Lynne Stewart, the people’s lawyer, dies at 77

Lynne Stewart, the militant lawyer who went up against U.S. state power to defend African, Arab and other oppressed nation activists, died March 7 in New York. Stewart was 77 and is survived by her husband, Ralph Poynter, a member of the Black is Back Coalition. After serving 4 years of a 10-year sentence as a political prisoner, Stewart was released from prison in December 2013 as a result of popular pressure on the government in the face of breast cancer that was terminal. Stewart represented Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman after he was labeled a terrorist by the FBI which claimed Rahman issued “a fatwa that encouraged acts of violence against US civilian targets”, particularly in the New York and New Jersey…

APRIL 8-9, 2017, St. Petersburg, Florida On April 8th and 9th, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will conduct an electoral campaign school for African activists who want to open up a new front for the struggle for self-determination in the U.S. After years of organizing mass actions, conventions and conferences to promote self-determination while fighting Democrats and Republicans and their black sycophants in our own communities, the Coalition has called on black militants to invade the system white rulers have created to exercise white political power. The Coalition is not calling on black people to abandon all other forms of struggle or to believe that elections are the only legitimate means of achieving and exercising…