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Omali Yeshitela in Oakland, CA
Based in Oakland during the 1980s and the early 90s, Omali Yeshitela is known by many for his courageous stand against the poverty, powerlessness and police containment policies imposed on the African community. From the Uhuru House at 7911 MacArthur Blvd. in East Oakland, Yeshitela launched many popular campaigns challenging the oppressive conditions faced by the majority of black people in the Bay Area.
In 1983 members of the Uhuru Movement were beaten and arrested by Oakland police when they attempted to build a tent city at Lafayette Park downtown. As a gathering place of many of Oakland’s thousands of homeless African people, the park was renamed Uhuru Park and a governing council of homeless people was established. The Uhuru Movement served meals at the park daily for several months, with food donated by countless Bay Area businesses and individuals.
In 1984 and again in 86, Yeshitela led the campaign that successfully put the Community Control of Housing initiative on the ballot in Oakland. Known as Measures O and H, the initiatives called for rents to be set at not more than 25 percent of the average income of a neighborhood. The popular, low-budget measures won 25 percent of the vote on both runs, despite hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by landlords to defeat it.
In the early 80s Yeshitela exposed the government’s role in flooding the African communities with deadly drugs, a fact later verified by Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance, which first appeared in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. Yeshitela, who led demonstrations with the slogan “Uncle Sam is the pusher-man,” pointed out that the drug infestation followed the government’s COINTELPRO attack on the Black Power Movement of the 60s. He defined the drugs as part of a U.S. counterinsurgency against the African community, a war that includes heavy handed policing, criminalization of the community and escalating rates of imprisonment.
Yeshitela was instrumental in making the demand for reparations to the African community a household word. In 1982 he led the Uhuru Movement in sponsoring the International Tribunal on Reparations for African people held in Brooklyn, NY.
During his 12 years in Oakland Omali Yeshitela wrote several books, published The Burning Spear newspaper and spoke tirelessly organizing African working people.
In 1989, the late Black Panther leader Huey Newton spoke at the Uhuru House, effectively passing the torch when he said, “We might not have the Black Panther Party, but we have the Uhuru House!”
In 1993 Yeshitela moved his headquarters to St. Petersburg FL, where he continues to speak and lead campaigns throughout the U.S., Africa and Europe for the liberation of African people.
Yeshitela organizes Africans everywhere to unite as one people to reclaim Africa and all its resources. A proponent of “the right of African return” Yeshitela points to African unification as the solution to the poverty and oppression that plagues African working people worldwide. Yeshitela leads the African Socialist International, an organization that has a growing membership throughout Africa, the U.S. and other countries.
“Whether it’s in Jena, New Orleans or U.S. prisons, or whether it’s in Sierra Leone, Darfur or Paris, African people are catching hell all over the globe,” states Yeshitela. “We don’t need charity! We need control of our own land and resources in Africa—the birthright of African people everywhere!”