Jacksonville, FL – On Wednesday March 12, Jacksonville Students for a Democratic Society held a teach-in on the history of SDS and the Black Liberation Movement.

The multi-national crowd of attendees were taught about the lives and contributions of three influential Black Panthers, those being Assata Shakur, Dr. Huey P. Newton and Chairman Fred Hampton, and their contributions to the student movement today.

Attendees spoke about the misrepresentation of Black liberation movements within media and education, as well as the tactics used by the Black Panther Party that are seen in political organizing today.

Discussion of the influence of the Black liberation movement has on local Jacksonville organizing shed light on the of inspiration that each leader provided to political organizing to this day.

#JacksonvilleFL #FL #StudentMovement #BlackLiberation

New Orleans, LA – On Saturday, March 2, around 50 community members packed into a community space in the 7th Ward. There, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) held a forum titled “Black Power and the need for communist organization.”

Juleea Berthelot, a student organizer, introduced the organization and two FRSO members who work in NOCOP (New Orleans for Community Oversight of the Police).

The first speaker, Toni Jones, starts off by pointing out that the political experience of Black people in the U.S. is also an economic one. Despite being over half of the city’s population, Black households make significantly less money than white ones. Historic, systemic factors play into the material conditions of the Black population. “The struggle for Black liberation has a class character,” says Jones. “Class character requires class struggle.”

Toni Mar, another FRSO member, expanded on what a communist organization looks like by connecting their work in NOCOP with the separate goals of a revolutionary organization. They aim to organize among the masses, who are not solely other socialists. In these environments, communists emphasize building the leadership of Black working class. Ultimately, they want to win people over to the socialist cause. Mar finished their addition to the forum saying, “We will only ever get what we are organized to take, and we want it all!” filling the room with applause.

#NewOrleansLA #NOCOP #BlackLiberation #Communism #WorkingClassStruggle #PoliceCrimes #SDS

Tampa, FL – On February 6, Tampa community members packed the North Tampa branch library for a Black History Month panel hosted by the Tampa district of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). The panel discussed the demands of African Americans, in Tampa and across the country, in the struggle against racism, imperialism and national oppression, especially talking about the struggles against police brutality and for community control of the police.

“The epidemic of police violence shows the need for Black liberation. If we’re going to be able to confront this thing head on, we need to develop better institutions for the people. Independent counsel for the Citizens Review Board is only the first step,” said Tampa Bay Community Action Committee member Jeremy Castano about the local struggle to expand the powers of the Citizens Review Board.

Jaden Patel of Tampa Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) said “USF needs to increase its Black enrollment. Less than 10% of USF’s student population is Black, while almost 25% of Tampa is. This is essential to allowing the Black community to be able to develop and thrive.” Tampa SDS has been campaigning to hold the University of South Florida’s administration to account for the massive disparity in its enrollment of African American students.

“Our community has always been the nest of everything wrong in this city. This import of dope, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the renting-while-Black program. All socially engineered by the city leaders from the beginning,” said Connie Burton of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and veteran Tampa activist of the oppression experienced by the local African American community

Frank Chapman, chairman of the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression (NAARPR) and central committee member of the FRSO, who joined the panel over Zoom, discussed the ongoing struggle in Chicago around ECPS. “What’s going on in Chicago right now is the most important thing happening in the Black liberation movement today. Everyone here and across the country should be watching closely. The only way we will overcome police violence, the foot-soldiers of the ruling class, is through the people and allowing the people to have control over the police.”

The panel emcee was Gareth Dawkins of the FRSO. She closed the event saying “This event should reaffirm everyone's dedication to the struggle of African Americans and all others oppressed by the U.S. empire. Through our unity we will consolidate and grow this movement.”

