When Chairman Omali Yeshitela jogged with the Uhuru Movement uniformed security force along the march route from 18th Avenue South to Williams Park in downtown St. Petersburg on Saturday, November 16, African people streamed out of their houses. They gave him a hero's welcome and cheered him and the movement he leads with heartfelt enthusiasm.It was supposed to be a "unity march" endorsed by the city government, as if white people coming together with the African community to chant "give peace a chance" could ever heal the brutal October 24 police murder of 18-year-old TyRon Lewis-one murdered African too many and 400 oppressive years too long.
Young TyRon was executed just two blocks away from the Uhuru House, and even before the police had fired the first shot, witnesses ran to the Uhuru House for reinforcements and leadership. After the murder, the African community rose up in a righteous rebellion that was politicized, focused and to-the-point.
The brutality and viciousness of the police was no different than in other cities like Los Angeles, Pittsburgh or San Jose. What was different was that the people had the Uhuru Movement has worked tirelessly in St. Petersburg in the interests of the African working class for the past 30 years.
Today, the Uhuru Movement has the trust and confidence of the African community primarily because of the commitment, work and leadership of one man: Omali Yeshitela. Because of him, the people have a model for the highest example of the courage, brilliance, stamina and determination of the African working class. He has truly earned the mantel of the people's leader, and the African community's love of Chairman Omali is deep and profound.
Throughout the days and weeks following the magnificent St. Petersburg rebellion, the government and the media worked overtime to try to isolate and target the Uhuru Movement and Chairman Omali himself. But by building the broadest base of support possible in the African working class agenda, Chairman Omali was able to turn the situation around.
He helped build a coalition crossing class boundaries which united with the undeniable justice of the Uhuru Movement's demands in the name of the African working class: amnesty for all those arrested, prosecution of the killer police, reparations to the family of TyRon Lewis, and defense of the Uhuru Movement.
The fact is that there was hardly anyone in the African community, regardless of class, who had not experienced some sort of attack by the police, nor was there anyone who did not have the deepest respect for Chairman Omali and the work he has led.
By the time the Chairman stepped up on the stage at Williams Park to speak that Saturday afternoon, the feeling was unanimous among the Africans in the park and they were very vocal about it: Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the Uhuru Movement represented them and their highest aspirations for their whole people. It was clear to the city, the police and the media that they would no longer be able to isolate and attack the Chairman and the Uhuru Movement without bringing down the wrath of the whole African community.
Chairman Omali summed up the significance of the period in which he was born and how that had influenced him and the working class nature of the Uhuru Movement and the African People's Socialist Party:"I am from a really important generation that was born during a particular transformation of the economy in the U.S. and the world. It was the period of the development of the urban working class.
"Our movement in the 60s was the first since the Garvey Movement of the 20s which had class consciousness. Malcolm X spoke as a conscious representative of urbanized African workers, and this influenced my understanding of the world.
"There was something about my generation. I was among the most recent generation born into an urban working class.
"My father had worked in Georgia. He came to St. Petersburg during the depression. This was an urbanized area compared to other parts of the rural South, and there was a great difference between the worldview of myself and my father who was from the share-cropping peasantry. I was of the generation of Huey Newton who went from rural Louisiana to urbanized Oakland where he started the Black Panther Party, an organization of the African working class.
"The transformation of the world economy created the urbanized working class throughout the colonized world and inside the U.S. as well. Thus we saw the rise of the national liberation movements in Africa, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam-and inside the U.S., as the Civil Rights Movement was claimed by the African working class and transformed into a movement for Black Power."
Omali Yeshitela was born as Joseph Waller to Joseph and Lucille Waller on October 9, 1941 in St. Petersburg. His father was a railroad worker and his mother a beautician. His grandmother was the most important force in his early life. Helping him to read the newspaper when he was barely out of diapers, teaching him to reject aspirations of personal gain and wealth, and priming him for a life of leadership and commitment to the struggle of African people.
