During opening remarks and libations, Mama Efia Nwangaza, an elder and leader in the movement said, “When I come here, I see so many of you, with big hair and big hearts. I feel like I can rest easy that the movement is going to go forward when my journeys over.”

Panel discussions ranged from fighting back against political repression to the role and impact of younger organizers within the movement. One panel was dedicated to the New Afrikan movement and covered the release of Jalil Muntaqim – a political prisoner, former member of the Black Panther Party and a founding member of the national Jericho Movement. Muntaqim was released in 2020 after spending nearly 50 years in prison. He spoke about the fight for national liberation and said, “the world will never be free until we are free”, uniting the struggle for Black liberation within the U.S. and the fight for liberation of oppressed nations across the globe against U.S. imperialism.

The conference ended with organizers, fighters and revolutionaries reinvigorated and ready to continue the fight for liberation in their respective cities. Addressing the younger activists in the crowd, Rafiki Morris, a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party said, “Y’all gotta take the baton. Pick it up. Run. I ain't running with you but I'll meet you there. This is your responsibility to finish what we started.”

#AtlantaGA #AfricanAmerican #BlackBeltSouth

Jubilee Shine, Coalition for Community Control Over the Police, told the crowd, “W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903, 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, ‘Either America will admit Black people on the basis of democracy, or America will cease to exist.’ But America has never been a democracy.”

Shine continued, “Now, 50 years since Dr. King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Voting Rights Act has been overturned for the southern states, the submerged Black nation. And in Florida, where the Black vote went uncounted to make Bush president after he lost the election, a white supremacist investigation and prosecution and defense of a white supremacist terrorist named George Zimmerman – and don’t let the media tell you he’s Hispanic. Had he been named Jorge Zuniga, he’d be under the jail – they let Zimmerman waltz out of court.”

Shine concluded by saying, “All democratic people must in principle uphold the right to self-determination for the Black nation, and all oppressed nations. Trayvon Martin is murdered, and the killer acquitted and protected, precisely because of the imperialist relationship of the U.S. to the U.S. Black nation, geographically located in the Black Belt south. The Black nation, which emerged with the betrayal of the Reconstruction after the Civil War, has since been denied sovereignty and the opportunity to identify its relationship to the U.S. This denial of rights and theft of resources has been manifested in the collective oppression and super-exploitation of African Americans in the deep South, and replicated in the ghettos of the largest U.S. cities. Florida has the highest count of lynchings of any state. There can be no local justice for Trayvon in a Florida court. The federal Justice Department must intervene with Civil Rights charges. And the only solution to the historic and systemic oppression of Black people in the U.S. must be based on the right to national self-determination. Justice for Trayvon Martin, Federal charges now for terrorist George Zimmerman, Self-Determination for the Black nation!”

#LosAngelesCA #AntiRacism #USImperialism #TrayvonMartin #GeorgeZimmerman #BlackBeltSouth

The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) has been criticized for its slow response to an outbreak of tuberculosis (TB) which has infected more than 100 people in rural Greenwood County, South Carolina since last March. More than 400 children at Ninety Six Primary School in Greenwood County were not tested for almost three months after TB was first reported.

Greenwood County is part of the Black Belt, named for the rich soil farmed by slave labor, which forms the heart of the African American Nation in the South. The national oppression that Black people face is most intense in the Black Belt South, even greater than other areas of the South. The poverty rate for Blacks, already much higher than that of whites, is even higher for Blacks in the African American Nation than other Blacks in the South. The infant mortality rate is also higher and the life span lower for Blacks in the African American Nation than Blacks living outside the nation but in the South.

The mishandling of the TB outbreak by the South Carolina DHEC is another example of the poor-quality government services and health care that are part of the all round economic, political, cultural and social oppression that African Americans face in the U.S.

I want to comment on two mistaken views in the left about national oppression. One incorrect view reduces national oppression to just a matter of racist attitudes among whites in general and white workers in particular. According to this view, if we can just overcome these racist ideas, then African Americans and whites can “unite and fight.” The problem is that there are important material differences in the lives of whites and African Americans, not just bad ideas. For example, African Americans are almost twice as likely as whites not to have any health insurance (19.5% vs. 11.1%). This is in part because many more whites (61.6%) than African Americans (44.6%) have jobs that provide health insurance benefits. White workers need to be won over to supporting demands for equality for African Americans, such as universal government health care, which would especially help African Americans, and also Chicanos, Mexicanos and Latinos, whose lack of health insurance is even higher than that of African Americans (at 30.1%) .

There is also a view that whites in general and white workers in particular actually benefit from the national oppression of African Americans. If this were true, we would expect to see a pattern where the more intense the national oppression is, the better off whites should be. But in fact whites in the Black Belt South where the African American Nation is based are worse off than other southern whites outside the Black Belt. An example of this is that the life span of whites is shorter, and the infant mortality rate among whites higher, in the Black Belt South than in other areas of the South.

This should be no surprise, for when the government doesn’t take care of public health, the tuberculosis bacteria doesn’t care if the body they are infecting is African American or white. So fighting national oppression is in the interest of white workers, because they face a common enemy: the wealthiest 1%, or the monopoly capitalists, who own and control the giant corporations that dominate the economy and control the government. But to upend the power of the 1%, we need an alliance between the working class and the national movements (the movements of oppressed nationalities such as African Americans, Arab and Asian Americans, Chicanos, Mexicanos, and Latinos, and Native Americans and Pacific Islanders). This alliance can only be forged by explaining to white workers that fighting national oppression is in their own interests and that they need to support the struggle for equality by Black people and support the right of self-determination, up to and including secession, for the African American nation.

#SouthCarolina #SC #healthCare #AntiRacism #selfdetermination #BlackBeltSouth

Jackson, MS – On June 4, Chokwe Lumumba won the election as mayor here, winning 87% of the vote in the general election. He had all but assured his victory by winning a stunning come-from-behind upset in the Democratic Party primary on May 21 in this 80% Black city in the heart of the Black Belt South.

As Lumumba’s campaign surged toward a surprise victory in the May 21 primary election, some powerful forces in Jackson panicked and tried in vain to stop Lumumba from advancing by pouring money into the opposing candidate’s campaign and by spreading lies and rumors about Lumumba in the Black community.

Lumumba is a lifelong leader in the Black liberation movement. He is associated with the view that there is an oppressed Black Nation in the Black Belt South that has a right to self-determination. He is a co-founder and leader of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which describes itself as “an organization of Afrikans in America/New Afrikans whose mission is to defend the human rights of our people and promote self-determination in our community.”

Lumumba is a lawyer who has defended many Black revolutionary political prisoners over the years, including Assata Shakur during her 1977 trial. He also served as a lawyer for radical hip hop artist Tupac Shakur during some of his prominent legal cases in the 1990s, and has fought and won many campaigns against police brutality.

Although Lumumba ran as a candidate of the Democratic Party, he described himself as a “Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat,” a reference to the 1960s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leader who organized a parallel Democratic Party in Mississippi to challenge the white supremacist Mississippi Democratic Party of that time. That caused a major showdown and national scandal at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Lumumba’s electoral effort is part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Jackson People’s Assembly’s “Jackson Plan” to build toward Black self-determination in the Deep South.

#JacksonMS #OppressedNationalities #AfricanAmerican #ChokweLumumba #MalcolmXGrassrootsMovement #BlackBeltSouth #Elections