#TampaFL #AfricanAmerican #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackLiberation

Chicago, IL – Rev. David Thornton, pastor of the Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church, welcomed the crowd, February 10. Referring to the program for the event, sponsored by Freedom Road Socialist Organiza-tion (FRSO), he said, “I think that the Freedom Road Socialist Organization has a strategy of building a united front against monopoly capitalism.” Recalling his sermon that morning, he added, “This reminds me, this morning, when I shared with the congregation the importance, if you really want to make a difference, to leave the safety of the shore and go into the deep waters. This is certainly an organiza-tion that is engaged in deep waters.”

He then introduced Evangeline Jackson of FRSO, who led the singing of the Black national anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing.

In opening the forum, Ariel Atkins of Black Lives Matter – Chicago quoted the indigenous woman activ-ist from Australia, Lilla Watson, “… if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” As an example of this kind of alliance of shared liberation struggles, she said, “I saw when the Ferguson police pepper-sprayed unarmed protesters filling the streets, furious over the murder of Mike Brown. Palestinian victims of Israeli violence stretched their arms to Ferguson with advice how to ease the burden in their eyes.” This vision of solidarity has helped BLM – Chicago’s #NoCopAcademy campaign, which has garnered the support of five Black candidates for mayor.

A strike captain from the Chicago International Charter School Ralph Ellison High School, Jamal Barnes, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union – Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff spoke. Barnes ex-plained, “My kids in my school need a library. My students need additional social workers. That’s what we’re fighting for on the picket line at Ralph Ellison.”

Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of CTU, began by explaining that conditions that impacted on these elections took place four years ago. “The way we got where we are now is because people are of-fended. How do we then get people to knock on doors? It is offensive that 50 Black schools were closed for Black children in this city. It is offensive that we watched a boy being murdered by 16 shots. It’s offensive that homes where Black people lived no longer exist, and what exists are vacant lots. How do we build on the victories and the gains that we have already made?”

Frank Chapman of FRSO and Field Organizer of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repres-sion, spoke then about the strategic alliance between the Black liberation movement and the labor movement. “Why do we call it the strategic alliance? Black folks are mostly proletarians. We’re op-pressed by the same system: capitalism. We see this alliance as essential to bringing about the demise of the system.”

Chapman commended the CTU, “for what you’re doing for the labor movement. You don’t see any manifestation of this strategic alliance in the labor movement as a whole. But here in Chicago, we see it in our relationship to the teachers union.”

“This election is the first time since Harold Washington that I have seen so many young Black people, grassroots people, who have thrown their hat in the ring running for office. What has motivated them is the stinking, rotten City Council.”

Referring to the struggle for an elected civilian police accountability council (CPAC), Chapman contin-ued, “The exact number of candidates we have supporting CPAC now is 68. In the last election, we had only one. That’s because these young people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

“This forum is being held with less than three weeks before election day. We need to stay focused on protesting at the polls, getting out the vote, and accomplishing a political realignment in city hall. We’re turning these elections into a referendum on CPAC.”

Finally, he ended, “We need to prepare for the period after the new council is seated, we’ll need the movement to keep the pressure on.”

#ChicagoIL #Elections #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #Socialism #BlackLiberation

For African Americans in the United States, we can recall the Great Migration after the betrayal of Radical Reconstruction in which hundreds of thousands of African Americans made their way across the country to escape racist violence and national oppression in the Black Belt South. African Americans made their way from the Black Belt to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and other northern towns in a search for greater economic opportunities, away from the white supremacist violence and other forms of national oppression they dealt with in the Black Belt.

It is important for Black people here to show solidarity with the Central American caravan and support caravan members’ demands and rights for a better life. Often, the struggle of refugees and the immigrants has been met by narrow nationalist forces here in the U.S. with much chagrin and resistance. These are African Americans who make the claim that the struggles of immigrants don’t affect Black people, therefore we have no stake in their struggle. But these forces show their own ignorance of the broader struggle for self-determination and immigration rights by even denying the national oppression and draconian U.S. immigration policies that Black immigrants face here in the United States.

