# African People's Socialist Party

The African People's Socialist Party (APSP) is a pan-Africanist political party in the United States. APSP leads its sister organization, the Uhuru Movement (pronounced /ʊhʊrʊ/, Swahili for "freedom"). Both APSP and Uhuru formed in 1972 from the merger of three prior Black Power organizations.
APSP supports reparations for slavery in the United States, African socialism, and African internationalism.
In 2024, four leading APSP members, including APSP chairman Omali Yeshitela, were convicted of conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government, but were found not guilty of acting as agents of Russia.
Notable APSP members include Omali Yeshitela, who has been APSP chairman since 1972.$^{:316}$

## Ideology

The APSP is an African internationalist and African socialist organization." APSP's stated goals are "to keep the Black Power Movement alive, defend the countless Africans locked up by the counterinsurgency, and develop relationships with Africa and Africans worldwide".
According to its Constitution, the African People's Socialist Party is the "advanced detachment of the African working class and its general staff," pursuing the goal of "the liberation and unification of Africa and African people under the leadership of the African working class as a critical component of the struggle to overthrow imperialism."
The Uhuru Movement's political theory is African internationalism, which argues that capitalism was born parasitic through the attack on Africa and its people. African Internationalism holds that capitalism is imperialism developed to its highest stage, not the other way around, as theorized by Vladimir Lenin.
This belief derives from Karl Marx's 1867 book Capital, in which Marx wrote of the condition essential to the emergence of capitalism which he called the "primitive accumulation" of capital. African Internationalism is not a static theory that only refers to past conditions, it refers also to the conditions that African people are faced with today. It refers to African people who live inside what it views as imperialist centers, such as the United States and Europe, as an "internal (or domestic) colony". Uhuru calls for the release of all African prisoners in US prisons (labelled "concentration camps") and the withdrawal of police forces (described as "illegitimate standing army") from African American communities.

## History
### Origins

In 1968, Omali Yeshitela created the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO), a Black Power organization that protested against racial discrimination, police brutality, and abuses against people of African descent in Florida. JOMO was modelled after the Black Panther Party.
In 1972, three Black Power organizations in Florida and Kentucky merged to create APSP: JOMO, the Black Rights Fighters (BRF), and the Black Study Group (BSG). JOMO, chaired by Yeshitela, was the most influential of the three. The Uhuru Movement was also created in 1972. After the merger, Yeshitela became the chairman of APSP and of Uhuru, which shifted their focus from Black Power toward Pan-Africanism.

### 1970's

In 1979, the APSP established the African People's Solidarity Committee (APSC), an organization for European and European American "that works in solidarity with the struggle for African liberation and the unification of Africa and African people worldwide". The role of the APSC is to raise funds through donation campaigns and to carry out the economic development campaigns of the APSP.
In September 1979, the party founded the African National Prison Organization (ANPO); the decision to form the ANPO was decided following a September 4, 1977 meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. During the meeting, several Black nationalist organizations declared the importance of, and the need for developing greater unity between pro-Black independence and prison forces. It was decided that the ANPO "would be the gateway to building a national liberation front." Additionally, the participants at the meeting established five principles as the basis for forming the ANPO, which were self-determination, political independence, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and self-defense.

### 1980's

In 1981, the APSP moved its national office from Florida to Oakland, California, and opened the Uhuru house.
In 1982, the APSP held its party congress in Oakland. The APSP passed a resolution to create the African Socialist International (ASI), and which called for all African socialists to unite into one all-African socialist movement, with the eventual goal of one African state. Although ASI pursues pan-Africanism, its primary aim is socialist revolution led by the African working class. The ASI seeks to be the "international party of the African working class".
In 1982, the APSP founded the African National Reparations Organization (ANRO), which held the First World Tribunal on Reparations for African People in Brooklyn, New York. That financial reparation was initially demanded at the First World Tribunal on Reparations for African People's 1982 meeting, which concluded that, "the United States owed $4.1 trillion for the crime of genocide against African Americans and the unpaid labor provided by them and their descendants during the period of slavery." The stated objective of the movement is to obtain compensation for the injustices of slavery, as well as segregation and neocolonialism since then. APSP chairman Omali Yeshitela has argued that African people worldwide are due reparations for more than slavery, but also over 500 years of colonialism and neocolonialism.
APSP claims that "through this work, the [APSP] gave birth to the modern Reparations Movement." However, authors Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto however posit that, in the National Black Political Assembly's (NBPA) Black Agenda report published in 1974, the NBPA first "endorsed the concept of African American reparations." Citing Ida Hakim (Hakim, I. T., Reparations, the Cure for America's Race Problem. Hampton. Va.; U.B. and U.S. Communication System, 1994), the authors however went on to write that: "The African National Reparations Organization linked to the African People's Socialist Party has conducted yearly tribunals on U.S. racism since 1982 and demanded $4.1 trillion in reparations for stolen labor."

