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DECLARATION A critical moment in our history is upon us. In addition to the traditional centuries-long destitution and political repression that has characterized our existence and distorted virtually all our intra-communal relationships within the U.S., there is now an escalation of police and other white violence directed at our people that demands a coherent response. The entire world is in a state of turmoil. The vast majority of the world’s population that experiences poverty and cruelty as normal features of life is in a state of rebellion. Because the world capitalist system owes its existence to the enslavement of our people and colonial domination of much of the world, capitalism rests uneasily on a fault line of oppression. The historical oppression…

PHILADELPHIA––For two days, August 13th and 14th, Africans from throughout the U.S. convened in Philadelphia at the First Unitarian Church to attend a historic conference. This conference was the clearest demonstration yet that the struggle for our liberation has reached a new height. Called by the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, the conference was a preparatory meeting where African people defiantly established our own National Black Agenda for Self-determination. It was a declaration of independence from the predatory Democratic Party and its partner in crime, the Republican Party. The August 13th and 14th Preparatory Conference was a logical outcome of the seven-year history of the Coalition to win broad unity within our liberation movement with the…

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford  After two generations of “Black social disintegration, economic retrogression and political confusion” ushered in through the collaboration of the Black Misleadership Class, “Black people have rediscovered and revived the Black Radical Tradition, with self-determination at the core.” The Black is Back Coalition is promulgating a groundbreaking 19-point Black political agenda entirely “formulated through the prism of Black self-determination.” There have always been two main political imperatives in Black America. One has sought “representation” at all levels within the surrounding, hostile, white supremacist society, and celebrates the elevation of individual Blacks to high social, political and economic status. As a practical matter, under this kind of politics, the condition of the Black masses is secondary --…