10th Electoral Campaign School
The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations
10th Electoral Campaign School
June 6 & 7, 2026
Uhuru House
St. Louis, MO 63115
Call 314 380 8013 for additional info
The Ballot and the Bullet!
It’s the Whole Damn System! We’re not Going Back!
Call to the Black is Back Coalition’s 10th Annual Electoral Campaign School, June 6-7, 2026
On Wednesday, April 29, 2026 the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that ostensibly allowed us to advance our freedom struggle through voting within the U.S. colonial electoral system.
Before this U.S. Supreme Court ruling, previous attacks on our freedom struggle were characterized by generalized terror against our people. This included mass, celebratory murder with thousands of white participants who often competed with each other for souvenir body parts of burned, hanged and shot-to-death corpses of black people.
The recently gutted 1965 Voting Rights Act did not come about because of some socially transformative epiphany on the part of our colonial oppressors. It was an act that was designed to give enhanced, politically expedient legitimacy to the Civil Rights Bill that was passed in 1964, despite serious opposition by many, including former Democratic Party U.S. president Joseph Robinette Biden.
We uphold the role of our people’s heroic struggles that were key to winning the passage of these acts. Their enactment allowed the U.S. to claim that our people were protected by the so-called Bill of Rights that was actually ratified by the U.S. Congress when we were still considered property with no more rights than horses, cows, shoes, chairs or any other property owned by the white colonizers.
In 1857, in the case of Dred and Harriet Scott, sixty-five years after ratification of the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Supreme Court at that time confirmed that we had no rights that a white man had to respect.
However, the colonizer’s denial of rights has never stopped our struggle against colonialism. Colonialism by definition means denial of any rights not conferred on the colonized by the colonizer. Indeed, it has always been colonialism itself that defined and made our struggle necessary.
It was our unrelenting freedom struggle at the time that made the 1965 Voting Rights Act necessary for our colonizers, and it is fear of our freedom struggle today that is responsible for the negation of the Voting Rights Act in 2026.
In 1964 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) launched the Mississippi Summer Project as a voter registration campaign to advance our struggle, especially in the state of Mississippi.
This campaign resulted in the brutal, highly publicized murders of three young civil rights workers at the SNCC-led 1964 summer project, forcing to the surface the ubiquity of the reality of colonial violence against African people. These notorious violent murders undermined U.S. attempts to market itself as the beacon of democracy in a world that was globally engaged in intense struggle to define the contours of the emergent anti-colonial social system.
On February 4, 1965, 17 days before his assassination and less than a month prior to Bloody Sunday and the infamous colonial assault on peaceful voting rights protesters on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Alabama, Minister Malcolm X accepted an invitation by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to come to Selma, Alabama.
When Malcolm X visited Selma, Dr. King was in jail so he met with his wife, Coretta Scott King, and conveyed to her his intention to work with King and unite two fronts of the struggle against colonialism, something that U.S. domestic colonizers found absolutely unacceptable.
His visit to Selma and the unity offered by Minister Malcolm X confirmed that we are engaged in one liberation struggle, directed against colonialism. It helped to show that for our struggle against colonialism, the Voting Rights Act, as important as it was, has always been about more than just voting. It was about black liberation and the possible use of the vote as an instrument to advance our freedom struggle against U.S. domestic colonialism.
An objective of the 1965 assassination of Minister Malcolm X in the same year as the passage of the Voting Rights Act, as well as the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just three years later, was to undermine the possibility of the politics of anti-colonial liberation entering the domain of electoral politics in the U.S. The murders of our leaders by the U.S. government aimed to restrict our anti-colonial freedom efforts to the counterrevolutionary restraints of the Democratic Party of the colonial ruling class.
Our oppressors were intent in preventing Malcolm X’s political program of Black Nationalism and King’s Poor People’s Campaign–reflecting our people’s politics of self-determination–from ever acquiring the presumed legitimacy of the colonial electoral process. This chilling colonial state violence thereby relegated anti-colonial politics to a state of illegitimacy and, by inference, illegality.
But our freedom struggle against colonialism was never determined by U.S. colonial legality. Not then, not now!