Let’s not forget that it was reported that Donald Trump called places like Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries. As well, the Trump administration has been especially vicious in breaking up Haitian-American households as well as other African immigrants here with threats of deportation. Just earlier this month, a U.S District Judge granted a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from terminating the Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which affects immigrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan. This specific ruling affects over 300,000 immigrants, including Black immigrants, who under the TPS have been allowed to live and work legally in the United States for decades after war and/or major natural disasters in their home countries.

It is paramount for the Black liberation movement in the United States to support the struggle of immigrants of all oppressed nationalities. The greater our unity, the more strength we have against the same white supremacy and imperialist forces that deport and terrorize immigrant families while murdering and imprisoning Black people.

It was civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who famously said, ““Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

African American Solidarity with Immigrants and Refugees!

Legalization for All and an End to Militarization of the Border! Michael Sampson is an African American organizer who works against police crimes, and for African American self-determination in Jacksonville, Florida with the Jacksonville Community Action Committee.

#JacksonvilleFL #ImmigrantRights #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #BlackLiberation

Chicago, IL — First of all, this movie took me back to my childhood love of fantastic tales of adventure and romance. So, for me, it was great entertainment made possible by cinematic art at its finest. It was a movie sprung from the pages of a comic book, moving pictures full of enchanting moments of musical chants, poetry flowing through panoramic scenes of spectacular beauty enhanced by the liquid murmurs of water falls. Most importantly, Black Panthe r is a movie endowed with the presence of Black African folk reflecting their social reality as dreams by way of rituals embellished by the contest of battles, dance and song.

Yet Black Panther is more than a fairy tale holding us spellbound, caught in a fantasy free from the controls of reality. It is also an expression of the authors’ confused knowledge of Black people and their struggles for freedom. I am referring here to the notion that we must be freed by someone or something outside of ourselves, for it is a mistaken notion that overlooks the great revolutionary traditions of our people from the slave revolts to the present. What we propose to do here is not to review this movie from the standpoint of its mistaken notions of Black liberation, because then we would miss the message that comes in the unfolding of a great story full of all the drama and excitement of a great adventure.

The movie portrays an advanced Black civilization that hid itself from the world, from a civilization that enslaved Black people and maintained itself with brute force. A world wracked with human suffering, with poverty and wars. Yet in its midst it harbored a utopian society of Black people who managed to evolve into an advanced technological civilization while staying rooted in their ancient tribal traditions and culture. Hence, there is no class oppression, no crimes that spring from poverty, no real social unrest necessitating the need for jails and prisons. No class struggle, but definitely royal intrigue and cloak and dagger treachery. There is, for the most part, non-antagonistic social inequality between the king and his subjects and between men and women. Women are duty bound to defend the kingdom, so they are warriors and guardians of the throne. However, these ennobling roles given to women do not overcome the sexist overtones inherit in a clearly male-dominated culture. Because of these contradictions the leading women characters, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Shuri (Letitia Wright) and Okoye (Danai Gurira) emerge as exceptional sheros in not only defending the kingdom but also in saving it.

The conflict, or basic contradiction, that drives this screenplay is that despite all the cloaking devices for concealing themselves and staying isolated from the rest of the world, the people of Wakanda are forced to interact with this outside world and in doing so they become infected or contaminated by it. The culture and folkways of Wakanda are designed to make the people immune to the outside world, but it’s not 100%, so they have a spy network to make sure their secret power, which is a powerful natural resource peculiar to their homeland, is not revealed. Because, in the hands of the greed-driven “colonizers” of the outside world, the world could be destroyed.

As it turns out this whole notion of isolation is delusional (see the movie if you want to know how and why). Without going into details of the story let us just say the people of Wakanda are as human as the people of the outside world when it comes to passions such as love, hate, jealousy and fear. The storyline of the movie is driven by these same human passions.

