1. We want
peace, dignity, and the right to build a prosperous life through our
own labor and in our own interests.
We believe that the U.S. North American government and society were
founded on the genocide of Native people, the theft of their land, and
the forcible dispersal, enslavement, and colonization of millions of
African people. We believe that the present condition of existence for
African people within current U.S. borders is colonialism, a condition
of existence where a whole people is oppressively dominated by a foreign
and alien state power for the purpose of economic exploitation and political
advantage. We believe further that this colonial domination is the primary
basis of the problems of African people within the U.S. and that we
shall know neither peace, prosperity, nor human dignity until this colonialist
domination is overthrown and the power over our lives rests in our own
hands.
2. We want
the rights to economic development and creative and productive employment
which promote the needs and well-being of our entire people.
We believe that colonialism is a blood-sucking system which causes all
economic development to benefit the colonialist ruling class state and
society at the expense of our colonized people. We also believe that
the massive, habitual unemployment and underemployment of our people
benefit the U.S. colonialist ruling class and capitalist system and
that a struggle by African people for jobs must be combined with a struggle
for socialism and independent economic development.
3. We want
an end to all local, state, federal, and other taxation of black people
by the U.S. government and any of its agencies.
We believe that such taxation is illegitimate, that black people have
no real or meaningful authority within the U.S. government, and that
U.S. taxation of African people is therefore taxation without representation.
We believe that in the absence of such real or meaningful authority
we have nothing to say about how such monies are used, and that therefore
the taxes taken from black people are often used against us and other
oppressed and exploited peoples within the U.S. and around the world.
We believe that the use of taxes extracted from the African population
to build more prisons to stuff us in and to hire more police to kill
us with is criminal, as is the use of these taxes to hire soldiers to
intimidate and plunder peoples oppressed by this same system internationally.
We also believe African people must refuse to pay taxes to a government
which uses such taxes to prop up and support brutal dictators around
the world who keep their own peoples oppressed and living in squalor
in order to maintain U.S. and Western imperialist economic and political
domination.
4. We want
the right to free speech and political association, a guarantee of the
right to work for the betterment and emancipation of black people without
fear of political imprisonment and the loss of life, limb, and livelihood.
We believe that the liberation of African people throughout the world
will come primarily as a result of our own efforts. We believe it is
our duty to our mothers and fathers, our children and ourselves, to
organize ourselves to overcome our oppression. We believe that the rights
to organize and speak out against our oppression are basic human rights
and that the U.S. government must discontinue its attempts to smash
these rights and must discontinue criminal attacks on those African
patriots who work for the betterment and emancipation of our people.
5. We want
the right to international political and economic association with Africans
and all other peoples anywhere on the face of the Earth.
We believe that all black people are African people and are a part of
a single national entity. We believe that the genuine freedom of African
people everywhere is irreversibly linked to the creation of an independent,
united, and socialist Africa. We believe the struggle of African people
within the U.S. represents the U.S. front of the worldwide movement
of African people for African liberation, political independence, and
socialist democracy. We believe that the worldwide struggle for African
liberation is in unity with the struggles being waged by the majority
of the peoples of the world to end the oppression of nations by nations
and to create a new world, within which the toiling masses will end
the system of workers and bosses and slaves and masters and will own
and benefit from the means and products of our labor and will have political
authority over our own lives. We believe that the natural, objective
friends of our struggle for African liberation, independence, and socialist
democracy are all the toiling masses of the world — the people
of the Middle East, the Asian and Latin American peasants and workers,
the democratic forces throughout Eastern and Western Europe and the
U.S., and the truly socialist states of the world, and that we must
therefore have the absolute right to free political and economic international
association.
6. We want
the immediate and unconditional release of all black people who are
presently locked down in U.S. prisons.
We believe that all the African men and women who are locked down in
the U.S. concentration camps commonly known as prisons are there due
to decisions, laws, and circumstances which were created by aliens and
foreigners for their own benefit and as a means of genocidal colonialist
control. We believe that these decisions, laws, and circumstances were
created and are enforced without our consent and are therefore illegitimate.
We believe that the African men and women who are locked down in these
concentration camps are victims of U.S. colonialist ruling class justice
which maintains our enslavement and terrorizes our people, and that
they should therefore be released immediately to the just representatives
of our struggle for liberation, independence, and socialist democracy.
7. We want
complete amnesty for all African political prisoners and prisoners of
war from U.S. prisons or their immediate release to any friendly country
which will accept them and give them political asylum.
We believe that U.S. prisons are also used as the illegitimate tool
for torturing, murdering, and holding captive those courageous daughters
and sons of Africa who through their patriotic deeds or spoken or written
words in support of the cause of our liberation have become political
prisoners and prisoners of war. We believe, along with the majority
of the peoples of the world, that it is the duty of the colonized and
enslaved to resist slavery and colonialism and to fight for socialism
and those who do so are patriots and heroines and heroes and should
be held in the highest esteem.
8. We want
the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. police from our oppressed and exploited
communities.
