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!
One of the most significant ideological, political and organizational expressions of the anti-colonial definition of our struggle leading to the creation of the Voting Rights Act was the 1962 founding of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) that had an outsized though little recognized impact on our fight against U.S. domestic colonialism and its international implications.
The 1965 creation of the original Black Panther Party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization of Alabama, advanced our electoral struggle beyond the restriction of electoral political participation within the ruling colonial Democratic Party.
The growth of our anti-colonial movement was further exemplified by the 1966 Black Power movement initiated by SNCC that was itself influenced by the Vine City Project in Atlanta in 1964 at the time when the Mississippi Summer Project was raging.
The 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California took the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and advanced our struggle beyond the confines of the colonial electoral process altogether.
The first Black Power direct action event that was a mass demonstration in 1966 at the St. Petersburg, Florida city hall where demonstrators removed an 8 by 10 foot racialized caricature of African people from its wall.
The St. Petersburg action was followed in 1967 by an armed demonstration four months later by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the chambers of the California state capitol in Sacramento.
In 1968 the Revolutionary Union movement was formed in Detroit, Michigan.
On May 4, 1969, SNCC’s Director of International Affairs, James Forman disrupted the services at the historic Riverside Church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had made a provocative speech just a year earlier. Forman presented to a startled and angry preacher and congregation a Black Manifesto that demanded churches and synagogues in the U.S. pay 500 million dollars in reparations to African people. It was a manifesto that had been adopted by the National Black Economic Conference in Detroit a week earlier.
All of these historic actions provided ample evidence that despite the desperate repression of a hostile anti-black colonial state, we have always fought for our total liberation, happiness, dignity and the return of all the human and material resources stolen from us.
Thus, the name of our coalition: the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations!
It is a Coalition that has successfully taken upon itself the responsibility to reunite and give coherence to our relentless fight for self-determination that we have defined as the highest expression of democracy.
Thus the significance of our 10th Annual Electoral Campaign School is that it takes the mystery out of electoral politics and destroys the monopoly of the electoral process by outright colonialists and their neocolonial minions in our midst. The Black is Back Campaign School pushes back against all efforts to limit our struggle to simple voting rights at the expense of our historical freedom movement for total liberation.
It is with urgency that we call you to join with us on June 6-7, 2026 despite and because of the Supreme Court’s latest ruling gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act based on the self-created colonial illusion that in so doing our struggle for total liberation of our people would be destroyed.
But we are still here! This is why the U.S. government found it necessary to initiate pre-dawn military-style attacks on our Movement and Coalition Chair Omali Yeshitela in two cities and states in St. Petersburg, Florida and St. Louis, Missouri.
These attacks did not result in the wished-for defeat of our movement. Instead, we have grown by leaps and bounds, making it necessary for the unprecedented attack by the colonizer within its own community.
Thus, because of the strategic reach of our anti-colonial movement, the U.S. also indicted two white people, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel, who along with Chairman Yeshitela became known as the Uhuru 3.
When the U.S. colonizers attacked our freedom struggle in the past they did not find it necessary to defend their position in their own white colonizer communities.
The murders of anti-colonialists like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. or Fred Hampton are among the glaring examples of the unhampered impunity of the U.S. colonizers to attack our struggle against U.S. domestic colonialism with the apparent support of the general white colonizer population.
The fact is that there has been an assortment of anti-colonial organizations representing a gamut of tendencies since the era of the Voting Rights Act.
These anti-colonial organizations were often in contention with each other in their separate drives to capture the leadership of the general anti-colonial movement.
They have included “black Muslims,” Pan Africanists, New Afrikanists, African Internationalists and various causes without clear ideological or theoretical identities except for opposition to U.S. domestic colonialism.
Now, the Black is Back Coalition has created an organization of nearly twenty organizations that unites our anti-colonial trajectory on a coherent anti-colonial mission.
We have reopened the door to the electoral arena in a manner that takes us forward in the fight against colonialism without surrendering to the Democratic Party or the limitations imposed on political participation restricted to colonial approval.
This is a call for you to join the 10th Annual Black is Back Electoral Campaign School to recapture the political space the colonizers attempted to deny us with their assassinations of Minister Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton and the targeted arrests and imprisonment of our militants during the Black Liberation Movement of the Sixties.
We have not surrendered! We are relentless!
Join us in St. Louis, Missouri for the 10th Annual Electoral Campaign School, June 6-7, 2026. Register at blackisbackcoalition.org.
It’s Not Just Trump, it’s the Whole Damn System!
This Time ‘til it’s Won!
Power in Our Own hands!
