Call to the Black is Back Coalition Electoral School 2025
by Chairman Omali Yeshitela March 14, 2025
On April 12 and 13, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold its ninth electoral campaign school for African people who want to respond to the urgency of the moment. This year’s school recognizes the need to take the struggle for our liberation into the hallowed terrain of our oppressors – terrain that our people fought bombings, murder, assassinations and racialized slander to penetrate for our own benefit.
Our Coalition has always recognized that voting as a means of attaining power was never intended to benefit African people in the U.S. or elsewhere. We have always recognized that it was only the blood-drenched struggle waged by our people, along with U.S. competition with the Soviet Union at the time that forced universal suffrage onto the political agenda with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 following the enactment of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964.
But the defining political organizations and leaders of that period were already falling under the repressive axe of our colonizers as a means of neutralizing electoral politics as a legitimate form of black struggle. This was obviously true in the U.S., but it was also occurring with the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and the attacks in South Africa against Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.
Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, the same year the Voting Rights Act was passed.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered just three years later and SNCC, the most dynamic, youthful, expression of the Civil Rights Movement that was in the vanguard of advancing the Civil Rights struggle to the struggle against colonialism and for black power, was being attacked and decimated from every possible angle using every possible method. In 1969 the FBI thrust the final strategic nail in the coffin of the Black Panther Party with the December 4th brutal assassination of Fred Hampton in Chicago.
This meant that by the time we were legally afforded the right to vote our independent organizations and leaders were mostly destroyed and our independent political programs were pushed into irrelevance, by the U.S. colonial state, mostly under the leadership and direction of the Democratic party. Indeed, neocolonialism, white power with a black face, represents a victory of white liberal colonialism in its struggle against both, the colonized and the conservative or reactionary sector of the colonial ruling class. In the U.S. neocolonialism has primarily been a strategic tool of the Democratic party.
This is a Call to African militants and revolutionaries to step forward and rescue the hard fought for victories of our historical fight to liberate ourselves from foreign (meaning U.S.) colonial domination.
The Black is Back Electoral Campaign school is our means of stating that we are not retreating from our right to intervene in this legal process in pursuit of the dignity of self-determination, the right to feed, clothe, house and govern ourselves.
Most of the struggles being waged or promoted against the colonial regime of Donald John Trump are struggles to repair and advance the ill-defined agenda of the historically cowardly and unreliable Democratic Party. We are our own liberators and our electoral campaign school plays a powerful role in our liberation struggle. We must continue to use the training from this school as a means of implementing our own National Black Political Agenda for Self-determination.
This is a Call by the Black is Back Coalition for our people to go into the electoral process as an important method of struggle that will take the anti-colonial aspirations of our people into a vast political arena that we were jailed, assassinated and otherwise pushed out of as independent self-serving agents of progressive change.
You must participate in this electoral campaign school.
The U.S. colonial government recognizes the significance of our electoral campaign school as a continuation of the Black Revolution of the Sixties. The colonizers recognize that the anti-colonial freedom agenda that was being carved out and fought for by Minister Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, SNCC, the Black Panther Party and the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO) is an agenda that spells the doom of colonialism no matter which colonial party is at the helm of a genocidal colonial regime.
This is why the U.S. colonial government made a pre-dawn FBI military assault on the African Liberation movement on July 29, 2022, in the two cities and states of St. Louis, Missouri and St. Petersburg, Florida. It was an attempt to crush the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru Movement, a founding constituent organization of our Coalition and to deny our people independent access to the electoral process as a method of anti-colonial struggle.
It was an attack that attempted to criminalize black criticism of U.S. treatment of African people, just as in the 1960s. It was an attempt to neutralize the voice of Africans in the U.S. so we would not be an independent, uncontrolled factor in the U.S. contest with Russia for global dominance as it was with the1960s U.S. contention with “Soviet” Russia. This is the basis of the claim by the U.S. government that the independent anti-colonial political voice of Africans in the U.S. was a hired agent of Russia.
It is not an accident that one of the crimes or “Overt Acts” the African People’s Socialist Party was charged with by the U.S. Justice Department was running candidates for office on a platform for reparations in 2017, the first year of the Electoral Campaign School initiated by our Coalition.
The hundreds of FBI agents and millions of dollars wasted by the government in charging, trying and losing its bogus case that the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru Movement are Russian agents is the best evidence of the significance of this electoral school. And, as this was an attack by the Democratic party Biden-Harris government of Palestinian genocide, this should also provide convincing evidence that our enemy is colonialism, regardless of who is at the helm of the U.S. government.
The frantic bleatings of the Democratic Party and its various iterations should not divert us from our strategic task of removing ourselves from the horrific grip of colonialism. Let us destroy the monopoly of the African petty bourgeoisie and white colonial liberals in the electoral process and open up a new front within this arena that the white rulers have claimed to be a legitimate form of political struggle.
Forward to Victory!
We are winning!