"When I was about five, I remember telling my grandmother that I was wishing for a big car and a big house when I grew up. But my grandmother said, "It would be better for you to get those things for everybody, then you could be happy too as opposed to doing it just for yourself.""As a child they skipped me a graded and they tried to reward me with all kinds of badges and make me a snitch on the other children who might smoke, and I refused to do it. I could never do that! I couldn't see myself being separate from the people in that fashion."
When he as 18, Joseph Waller joined the army where his political consciousness began to develop. He began to do some organizing in the army and started to take stands in defense of African people. He was discharged after being told by a military psychiatrist that he was "a Garveyite."
When he returned to St. Petersburg, Joseph Waller was "filled with rage," and hungry to experience life and bring justice to African people. He got out of the army just as African workers, under the influence of Malcolm X, were about to transform the petty-bourgeois-led Civil Rights Movement into the explosive Black Power Movement. It was the events of the early and mid-sixties which charted the destiny of this talented and committed young African worker who would one day become Chairman Omali Yeshitela. This was the young man who would ultimately change the course of history for African and all oppressed people throughout the world.
Joe Waller first worked with the NAACP Youth Organization and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) before becoming an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Traveling throughout Florida and other parts of the South, Waller built SNCC as a membership organization, engaging the local people to become organized to solve their own problems.
A turning point came in 1966 when Waller led a demonstration of African people to the St. Petersburg city hall and ripped down a degrading and racist mural which hung in the lobby. For this courageous act he was charged with 11 counts and sentenced to five years in prison, however he gained the respect and admiration of the entire African community.
He had emerged as the leader of the African working class movement in St. Petersburg. The act of ripping down the vicious mural is still legendary in the people's minds in St. Petersburg, and city officials have never been able to replace the picture.
The young Waller spent most of the next few years in and out of prison, often in the chain gang, on these and other charges, stemming from his political activity. While in prison in '66, he formed JOMO, the Junta of Militant Organizations, a militant working class organization similar to the Black Panther Party which also chose the Black Panther as its mascot.
The ranks of JOMO swelled rapidly, The Burning Spear newspaper was born and Chairman Joe Waller became the dynamic young leader, loved by African People and their allies and hated and feared by the city government and the white power system.
It was the period of Black Revolution of the 60s. All over the U.S., cities were burning and struggle for political power and independence. The U.S. government was involved in the illegitimate genocidal war against the heroic people of Vietnam and the Black Revolution inside the U.S. to have to fight on two fronts.
By the end of the 60s the U.S. had implemented its deadly COINTELPRO program, which militarily defeated the Black Revolution. Some of the most important leaders had been assassinated, such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the beloved Fred Hampton in Chicago. Most of the chapters of the Black Panther Party had been infiltrated by government agents and destroyed. The movement was being slandered and many organizers were being imprisoned.
The U.S. was carrying out a full-scale counterinsurgency war against the Black Power Movement and the African population. It has always been the African working-class which bears the brunt of this violent and deadly counterinsurgency war.
Despite the atmosphere of fear and intimidation which opened the 1970s, Joseph Waller continued to keep the Movement of the African working class alive in St. Petersburg, Florida. Even as African petty bourgeois forces were stepping in to replace the defeated African working and neo-colonialism was on the rise, Waller formed the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) in 1972.The APSP which has never compromised its commitment to the interests of the African working class is the only African organization alive today which was able to survive the U.S. governments counterinsurgent attack against our movement of the 60s. This has been vitally important, giving our movement continuity and the depth of experience over the years.
During the 1970s the main goal of the newly-formed Party was to keep the Black Revolution alive, to defend the countless Africans who had been imprisoned by the counterinsurgency and to develop the relationship with Africa and African people dispersed around the world. During this period the Chairman took the name Omali Yeshitela which means "umbrella to protect 1000 people." He spent the greater part of the decade traveling around organizing from city to city carrying a red suitcase full of books.
Led by Chairman Omali, the Party took on some magnificent campaigns during the 1970s. The successful campaign to free Pitts and Lee was significant because it forced the governor of the state of Florida to release two African men on death row who had been framed for something they did not do.
