Coalition an important factor
Then we built a coalition. We didn't start out to build the coalition, actually. We started out working for self-protection, self-defense.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was having a meeting, planning to run down to City Hall and ask for some money. We heard about the meeting and went to it. The media was sitting in the hallway waiting for the SCLC to come out and tell them what the plan was.
African American Leadership Coalition at press conference.
So I went into the meeting and told them that they were just asking for money. They were not saying anything about the conditions of the people, so they had to include the people's demands.
We said that you've got to call for the prosecution of the cops who killed this brother. Call for reparations, and then "hands off the Uhuru Movement," and release everybody from jail who was arrested.
Most of the middle class people in there united with those demands, except the SCLC guy. He didn't want to do it. He was doing everything but that. But we forced him to say that he was united.
The people saw us on television. They saw all these diverse forces sitting down there, and black people were really moved by that. They said, "Finally the community is united." That, then, became pressure from below which helped this guy from the SCLC think he was on the right track. It also helped him because he figured this was the only way he could get the money. Plus he almost admitted to the white folks in my presence that with him being in this coalition, "We got Omali under control."
That was fine. I have no ego in that way-I'll be under control. By having that relationship in the coalition, all the preachers were now involved. Now for the State to come get us, they had to come through the preachers as well. That complicated things for white power, because if I'm just this marginal force and the Uhuru Movement has no connections, then why were all these people standing there with us? So on November 13, the day the Grand Jury exonerated the two cops who had killed TyRon Lewis, we in the Uhuru Movement were seeing all these signs that the police are getting ready to move on us in a serious way again.
We were in the meeting trying to strengthen the Coalition; we called on them to come to our regularly scheduled NPDUM meeting that night. One of the preachers said, "Well, our position should be that an attack on one is an attack on all." The coalition called a press conference, and though the unity was somewhat shaky, they said an attack on one is an attack on all!
Later that same day the State attacked the Uhuru House in a very serious way. The St. Petersburg Times was printing editorials really castigating the preachers, chastising them for having this relationship and being in a coalition with Omali Yeshitela. They needed me isolated, they needed Uhuru isolated, and they couldn't do it! They were saying to the preachers, "You shouldn't have this relationship because Omali Yeshitela refuses to renounce violence. That was the stuff coming from the media. But we were able to hold onto that relationship.
