On October 1, Sis. Tomiko spoke with recurring guest Grandmother Walks On Water. Also known as Mama Nataska Hasan and the mother of local Baltimore recording artist Maimouna “MuMu Fresh” Youssef, Grandmother Walks On Water regularly presents her analysis on issues of Afrikan centered health and spirituality. Their discussion, which always promises to be thought-provoking, can be found here as well as on our Media Page under Current Radio and Podcasts.
On September 24, show host Sis. Tomiko interviewed Washington, DC-based activist Dr. Baruch Ben-Yehudah, who is the proprietor of ELife Restaurant in Capitol Heights, Maryland, just outside of Washington DC. ELife seeks to nourish the mind, body and spirit, offering a variety of healthy foods and products as well as regularly bringing in lecturers on Afrikan history and Pan Afrikan organizing such as historian Dr. Ashra Kwesi. Her interview with him can be found here and on our Media Page under Current Radio and Podcasts.
There has been a rather disturbing trend among Black political activists that seemed to accelerate after Donald Trump retook the White House in January of this year. I have watched political activists who I had once regarded as intellectual pro-Black thinkers suddenly start acting as cheerleaders for practically every draconian, authoritarian and downright dictatorial policy enacted by Trump, in accordance with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf; https://www.factcheck.org/2024/09/a-guide-to-project-2025/), while demonstrating a surprising attitude of uncritical support and unabashed celebration.
National and local Black celebrities, from Judge Joe Brown to Maryland Republican political candidate Kim Klacik, partied in the White House in February to celebrate Trump’s victory. Activists who had once uncompromisingly opposed authoritarian overreach and right-wing dictatorship began cheering as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accosted people at court-mandated immigration hearings, at work on work visas, in college on student visas and on the street without warrants, uniforms or badges, in apparent blissful acceptance of the scattered cases of United States citizens being detained for their political activism as collateral damage, the price that must be paid to get the immigrants out of ‘Murica. And now, I’ve seen Black people pointing to marginal “Black MAGA” groups as evidence that Black America as a whole really supports the Trump agenda. This, for now at least, is my answer to them.
At the urging of a Sista who had posted on Facebook, I took some time away from my actual organizing work and watched the Angela Gets Answers (https://www.youtube.com/@AngelaGetsAnswers) YouTube video with Chicago Flips Red co-founder Danielle Carter-Walters (I’m a Black Woman Supporting Trump & Troops, which I’m sharing here just so you’ll know), as well as a Fox News video (Chicago resident goes after city’s ‘progressive Democratic gang’ for refusing Trump’s federal help on crime) featuring Zoe Leigh, the other co-founder of Chicago Flips Red (apparently more of an objective or a wish than an actual documented fact).
Chicago Flips Red is described by Angela Gets Answers host Angela Brown as “Black MAGA”, and she describes co-founder Danielle Carter-Walters as “an outlier, not one of the 92% of Black female voters who voted for Kamala Harris.” It seems that independent Black political organizing is embodied these days by us eschewing classical “liberal” and “moderate” politics, rejecting Pan Afrikan (Black) organizing as “divisive” and zooming right past “traditional conservative” concepts to embrace hard-right-wing MAGA ideology. This appears to be not inconsistent with the percentage of Black voters who backed Trump (some of whom I suspect have already FAFO’ed), either because of dissatisfaction with Democrats’ broken promises and weak leadership or because of Trump’s celebrity and shameless swagger which still seems to impress us for some reason. Ms. Carter-Walters states in the video that she initially faced pushback and then tapped into the concerns of some of the more conservative Black constituents about “young Black thugs” and immigrants who White racists have often successfully turned us against.