Through the successful campaign to free Dessie Woods the Party built an international organization which won world-wide support for this African working class woman who was forced to defend herself against colonial violence by killing with his own gun the white man who tried to rape her.
This campaign was also politically significant for reclaiming the struggle from white leftist and feminist forces who had risen up after the defeat of the Black Power Movement and who opportunistically tried to redefine Dessie's courageous act as the right of all women to defend themselves against rape. The campaign to free Dessie Woods proved to be very important in rebuilding the Black Movement after the U.S. government's attack, and she was freed in 1981.
During the 70s the Chairman began to formulate his developing theory from the point of view of the African working class. During this period, the Party published several of the Chairman's theoretical pamphlets including the well-known "Colonialism: the Main Contradiction Facing Africans in the U.S." and "Tactics and Strategy for Black Liberation" which was meant to be guideline for all African forces struggling against imperialism.
In 1976 the Party formed the African People's Solidarity Committee (APSC), which proved to be one of the its most significant moves. For the first time in history, a Revolutionary African organization was able to win white people away from their historic unity with white power and colonialism by giving them the opportunity to be organized under the leadership of the African working class.
The existence of APSC enabled the Party and the Black Revolution to win back some of our stolen resources and to build a genuinely revolutionary force within the white population which could provide solidarity with the Black Revolution in the U.S. and around the world and help to isolate and encircle the U.S. government.
As the 1980s opened up, the U.S. government was deepening its counterinsurgency against the African working class as a whole and against the revolutionary movements around the world. The U.S. unleashed the full extent of its viciousness against the African working class, sparing nothing.It began a massive slander campaign which campaign which criminalized the whole African population, flooded the communities with a new kind of chemical warfare called "crack", and implemented an all-out campaign to lock up nearly every African male into the concentration camps called prison. As the white population was enjoying an enormous economic boom derived from the drug economy and the massive prison building, African workers were trapped in an impoverished war zone dependent on the crumbs of the illegal drug economy with fewer and fewer social services and no democratic rights.
While the U.S. intensified its brutal counterinsurgency, serious internal struggles rocked the Party and the African Peoples' Solidarity Committee, struggles which attempted to challenge the Party's whole identity grounded in the African working class. Chairman Omali rose up to overcome one of the most serious threats to the Party by fighting fiercely for the agenda of the class and rebuilding the Party.
In 1981 the Chairman moved the national office of the Party to Oakland, California where the Party had been doing work for the past few years and where the majority of the African People's Solidarity Committee was located. Almost immediately the Chairman opened the first Uhuru House on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, the heart of the African community. In the city where only 12 years before African workers had proudly exercised their power as the Black Panther Party, Africans now seemed brutally down pressed. The Chairman often remarked that he wondered if the water had been poisoned with mind-deadening drugs as part of the COINTELPRO attack on our movement.
In addition, in place of the voice of the African working class which had been so powerful just a few years prior, now a vicious, self-serving and parasitic white left had set itself up to dominate the political agenda of the Oakland area and to participate in the attack on African workers. White leftists of all stripes were building lucrative careers as "progressives" at the expense of African workers.
From the first day the doors of the Uhuru House opened on MacArthur Boulevard, in the summer of 1981, the Chairman led an intense whirlwind of political activity that continued without a breather for more than five years. It was one of the most important periods of the Party and represented a profound transformation both in the organization itself and in the Chairman's theory.
During this period sleep was nearly forgotten and Party-led forces were out on the streets every single day, organizing and demonstrating against the brutal conditions facing African workers. The political consequences were profound, forcing the needs of the African working class back on the political agenda for the first time since the 60s. The city of Oakland is still reeling from the work of this period, and the campaigns had national and even international significance.
The Chairman kept the Party forces in constant motion. The First Party Congress was held in Oakland, the African National Reparations Organization was built and the first Tribunal on Reparations for African people in the U.S. was held in New York in 1982. Tent City for the Homeless was organized in Oakland in 1983 followed in 1984 by the Oakland Summer Project, the Community Control of Housing Initiative (Measure O and Measure H), the Bobby Hutton Freedom Clinic, as well as the monthly publication of [italics] The Burning Spear. Party work was going on in other parts of the U.S. as well, and the Chairman was often traveling to revolutionary Nicaragua or for speaking tours around the U.S., and making two tours to Europe.
