alone.”
The FBI’s July 29 raid, in Yeshitela’s view, was part of a renewed “ideological war by the U.S. government directed against Black people and Russia,” whose purpose was to discredit Black political activism and further U.S. support for its war by proxy against Russia in Ukraine.
Yeshitela said that many Whites across the U.S. had now “come to support the demand for Black reparations,” which has “made people in power nervous,” so they “have to attack us and try to link the leaders of our movement to Russia.”
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Fred Hampton and crime scene photo. Yeshitela reminded his audience that it was the U.S. government—and not the Russian government—that murdered Fred Hampton and so many others. [Source: heavy.com]
Broken window in Yeshitela’s house from Police/FBI raid. [Source: Photo courtesy of Burning Spear Media]
When “home-grown American Whites—having nothing to do with Russia—tried actively to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6 and threatened to kill the Vice President, the government did not respond by raiding the culprits’ homes with flash-bang grenades and drones like they did mine.”
Most insulting, Yeshitela said, was the insinuation that Blacks could not lead their own struggle—that somehow, they had to turn to Russia and to “wait for Russia to tell us we’re oppressed,” especially when conditions in their community were so bad. As if Black people “have no agency or will of their own.”
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... -st-louis/