### 1990's

In the 1990s, tensions were high between the police in St. Petersburg, Florida and the Uhuru Movement. Members of the Uhuru Movement frequently protested against the police's treatment of African Americans, usually after the murders of African Americans by police. On October 25, 1996, riots in St. Petersburg, Florida erupted after a White police officer shot and killed a young, unarmed Black man driving a stolen car. Cars and buildings were torched and rocks were tossed at the police officers at the scene of the shooting. At least 20 protesters were arrested. The next day, a large group of Uhuru members went back to the scene and called for the release of the arrested protesters. Most of the protests organized by Uhuru remained peaceful. Sobukwe Bambaata, one of the Uhuru members, stated that the rioting would have never occurred "if the police did not come into our community and treat us like dogs".
In the mid-1990s, APSP and Uhuru moved back to St. Petersburg, Florida.

### 2000's

In 2004, Uhuru chairman Omali Yeshitela tore down a Halloween display in St. Petersburg, Florida, which depicted "a stuffed figure hung by the neck on a homemade gallows". Subsequent opinions and letters to the St. Petersburg Times criticized both the Uhuru Movement and Yeshitela's conduct.
In 2008, Uhuru received national attention during the 2008 Presidential campaign season when an Uhuru member interrupted Barack Obama at a town hall meeting in St. Petersburg and asked the candidate "What about the black community?", alleging that he was not speaking out for Africans on issues such as police brutality, high unemployment, predatory lending, and Hurricane Katrina.
In 2009, the Anti-Defamation League criticized Uhuru's demonstrations on January 3, 2009 as anti-Israel and anti-Zionist.
In 2009, the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) organized a march in support of Lovelle Mixon and against the Oakland Police Department. Mixon, an Oakland, California, resident, who had killed four Oakland police officers and died during a shootout after a traffic stop, coincidentally just blocks away from the local Uhuru headquarters.

### 2010's

In 2015, at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, the General Students' Committee (AStA) broke apart in April 2015 as a consequence of internal dispute over purported antisemitism after having organized an information event about the Uhuru Movement on JGU campus in January. The AStA distanced itself both from the Uhuru Movement, African People's Socialist Party and its leader Omali Yeshitela stating that "the struggle against racism and the consequences of colonialism should not blind us to other reactionary ideologies" and regretted providing a platform to the movement.

### 2023 federal indictment

In 2022, APSP and Uhuru supported Russia's invasion and occupation of eastern Ukraine, which it views as a "defensive war against the world colonial powers" and an appropriate response to NATO expansion. In 2022, APSP and Uhuru members attended an anti-globalization conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In 2022, APSP and Uhuru, including chairman Yeshitela, were investigated by state prosecutors for allegedly collaborating with Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov to spread pro-Russian propaganda and to sow social divisions in the United States. Ionov founded the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia. US prosecutors described him as a Russian foreign agent under the direction of the Federal Security Service (FSB).
In 2022, on July 29, the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg, Florida, was raided by the FBI due to an indictment by a grand jury alleging a conspiracy between Ionov and the Uhuru movement to spread Russian disinformation under the guise of domestic political movements. An FBI Tampa Special agent said that "The facts and circumstances surrounding this indictment are some of the most egregious and blatant violations we've seen by the Russian government in order to destabilize and undermine trust in American Democracy." APSP described the raids as a "hysterical response to the United States' loss of legitimacy".
In April 2023, the Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed a federal indictment alleging that APSP and Uhuru worked on behalf of the Russian government without registering as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The Nation described this as the DOJ "using 'foreign agents' accusations to repress Black liberation organizers". In June 2023, Yeshitela interviewed with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and dismissed the charges as a baseless attempt by the Biden administration to limit free speech.
In October 2024, four leading members of APSP and Uhuru, including chairman Yeshitela, were convicted in federal court of conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government. APSP members were found guilty on conspiring with Aleksandr Ionov to interfere in U.S. elections and sow social division in the United States. APSP members were found not guilty of acting as agents of Russia. In December 2024, Yeshitela and two other defendants avoided prison time in the Uhuru-Russian case when District Judge William Jung sentenced them to three years of probation.

## Newspaper

The Burning Spear Newspaper is a print and online newspaper, founded in 1968 by Omali Yeshitela as a newspaper for the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO). In its organizational pamphlet, JOMO states that the acronym jomo translated means burning spear. The Burning Spear's first issue was printed on December 22, 1969. Since 1972, The Burning Spear has been published by the APSP. The paper has published work by influential Black Power authors, including Assata Shakur.