In 1987 the popular Uhuru Bakery Cafe opened in Oakland. There was the Party-owned Spear Graphics in Oakland, and Uhuru Houses were opening in Philadelphia, Baltimore and St. Petersburg.
During this period of incredible activity Chairman Omali also produced his most important body of theoretical work which went through profound tranformation at this time. Through the struggles in the world and in the organization and through the real conditions of colonialism, the Chairman developed his theory in the heat of battle.It was at this time that the Chairman first defined the question of [italics] parasitic capitalism-that capitalism was born of slavery, genocide and theft of resources of the African people and all oppressed peoples, and that it remains parasitic today.
It was in this period that the Chairman brought the theory of Marx and Lenin to a higher level, showing that African and colonized peoples create the foundation upon which the whole white world sits. The Chairman's theory brought African workers and other colonized peoples to the center stage of history.
As the Chairman wrote in [italics] A New Beginning: the Road to Black Freedom and Socialism published by the Party in 1982:
"Living in a country built and sustained off slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, the impact of victorious revolutionary struggles reach down into the gas tanks, shopping centers, and tax brackets of the North American population. There is an objective relationship between world slavery and U.S. affluence, and up until now the North American population, opportunistically and demagogically led by their stomachs, pocketbooks, and corrupt leadership, have chosen the continued enslavement of the world..."
As the Chairman explained about his theory versus the classic "Marxism-Leninism":
"There was a huge error in Marx's observation and that error was based on his relationship to the same reality that African and other people experience. This error was the ability to diminish and sometimes obscure the significance of Africans and other colonial people in the development of the world capitalist economy and its ongoing existence.
"They made Europeans the subjects of history...and their experience was very narrow. Because of that they saw white people and what happened in Europe as the central force and the engine of world history. But even as they did that they were still able to sum up that slavery, this thing they call primitive accumulation which was a great aggression against most of the other peoples in the world, but it was only seen as significant as it related to Europe. This was a profound weakness and error in their observations that tainted everything, even the labor theory of value, etc."
Today the Chairman's theory of African Internationalism or Yeshitelism is the only analysis that can give African people around the world and all of our allies a vision for a future free of white power and oppression and with political power in our own hands.
By 1991 Chairman Omali had called for the founding of a Revolutionary mass organization to build as broadly as possible, with the central goal of defeating the vicious counterinsurgency against the African community and defending the democratic rights of African people.Around this time Akua Njeri, the widow of the beloved Fred Hampton, the Illinois Chairman of the Black Panther Party came forward to embrace the African People's Socialist Party.
The Chairman was very moved by this courageous woman who, while more than 8 months pregnant, had survived the deadly police assault on December 4, 1969 which brutally killed Fred Hampton. Yet she had continued to struggle and raised her son, Fred Hampton, Jr., to follow in the footsteps of his father.
The Chairman nominated Akua to be the president of the National Movement (NPDUM) and the founding convention was held in April, 1991.
Despite contradictions, NPDUM has proved to be a fundamentally important organization in defining and stopping the counterinsurgency against African people.
As the 90s have unfolded, the Party moved its national office back to St. Petersburg where it has continued to work tirelessly among the masses of African people, organizing every day around all of the life and death issues affecting the class.
During this period the Party has put a lot of effort into building institutions which create economic self-reliance for the party and the African community. The most successful Party institutions today include Uhuru's Black Gym of Our Own in St. Petersburg, and the two Uhuru Furniture stores coordinated by the African People's Solidarity Committee, one in Oakland and one in Philadelphia.
The Fourth Party Congress is scheduled for February 1997 and will finally put in place the Chairman's long held dream of building the African Socialist International, the coordinating organization that will unite and give leadership to Africans struggling for liberation anywhere in the world.
