Uhuru 3: We need your help during appeal

DJ Suss D: In April 2023, the Uhuru 3 were indicted by the U.S. government on charges of being agents of a foreign government because of the Uhuru movement’s over 50 years of work to advocate for the liberation and unification of Africa and forcibly dispersed African people everywhere. I spoke with Jesse Nevel, one of the defendants.

[00:00:23] Jesse Nevel: What the Uhuru movement has done for over 50 years is they have worked to carry out a strategy that Chairman Omali Yeshitela calls dual and contending power, recognizing that the United States government and this entire colonial capitalist system of which the U.S. government is the world headquarters. It’s built on the oppression and exploitation of African people.

[00:00:46] So it actually has, this system has its basis, its foundation in African people being separated from their own resources and having no ability to produce and reproduce life for themselves.

[00:01:00] And the rural movement has worked to build an anti-colonial capacity for African working class people in communities throughout this country and throughout the world in Africa and Europe and other parts of the world wherever African people are, to actually have self-government, to have political and economic power.

[00:01:20] And those programs include here in St. Louis in the North Side, in the predominantly Black and deeply exploited and impoverished North Side of St. Louis, the Uhuru movement has many programs that fall under the umbrella of a project called the Black Power Blueprint. So that includes the basketball court that you just referenced.

[00:01:39] It includes creating Uhuru House community centers here in St. Louis, in St. Petersburg, in Oakland. It has included creating farmers markets, community gardens in the African community, working to build a doula training program to train African women to be birth workers. And this is part of addressing the genocidal conditions of African women facing internal and infant mortality in this country. These are the programs that the Uhura movement has built.

[00:02:10] And these programs are not charity. They are supported by the community and controlled by the community itself and often from contributions from white people who support these programs as a stand of reparations and solidarity with African people having power and self-determination over their own lives.

[00:02:30] There is a local component to the trial Lauren Regan who’s right there in Eugene, Oregon. She’s a brilliant attorney and she’s the director of an organization called the Civil Liberties Defense Center. Lauren was one of those people who was instrumental in the early days of this campaign this fight back following the raids on July 29, 2022 who worked with us to to identify lawyers who would be up to the task of going in and fighting not just these charges, but the whole system, the whole U.S. government.

[00:03:04] DJ Suss D: These charges carry prison sentences of up to 15 years each.

[00:03:10] Jesse Nevel: So on July 29, 2022, it was a Friday morning. It was predawn, 5 a.m. in St. Louis, Missouri where I’m currently located and it was coordinated to be a simultaneous raid in two different states at the same time. So in St. Petersburg, Florida, the raids began at 6 a.m. in that time zone.

[00:03:33] And this raid was not an FBI agent in a suit and tie showing up at someone’s door with their briefcase in hand and showing their ID and presenting a search warrant. This was a violent, militaristic, SWAT team kind of siege that was executed against these seven homes and offices.

[00:03:56] They came into the home of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and his wife, Ona Zene Yeshitela, who’s also the deputy chair of the African People Socialist Party in North St. Louis, Missouri. They came with flashbang grenades, they came with assault rifles, dozens of FBI agents in full military gear. They used drones. They trained the laser-red sights of their rifles on the chairman’s chest as he came down the steps of his home. And handcuffed the chairman and Deputy Chair Ona, told them to sit on the curb in front of their house, which they refused to do, because that is a typical tactic of the state to try to humiliate and degrade African people, they refused to do that.

[00:04:41] And they proceeded to ransack their home and six other homes and offices throughout Florida and Missouri for upwards of seven hours that morning. They took countless electronic devices, phones, computers, notebooks, calendars, planners, things like that. And they didn’t show us search warrants, by the way, until hours later they left a search warrant on the kitchen table or something like that.

[00:05:11] And at some point during these raids, the FBI agents informed us that these properties had been named in a search warrant relating to an indictment that had been unsealed out of Tampa, Florida of a Russian national for allegedly conspiring with people in the United States to work as Russian agents in this bogus absurd plot that the U.S. government created that, you know, claimed that we were working with the Russians to try to sow discord in the United States.

[00:05:47] And we were characterized, we, meaning Chairman Omali Yeshitela, who’s the primary target, along with Penny Hess, the chair of the African People Solidarity Committee, myself, and Akilé Anai, who’s another leader in the Uhuru movement and the APSP. We were characterized as unindicted co-conspirators in the initial indictment that was released on July 29, 2022.

[00:06:14] And on April 18, 2023, we were indicted. We were indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida. They issued a superseding indictment, which charged Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hess and myself of two criminal charges, two federal felony crimes.