The antagonist is on a mission of revenge because his father was murdered. He has been forced to live among Black people in the U.S. as one of them. He hates the bondage he sees his people in and he hates the Black Panther King of Wakanda (Chadwick Boseman) for doing nothing about it, for not using the superior force of their civilization to destroy/conquer the colonizers and set Black people free. To make this happen, the antagonist, Eric Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) sets out to overthrow the Panther King and, when he does, he immediately attempts to unleash war on the outside world with the openly stated objective of freeing all Black people. Kilmonger, the hero as villain, does not steal the show but he does give it substance, meaning and relevance to the plight of Black folk as an oppressed people. I imagined how telling it would have been to have a Kilmonger challenger to Obama while he was in the White House or to the aspiring Black capitalists who see only business opportunities in our misery. Oh well, imagination can be silly.

I hate when people tell me how a movie ends or give me a full account of plot and episodes. I won’t do to you what I wouldn’t want done to me. Suffice it to say that the basic conflict between Wakanda and the outside world is resolved, and the tale ends well.

Like we said starting out this is great entertainment and basically a movie for children. But as a grown up I enjoyed it as well. The movie gave me an opportunity to return to my childhood and in doing so reminded me that as a child I rarely saw Black people filling up the screen with heroic deeds, instilling in me a sense of pride and self-worth. As a child, the feelings I got were from Black folk on the silver screen were too often feelings of shame and self-loathing. However, there were some moments of pride with Black actors and entertainers like Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Danridge, Harry Bellefonte, Bill Robinson and a host of others. Although Black Panther is a great movie, we as a people were not waiting for this movie to give us pride and self-worth, for we have always given these things to ourselves in art, in life and in our persistent struggles for Black liberation.

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #Movies #AfricanAmerican #BlackLiberation #BalckPanther

Chicago, IL – The strains of the civil rights anthem, Oh, Freedom, rang out in Trinity Episcopal Church on Chicago’s South Side, Feb. 12, sung by Evangeline Jackson. Jackson, a registered nurse, is a leader in her union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1216. As a young woman in the South in the 1980s, her hospital was unionized with the help of Frank Chapman, a veteran of the Black liberation movement.

The song introduced a Black History Month program where Chapman spoke about his upcoming book, “A Marxist-Leninist Perspective on the Struggle for Socialism and Black Liberation.” A leading member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Chapman explained that the book sets forth the thesis that an important part of revolutionary content of Marxism-Leninism lies precisely in seeing the centrality of the national question in the struggle against imperialism and the struggle for socialism.

For Chapman, history is alive. He illustrated that the struggle for democratic rights that was the period of Black Reconstruction is still on the agenda today. “We lost the right to vote in the 1890s, we fought to get it back in 1965, and the Supreme Court just took it away again.” He explained that it was political power backed by arms in the South after the Civil War that guaranteed Black equality.

Chapman began by establishing that the idea of Black people as a nation in the U.S. grew organically out of the Black liberation movement, starting before the Civil War. He recounted the development in the 1920s, when the Communist Party USA, with the leadership of Black communists like Harry Haywood and the influence of the Communist International, “dealt with Black people as an oppressed nation within this nation.” Once this happened, the Party began to play a leading role in the Black movement, including the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, and organizing textile workers in North Carolina. Chapman even argued, “In the South, without the role of the Communists, there would have been no Civil Rights Movement.”

A former member of the Communist Party, Chapman joined FRSO because of the organization’s view of “the strategic alliance,” expressed in a statement adopted at the organization’s 2007 congress: “Our basic strategy for revolution and socialism is building a united front against the monopoly capitalist class, under the leadership of the working class and its political party, with a strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities at the core of this united front.”

The event opened with comments by Aislinn Pulley of Black Lives Matter-Chicago, who spoke of the recent Amtrak Police shooting of Chad Robertson; the refusal of prosecutors to bring charges against the cop who killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones on Christmas morning 2015; and the Chicago police department murder of a mentally ill woman two days before the event. This helped place Chapman’s talk in the context of the ongoing struggle against racist discrimination and national oppression.

#ChicagoIL #Socialism #PeoplesStruggles #Antiracism #FrankChapman #BlackLiberation