Acquitted on Russian agent charge, sentenced on Conspiracy charge
The “Uhuru 3” are Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP); and two organizers with the Uhuru Movement’s white reparations component: Penny Hess, Chair of the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC); and Jesse Nevel, Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement (USM).
On September 12, 2024 they were found not guilty on federal charges of acting as unregistered agents of Russia but were convicted on a contradictory charge of conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of Russia. They are appealing the conspiracy conviction.
While they were found not guilty of the most serious charge – acting as agents of Russia – the government still seeks a sentence of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine each on the conspiracy conviction.
First Amendment attorneys are alarmed at the case law precedent that has been set, this being the first time the DOJ has ever used the foreign agent statutes to prosecute pure speech and opinion.
A highly-publicized feature of the government’s conspiracy case was the accusation that the Russian government interfered in U.S. elections via Jesse Nevel’s 2017 candidacy for mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida with its reparations platform. During the trial, the prosecution’s key witness and lead investigator in the case, FBI agent Kelly Bowen, admitted under oath that they had no evidence of this allegation, even as they wrote it into their press releases and indictment.
Some see this DOJ disinformation campaign as part of a Biden administration policy to discourage independent Black participation in the electoral process, a policy that may have backfired, resulting in many Black people turning their backs on the Democratic Party in the recent elections.
Activists and historians denounce the prosecution as a continuation of the FBI’s decades-long war on the Black movement, beginning with J. Edgar Hoover’s career-launching campaign against Marcus Garvey, through the “Red Scare” that targeted such figures as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson, and revealed in the notorious COINTELPRO efforts to “discredit and neutralize” Black leaders of the 1960s including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton and Fred Hampton.
The government’s attempt to imprison Chairman Yeshitela and financially hamper the Uhuru Movement has also been seen as an attempt to stop progress on the group’s Black community and economic self-determination programs, including a workforce training and housing program for former prisoners, a state-of-the-art basketball court, farmers markets, a women’s health clinic and Uhuru House community centers in St. Petersburg, Florida, St. Louis, Missouri and Oakland, California.
Chairman Omali says, “The U.S. government is punishing us because we criticize them, because we organize for reparations, create Black community economic development programs, oppose gentrification, speak out against genocide, travel to win international support for the struggle of Black people in the U.S. and use our newspaper to carry stories about Russia and Ukraine that other U.S. news organs refuse to publish. And now the U.S. is firing missiles from Ukraine deep into Russia, threatening WWIII and nuclear war.”
The political and economic impact that the work of Chairman Omali and the Uhuru Movement has achieved in empowering impoverished Black communities and uniting anti-colonial struggles internationally over the past six decades was evidenced in the outpouring of support at the trial where the courtroom was overflowing each day.
Supporters will converge from around the country to attend the December 16th sentencing hearing, including former New York State Assemblyman Charles Barron, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran Efia Nwangaza, Mark Friedman from Hands Off Cuba, USF professors, Indigenous rights activist and author Ward Churchill, Pam Africa of the Free Mumia campaign and organizers with the Free Leonard Peltier committee.
“Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa!” campaign Chair Mwezi Odom declares, “we will pack the courtroom again and demand ‘not one day in prison!’.