As often happens when someone pushes against the “political mainstream”, Chicago Flips Red’s Website (https://www.chicagoflipsred.com) has made claims that its members have been harassed and even threatened with violence. While I personally decry such acts of intimidation against those who disagree politically and prefer to engage such people on the merits of their positions in the hope of showing them the error of their perspectives, I must also note that such acts of intimidation, against those on the so-called “far left” (which really does not exist in the United States) or the “far right” (which we used to think didn’t exist but seems to be making a comeback thanks to hard-right ideologues such as Stephen Miller) have apparently increased since Trump took office and the accepted mode of debate has turned increasingly superficial, anti-factual, aggressive, disrespectful, xenophobic, ugly and downright violent.
As so often seems to happen, the backlash against “Vote Blue No Matter Who” and the furor over sanctuary cities (“They’re getting free everything here”, a charge usually made without evidence) was followed not by truly independent Black-led political organizing (which I could support) but by Black folks running to support a political party that actively seeks to marginalize us (elimination of essential services, hypocritical imposition of federal power on local communities — “don’t tread on me” be damned — gerrymandering, voter suppression, criminalization and mass incarceration, anti-Black History in the name of “anti-wokeness”, and now militarizing policing in largely Black and Black-led cities up to and including unleashing the actual military in direct violation of Posse Comitatus).
The efforts of mayors such as Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson and Baltimore’s Brandon Scott to find ways to decrease crime through empowering community and anti-violence groups (a plan which seems to be working, as crime is reported to have decreased in these cities to levels not seen in decades) stand in stark opposition to Trump’s plan to “send in the troops” in military gear brandishing automatic weapons to police the streets even though their primary training is to act in times of outright war. It should also be noted that when Trump was last in the White House, he refused to “send in the troops” in accordance with the Insurrection Act when actual insurrectionists in support of Trump attacked the Capitol building (beating police with rails, breaking windows, carrying Confederate flags, defecating in the halls, chanting “Where’s Nancy” and calling for the hanging of his own vice president) on January 6, 2021. Trump’s intended rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War as he unleashes them on America’s Black-run and largely Black-populated cities seems to make his intentions clear. But our Brothers and Sisters who have embraced the political hard right seem to be ignoring this, not too different from White citizens ignoring the racism and sexism of Trump and many in his party, as long as their specific “wish list” of eliminating crime, kicking out the immigrants and promoting “conservative values” (whatever that means) is addressed. In any case, these Black activists are of the opinion that our freedom and uplift will come from uncritically embracing the Red, White and Blue instead of building up the Red, Black and Green.
Instead of leaving one (Democrat) political plantation and choosing real freedom and Black self-determination (independent Black political organizing) which apparently is too much like hard work (so much for MAGA calling Black people “lazy”), they run to another plantation (Republicans) where we will be treated worse. Enough of this “Party of Lincoln” hogwash that so many MAGA folks love to push; the Republican Party abandoned that anti-slavery credo when southern racist Dixiecrats left Harry Truman because of his pro-civil rights policies in the 1950’s and joined the Republican Party en masse, turning what had been a mildly progressive political party into a right-wing reactionary one in support of White supremacy. The Republican Party has effectively been our political enemy ever since. Who used the “Southern Strategy” in 1968 to bring in even more White southern racists, empowered J. Edgar Hoover to launch COINTELPRO against Black organizations in the late 60’s, inundated our communities with marijuana when it was illegal in the 70’s and overthrew democratically-elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973 (Richard Nixon, a Republican)? Who dumped cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and supercharged the cocaine epidemic as well as mass incarceration in the 80’s (Ronald Reagan, a Republican)? Who mismanaged the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and used “weapons of mass destruction” and false media reports in 2003 to gin up support for the illegal war on Iraq, directly causing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths (George W. Bush, a Republican)? Who ignored the COVID pandemic from 2020 to 2024 and called it a “hoax”, leading to the current estimates of over 1 million deaths in the US and over 7 million worldwide (Donald Trump, a Republican)? Who inspired an insurrection on January 6, 2021 and did nothing