The Uhuru Three, African Stream and the Black Scare/Red Scare

On September 12, 2024, a verdict was handed down in the “Uhuru Three” case. Omali Yeshitela, leader of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), Penny Hess, leader of the African People’s Solidarity Network, and Jesse Nevel, leader of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, were acquitted of failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act However, agents of Russia were found guilty of conspiracy – that is, conspiring with the Russian government to sow discord and disrupt elections. The charge of conspiracy is particularly nefarious because it effectively criminalizes thoughts and ideas as actions, and as the Black Alliance for Peace explains: “Conspiracy should be understood as the state using anything vague and circumstantial against our movement when it has no idea has.” Conviction about everything else.”

The use of the conspiracy charge to undermine radicals has a very long history. It is very effective because it allows for mass prosecutions and lawsuits that can cripple entire organizations in a single trial. One of the most famous examples is the Smith Act trials of the Communist Party leadership in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The defendants were convicted of conspiracy and insurrection based on books, writings, and memberships; No overt acts of violence were committed against the U.S. government. Then as now, black radical leaders like Claudia Jones and Pettis Perry argued that stripping communists of their rights to write, speak, assemble, and publish abolishes those rights for all people, and that ostracizing ideas through accusations of conspiracy The first step on this path is the path to fascism. The sentencing of the Uhuru 3, who face up to five years in prison for essentially organizing for oppressed people in general and African people in particular, also points to deep-rooted attacks on radical and progressive forces, regardless of faction of the one-party state they belong to is in office.

The conviction of the Uhuru Three for conspiracy must be understood in the context of the Biden administration’s attack on independent pan-African media. In a press conference the day after the verdict in the Uhuru case, Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused African Stream, a Kenya-based platform that shares a wide range of content on politics, movement and social realities in Africa and the diaspora, of being a cover for the to be Russian media company RT. Similar to the accusation that the APSP and its solidarity network were acting at the behest of a Russian agent, Blinken alleged that RT funded and exerted nefarious influence on African Stream, effectively reducing the latter to a voice of Kremlin propaganda.

The fact that Blinken mentioned African Stream alongside the Red (formerly Red Fish) platform is no coincidence; It is part of a long pattern of Black Scare/Red Scare oppression that simultaneously targets radical (e.g. communist, socialist, revolutionary nationalist) organizations and institutions as well as black people across the ideological spectrum, but particularly those with a internationalist, revolutionary and/or anti-imperialist orientation. As explained in Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, The Black Scare/Red Scare eliminates the difference between the challenge of white supremacy and the challenge of capitalist exploitation because both reject the organization of the United States along racial and class lines. Therefore, those organizing for black liberation and socialist transformation essentially became interchangeable as suspicious, outsiders, and plausibly destabilizing. Both were portrayed as aliens who aligned themselves with the enemies of the United States and thereby did not deserve citizenship, rights, privileges, and entitlements.

Shortly after Blinken’s announcement, African Stream was deplatformed under the auspices of the Foreign Missions Act and immediately disappeared from YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Similar to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, under which the Uhuru 3 were prosecuted, the Foreign Missions Act requires employees of “state-controlled” media companies to notify the State Department when they operate on U.S. properties. The goal is ostensibly to protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, which in the past has been a key reason for repealing freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and association. The infamous Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran Act), for example, required many radical and communist organizations to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board. Specific penalties for failing to register fully communist organizations or those alleged to be communist fronts, communist-infiltrated, communist-dominated, communist-supported, or communist-inspired organizations included five years in prison and a fine of $10,000 for each Day of non-registration. The “Labeling” section of the law required “Communist Action” and “Communist Front” organizations to label all mailed materials as coming from such organizations. It has been argued that such labeling aims to restrict freedom of information by leading to persecution and harassment of those who receive these mailings. It also imposed a “vicious form of censorship” due to its alleged “dangerous or harmful nature.” . . of the publisher or distributor.” This “labeling” process has many similarities to Twitter’s previous designation as a “state-affiliated media,” which was apparently intended to undermine the credibility of media outlets aligned with designated enemies of the United States (e.g . B. Russia, China, Iran) that questioned the narratives of the US mainstream media.

Regarding the McCarran Act, communist supporters Claudia Jones and Ferdinand Smith and their comrades imprisoned at Ellis Island warned in November 1950: “If we can be denied all rights and locked up in concert camps, then it is the trade unionists’ turn; Then the black people, the Jewish people, all the foreign-born, and all progressives who love peace and value freedom will be subjected to the bestiality and torment of fascism. Our fate is the fate of all opponents of fascist barbarism, of all who abhor war and want peace.” They argued that the McCarran Act worked through and with the Black Scare/Red Scare by denying human rights to radicals, not because they posed a physical threat, but because their fight for work, black rights and true democracy threatened to undermine the human rights status quo. Likewise, such repression meant that an attack on one group of the “others” could quickly spread to all groups of the “undesirables”. Eventually, the state of constant siege and war in which oppression flourished became normalized in the United States, and values ​​such as peace and freedom were distorted into threats to national security in order to legitimize racially motivated incarceration and expulsion.

The parallels between this 1950s moment and our current era—in which the war-aggravated genocide of Palestinians is normalized, anti-Cop City organizers are labeled domestic terrorists, support for bail funds falls under the RICO statutes and student protesters being brutalized and ostracized by colleges and universities and pan-African organizations and institutions being attacked as agents of a foreign power – certainly revive the popular notion that we are currently living through the “New McCarthyism.” That we are currently in the midst of another (black) red scare certainly calls into question the notion expressed by some activists that a Democratic presidency will “inaugurate.”[n] Space for those of us more radical than Kamala Harris to put pressure for change, especially when it comes to the genocide in Palestine.” The ongoing oppression of Pan-Africanists, students, organizers, workers and ordinary people who oppose genocide, settler colonialism , Western imperialism, the growing police state, and escalating warmongering casts doubt on the notion that US electoral politics in and of itself is capable of “expanding the terrain of mass struggle to guarantee a space in which the “The union movement can win victories, so that the women’s movement can win victories, so that people of color can win victories, so that working people and poor people can win victories.” While it is true that Donald Trump is the more open and boisterous fascist, that would be the height of dishonesty , to deny that the attack on the APSP, African Stream and countless other radical organizations and individuals provides the infrastructure for full-blown fascism – and the neoliberals currently in power are active and willing architects.