We believe that the various U.S. police agencies which occupy our communities
are arms of the U.S. colonialist state which is responsible for keeping
our people enslaved and terrorized. We believe that the U.S. police
agencies do not serve us, but instead represent the first line of U.S.
defense against the just struggle of our people for peace, dignity,
and socialist democracy. Therefore, we believe the U.S. police is an
illegitimate standing army, a colonial army in the African community
and must withdraw immediately from our community, to be replaced by
our liberation forces whose struggles in defense of our community and
against our oppression demonstrate their loyalty to our community and
their willingness to serve in its interest.
9. We want
an end to the political and social oppression and economic exploitation
of African women.
We believe in the absolute, unequivocal, political, social, and economic
equality of African women and men. We believe that a fundamental test
of the progressive or revolutionary character of any organization, party,
movement, or society is its commitment, confirmed in practice, to the
destruction of the special oppression of women and the elevation of
women to the rightful place as equal partners and leaders in the forward
motion of the development of human society and as leaders, makers, and
shapers of human history.
10. We want
the right to build an African People's Liberation Army.
We believe that true freedom, although often taken away, cannot be given
to a people. We believe that African people are our own liberators,
and that we have a right and obligation to build an African People’s
Liberation Army to defend our political gains, our freedom fighters
and communities, and to win our actual freedom from our oppressive colonial
slave masters. We believe that neither meaningful freedom, nor guaranteed
political and social gains, nor genuine liberation are possible without
the assuring existence of an African People’s Liberation Army.
We believe further that the only legitimate wars are wars of national
liberation, and wars to oppose imperialist aggression, and that therefore,
the only legitimate military forces for black people to serve with are
military forces which defend liberty and repel imperialist aggression.
Such a force would be the African People’s Liberation Army.
11. We want
the U.S. and the international European ruling class and states to pay
Africa and African people for the centuries of genocide, oppression,
and enslavement of our people.
We believe that U.S. and European civilization were born from, and are
presently maintained by, the horrendous theft of human and material
resources from Africa and its people. We also believe that this theft
of human and material resources is responsible for the present underpopulation
and underdevelopment of Africa and her people and the political servitude,
material impoverishment, and cultural discontinuity and disintegration
of African people throughout the world. We believe that Africa and African
people are due reparations, just economic compensation, billions of
dollars which must be paid to the Organization of African Unity or any
other legitimate international organization of African people, for equitable
distribution for the development of Africa. We also believe that reparations
must be distributed to the various independent African states dispersed
throughout the world, and to the legitimate representatives of African
people forcibly dispersed throughout the world who have not yet won
liberation.
12. We want
an end to the vicious, self-serving U.S. and Western European political,
economic, and military interference in the affairs of Africa and African
people throughout the world.
We believe that African people in Africa and elsewhere have a right
and responsibility to solve our own problems, free from the unwanted,
and self-serving interference of U.S. and Western imperialists. We believe
that the U.S. and Western imperialist interference in the affairs of
our people is designed to maintain the continuation of the theft of
our human and material resources and our oppression and impoverishment.
We believe that African people must be free to organize and struggle
for an end to colonialism and neo-colonialism without interference from
U.S. and Western imperialism which supports neo-colonialism and colonialism
in Africa, the U.S. and elsewhere, and which has deposed progressive
and revolutionary African leaders and replaced them with neo-colonialist
stooges.
13. We want
an end to U.S. colonial domination of African people within the U.S.
We believe that the primary struggle of African people within the U.S.
during this period is to throw off the alien U.S. colonial domination
which is responsible for virtually every hardship imposed on black people
by this government that is identifiable as a “black problem.”
We believe that our problems with education — from our inability
to control our own schools and determine the education of our own children,
to the inferior and racist quality of the education we do receive —
are caused by colonialism.
We believe that our problems with health care — from the absence
of black controlled and operated health clinics and institutions throughout
our communities to the hazardous health conditions imposed on us by
poverty and callous government decisions — are caused by colonialism.
We believe that our problems with housing — from the unavailability
of decent and adequate housing for the majority of our people, to the
dilapidated and vermin-infested housing we are forced to live in —
are caused by colonialism.
We believe
that our problems with food and clothing — from the terrible quality
and quantity which are imposed on us by blood-sucking merchants, to
our inability to produce and distribute them for and among ourselves
— are caused by colonialism, where our whole people is dominated
and oppressed by a foreign and alien state power for the purpose of
economic exploitation and political advantage.
14. We want
the total liberation and unification of Africa under an All-African
socialist government.
We believe that “the total liberation and unification of Africa
under an All-African socialist government must be the primary objective
of all Black revolutionaries throughout the world. It is an objective
which, when achieved, will bring about the fulfillment of the aspirations
of Africans and people of African descent everywhere. It will at the
same time advance the triumph of the international socialist revolution,
and the onward progress toward communism, under which every society
is ordered on the principle of — from each according to his (her)
ability, to each according to his (her) needs.” — Kwame
Nkrumah
