US Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020
Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka told a year-end conference of the Black Is Back Coalition that “the US settler state is facing the most serious crisis of legitimacy since the collapse of the capitalist economy” in the Great Depression. Betty Davis, of the Coalition’s Community Control of Schools Working Group, said: “The federal budget that comes down to New York City is the 23rd biggest budget in the world, but you don’t control that money and that’s why you are not having the same services as your white counterparts.”
US Genocide Against Blacks, Now and in 1951
The Black leftists that presented a petition to the United Nations, 70 years ago, charging the US with genocide against Black Americans, understood that “there is a linked fate between what’s happening to Black people in the US and what is going to happen” to other racialized and oppressed people around the world, said Dr Charisse Burden-Stelly, speaking at an online commemoration of the event. The “We Charge Genocide” campaign was led by entertainer-activist Paul Robeson and Black members of the Communist Party.
Lumumba Assassination Changed Black American Politics
A panel of academics and activists marked the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected prime minister, by agents of the US and Belgium. Texas A&M professor Ira Dworkin, author of “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State,” pointed out that it was Black women, led by singer Abbey Lincoln, who petitioned for Lumumba’s release from arrest, and later organized against US policy in Congo. These protests “did create a shift” in Black American politics towards confrontation with US policies in Africa and the world, Dworkin told the online seminar.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
The idea that we can resolve racism by integrating a fundamentally anti-Black institution is the most absurd notion of all.
The Bureau’s COINTELPRO deployed every trick and crime in the book to crush left dissidents, from disruption to assassination.
This week the presidential election and the legacy of Paul Robeson were on your minds.
Politicians ignore at their peril the power of popular culture and its people-moving practitioners.
Facial masks and Black Lives Matter murals are part of the ever-changing panorama that shapes our perceptions of hierarchy, just as tall buildings do.