Today the rebellions in St. Petersburg in October and November, 1996 have helped create a whole new level for the re-emerging Black Revolution in the U.S. St. Petersburg is the center of African resistance for the whole country right now-and Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the African People's Socialist Party are on the front lines of that resistance, giving it leadership, strategy and clarity and courage.
Chairman Omali recently summed up this period:
"During the 60s a lot of forces out there talked about Black Power, but the Revolutionary movement was crushed before accounts were settled and struggles were resolved. So there was the Nation of Islam's version of Black Power, the RNA's version...there was no unified summation. The Party was the only force which summed up that the African working class working class was in fact the central driving factor of the Black Revolution.
"This is why after the movement was crushed, I was still able to be out there trying to make the movement when hardly anyone else was there. I knew that the African working class was under the most vicious attack by the counterinsurgency and was thrown off balance. I knew that it was inevitable that African workers would rise up again. It was only a matter of time and time was on our side.
"Now with the rebellion in St. Petersburg we come back around, but we are in an entirely different place than in the 60s. This is because the Party has worked all these years taking on real struggle to advance the interests and understandings of the African working class. The Party is the advanced detachment of the African working class which today is in the process of forging its political terrain.
"Now we come back to a period of resistance, but its no longer the hodgepodge of all kinds of forces and lines as in the 60s. Today the struggle is clearly in the interest of one particular class, the African working class.
"Holding on the interests of the African working class has meant lonely work at times. The U.S. was attacking the class-imposing drugs, criminalizing the class and imprisoning them. The working class bore the brunt of the attack, but when the class moved the way it did in St. Petersburg it thrust forward the Party as its advanced detachment."
Omali Yeshitela is truly a leader for these times. He is a man who has aimed his genius and talents towards one single goal-the liberation of Africa and African people. Having spent his life avoiding wealth and recognition, the Chairman has never wavered in his commitment to the struggle of the African working class. For the majority of his life he has paid a price for this commitment in year of poverty, imprisonment, slander and the loneliness of upholding a movement that's been defeated and crushed.Over the years the Chairman has always had complete unwavering faith in the tremendous ability of the African working class to lead the struggle-no matter how great the slander and degradation heaped on them by the U.S. government at any given time.
A man who could never be bought, Chairman Omali has always tried to set an example with his life that death or prison are preferable to slavery or being on your knees. For more than 30 years his devotion to the struggle has been limitless, sometimes at the expense of his most basic personal needs. You couldn't talk about the Chairman without admiring his extraordinary courage. In any struggle or attack he will be the first to the front lines to defend the people regardless of the personal price to himself.
His hunger for knowledge is enormous, and he will spend his last dollar on newspapers and books. Although he is a man whose brilliance and intellectual powers have developed a political theory which will transform the future of this whole planet, he has never separated himself from the masses of African people. He would stand on the street corner talking to his countless friends in the neighborhood about anything from the best blues record, to the latest Tyson fight to the political situation in Nigeria.
He is hard at work at the Uhuru House every day but will interrupt any pressing project or meeting to greet the children who can't wait to see him. The needs of the people have always been his greatest concern, and even in the heat of struggle he will make sure that the people have enough food and shelter.
A strict vegetarian, Chairman gave up smoking and drinking in his 40s and transformed himself physically by running and body-building.
A man of great wit and humor, the Chairman is able to make fun of the oppressors, exposing them for the ridiculous and powerless cowards that they are. He has a genius for strategy and can turn any attack by the government into a victory for the people.
One of the best examples of both his wit and his strategy may be when the police came in full riot gear to evict the Party from the first Oakland Uhuru house after two years of a rent strike against an exploitative slumlord. Little did the police know that during the night before the Party and supporters had moved the entire contents of the building to a new center down the street.
All the next day, though, the comrades from the movement demonstrated outside of the empty Uhuru House, chanting, "Comrades, Comrades, we can win, if just don't let them in!" as if the Party was inside to defend the building. When the police finally broke down the doors, ready for a shoot-out, the place was completely empty. All the Africans who had gathered in the street to watch had a good laugh that day!
Omali Yeshitela is genuinely a man of African people and a leader for all of humanity who aspire to a future of justice and freedom.
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