[00:06:35] One, which was conspiring with the Russians to commit an offense against the United states government. And two, which was the main charge was to actually function as illegal secret agents of the Russian government in this alleged conspiracy to try to sow discord or cause dissension in the United States.

[00:07:01] DJ Suss D: The dog ate the FBI’s homework.

[00:07:04] Jesse Nevel: They expended tens of millions of dollars, if not more, on orchestrating this prosecution. They involved hundreds of FBI agents and other government personnel. The State Department actually put out on their so-called Rewards For Justice website a $10 million reward for any person who would step forward to collaborate with the U S. government’s prosecution of the Uhuru movement.

And after all of that, they couldn’t find a single person, a single actual person to come forward and testify against us.

[00:07:39] And they had to rely on calling their own FBI agents to the stand in order to introduce the evidence. What happened in that trial is that through cross-examination, it was exposed that the U.S. government had zero evidence whatsoever of any time that Chairman Omali Yeshitela or the Uhuru movement had ever agreed to function under the direction or control of the Russian government or of anyone other than themselves and Black people and the struggle of Black people for their freedom.

[00:08:15] DJ Suss D: It seems like a continuation of J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence programs.

[00:08:19] Jesse Nevel: They targeted the Uhuru movement and Chairman Omali Yeshitela for the same reason that in the 1920s, the FBI in its early stage targeted Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, who had built a similar movement to the Uhuru movement at that time, which was organizing millions of African people around the world in a struggle to liberate and unify Africa and free African people from colonial domination.

[00:08:47] They targeted the Uhuru movement for the same reason they targeted Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the 1960s, for the same reason they assassinated 30 members of the Black Panther Party and imprisoned over 300 members of the Black Panther Party in 1969—because this is a colonial state and the colonial state exists for the purpose of trying to, by force, suppress the basic human aspiration of African people to be self-determining and to be free.

[00:09:20] DJ Suss D: There’s a chilling effect on the work they’re doing to call attention to the plight of African-Americans that included preparing a petition to the United Nations accusing the U.S. of committing genocide against African Americans.

[00:09:33] Jesse Nevel: Immense support started flooding in for the Uhuru movement from people of all different political backgrounds. Because if you read the indictment against the Uhuru 3, what you will see is that every single what the prosecutors call ‘overt acts’ that they alleged that the Uhuru movement carried out as part of this so-called conspiracy, every single one of those overt acts was, in fact, not an act, but an example of political speech.

Political speech, which is supposed to be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is meant to protect the right to criticize the government, to engage in political speech and dissenting views of the United States government.

[00:10:25] DJ Suss D: He says the state had an ulterior motive for these charges submitted to an all-white jury in a conservative state.

[00:10:32] Jesse Nevel: To make it so that the African liberation movement and the voice of African people itself would have no legitimacy and would be reduced to simply being a mouthpiece for somebody else. So that when Black people speak out against their murders at the hands of the police, the killings of Black men and women in this country, the mass incarceration of Black people in this country, the gentrification of their communities that the U.S. government could just say, well, the Russians told them to say that.

[00:10:59] And the jury was able to reject that. The jury was able to unite with the basic legitimacy of the voice of African people struggling for self-determination and to say that, no, African people have agency. They have their own sovereignty. They are their own liberators. Chairman Amali Shatela and the Uhuru movement work for Black people, not for Russians.

[00:11:21] DJ Suss D: They need your support.

[00:11:23] Jesse Nevel: There will be motions filed to contest the verdict on the conspiracy conviction, and then there will be a motion of intent to appeal that will be filed. Right now, we are preparing for a sentencing hearing in Tampa, Florida, on Nov. 25, and people can support our campaign around the sentencing hearing by going to HandsOffOhuru.org.

[00:11:47] One of the things that we’re encouraging all of our supporters to do is to actually write letters to the judge, testifying to the character of Chairman Omalia Shatela and the Uhuru 3, and presenting, you know, from your perspective, why you feel that whatever sentence the judge imposes should not restrict Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the Uhuru movement from continuing to move freely in the world and do the work they’ve been doing for more than 50 years to uplift and empower the African community.

[00:12:20] So that’s a campaign that we have going on right now. This is really important that the world can know that the U.S. government lied and they lost and the Uhuru movement told the truth and won. And we’re going to continue winning and we invite everybody to be a part of this historic fight back and go to handsoffuhuru.org to find out how you can support it.

[00:12:43] DJ Suss D: For KEPW News, I’m DJ Suss D.