to stop it (Trump again)? Sure, Bill Clinton (a Democrat) signed the Crime Bill and the Effective Death Penalty Act, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (a Democrat) had called young Black males “super predators”, Joe Biden (a Democrat) had backed several onerous bills as a Senator, and even Barack Obama (a Democrat) increased drone strikes in Afghanistan, prosecuted whistleblowers and bombed Libya leading to the assassination of Muamar Gaddafi, but that only underscores my point. We keep bouncing from one oppressor to the other like a shooting gallery duck. “The Democrats ignore us and break promises to stop ignoring us, so let’s run to the Republicans who beat us and at least keep their promises to continue beating us.” Reject the Democrats because of transgender and immigrant support and run to the Republicans who strip agencies like FEMA, NOAA and the National Weather Service of critical personnel and infrastructure, wage “culture wars” against Black books, Black institutions and even the Public Broadcasting System (“Sesame Street”), invade our cities, take the regulatory chains off industrial polluters, close public services for poor people to give tax breaks to the filthy rich and eliminate inspectors general and community control boards to allow police brutality to once again run unchecked and unwatched throughout our communities. I am not saying the Democrats are good (though there are at least progressive-minded legislators like Jasmine Crockett and others, the Democratic Party supports the genocide in Gaza and opposes reparations and independent Afrikan nations too), just that the Republicans are worse. We continue to behave as though there are only two possible courses of action, so we keep running from one Massa to another. We should be building our own independent, Black-led, grassroots-responsive, non-partisan political machine but Noooooo. Apparently that would require too much reading (hence the Black book bans going unnoticed by “Black MAGA”), too much real research (as opposed to just watching Fox and a few counter-culture YouTube shows) and too much real work with real Black organizers, Black historians and Black activists, and we can’t have that, can we? As for Angela Brown, she counters her interview with Ms. Carter-Walters with a White former MAGA member in her follow-up episode, her show’s tag line is “Decoding MAGA” and “Decoding Liberals”, and she clearly recognizes that Ms. Carter-Walters is “an outlier”. So any implication that Black people are “begging” Trump to come in with the military, despite the propaganda from Fox News in their interview with Zoe Leigh, a self-described “suburb kid” originally from Albany, NY, egged on by the host (“please bring us help”, which does not mean bring in the military to turn the city into a war zone), is disingenuous at best.
I don’t know whether some people are just trying to gain political favor from whoever is in power, whether some are intoxicated by the notoriety that comes from taking a confrontational, controversial or counter-cultural position, whether some have had the bucks waved in front of their faces or whether they truly believe in what they are saying, but too many of us are apparently allured by the feeling of superiority that comes from finding an obscure position through shallow research and running with it for the likes and follows, and are addicted to political posturing and the attention and fame (however fleeting) it gives them. If that is not their motivation, then why not work with anti-imperialist, anti-racist grassroots activists to truly build the “better place” we all claim to desire for ourselves, our families, our people and humanity?
On Saturday, August 30, the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition (MPACC) is holding our first Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall Meeting of 2025.
The event will be held at the Temple of New African Thought, 5525 Harford Road in Wast Baltimore, from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. I’ve attached a flyer for the event.
We hope to bring organizers and activists from our community to offer their ideas on how we as a community can move forward as “America quits on Black People”.
The “war on woke”, the elimination of community survival programs (Social Security, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, Medicaid), the deregulation of police and corporate abuse, gerrymandering and the assault on voting rights, the rise of White Supremacy, the disinformation campaign and other attacks on our community and the general US population will be discussed, centering on how we as a Pan Afrikan community can respond and defend our people from the worst of the current administration’s destructive policies. Our objective is to elicit ideas on how we can respond as a community on the political, cultural, economic, legal, cultural, information and revolutionary levels, and bring them all together into a cooperative, all-encompassing plan for our entire community that involves, empowers and acknowledges all of our organizers and activists.
We invite you to join us on Saturday, August 30 for what we hope will be a lively and productive discussion.
For more information, feel free to contact Bro. Cliff at cliff@kuumbareport.com.
