9th Electoral Campaign School
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.