Every year at this time, as Americans break out the red, white and blue bunting, the American flags, the Uncle Sam outfits and the grill for some nice patriotic backyard barbecue, we feel the need to post this little reminder that the United States still has a lot of work to do if it is to, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “live out the meaning of its creed.” There is no better time than this to share the speech given by Ancestor Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852 in Rochester, New York.
The Web site https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/frederick-douglass-what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july-1852 describes Douglass’s speech thus:
Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, delivered on July 5, 1852, addresses the stark contrast between the celebration of freedom on Independence Day and the ongoing oppression of enslaved people. Douglass states that for the American slave, the Fourth of July is a day that highlights the “gross injustice and cruelty” they endure, making it a painful reminder of their lack of freedom and rights. He critiques the hypocrisy of a nation that celebrates liberty while denying it to a significant portion of its population.
The Web site https://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/more/douglass.html offers its own introduction and a reasonably complete text of the essential points of Douglass’s speech:
Douglass delivered this speech before a crowd in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852. The poem at the end was written by famed abolitionist and colleague William Lloyd Garrison, and published on March 17, 1845 in the Signal of Liberty an anti-slavery newspaper.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too — great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
Fellow Citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow Citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”
To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery Ñ the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse”; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, “It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed.” But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look today, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….
…Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. — Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.
The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia, shall, stretch. out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.
God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.
God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant’s presence cower;
But to all manhood’s stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his Prison-house, to thrall
Go forth.
Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I’ll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive —
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate’er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.
The State Of The People (SOTP) National Convening (https://stateoftheppl.com) was held June 19-21, 2025 at The Empowerment Temple (with breakout sessions and luncheons provided at The Forum Caterers) in northwest Baltimore, Maryland. Organized by former MSNBC show host Angela Rye and supported by several current and former MSNBC hosts and guests such as Joy Ann Reid, Mya Wiley and Mark Thompson, SOTP seeks to galvanize and mobilize grassroots Black communities in cities across the United States and advance an alternative Black Agenda to the established Democratic and Republican Party platforms, though the conveners and primary presenters echoed many essential points of Democratic Party politics.
The State Of The People Power Tour visited several cities across the United States in the months leading up to the National Convening: Atlanta, Georgia (April 26-27); Durham, North Carolina (April 29-30); Mongomery, Alabama (May 3); Birmingham, Alabama (May 4); New Orleans, Louisiana (May 8-9); Newark, New Jersey (May 13); Richmond, Virginia (May 16-17); Detroit, Michigan (May 21-22); Jackson, Mississippi (May 30-31); Louisville, Kentucky (June 2-3); and Los Angeles, California (June 5-6) before coming to Baltimore on June 19-21.
The Rev. Dr. Robert Turner, pastor of The Empowerment Temple, graciously hosted this event and made sure the Convening proceeded smoothly. As an activist for truth and justice himself, it was good to see the Black Church taking a position of support for a community-oriented conference such as this one.
The Thursday, June 19 session began that afternoon with a libation ceremony officiated by Baba King Teasdell of Baltimore’s Souls of Life Society, followed by a recognition of the Juneteenth holiday and a panel moderated by anti-racism activist and author Ibram X. Kendi that featured, among others, New York lawyer Mya Wiley, Morgan State professor Ray Winbush and Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant who had founded the Empowerment Temple and now pastors a church in Atlanta, Georgia. Lawyer Ben Crump, who became a household name for his advocacy for victims of police abuse, brutality and murder, delivered impassioned closing remarks.
Saturday’s session was another short day as previous speeches and presentations were reviewed and the stage was set for SOTP’s organizing plan going forward.
Much of the content of the weekend was presented on Friday, June 20, which opened with an Old South call and response “I ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round”, a rousing musical performance by Sis. Katoriae and a spoken word presentation. Several breakout sessions and panels were held that featured national speakers such as Minyon Moore of Essence and Rashad Robinson of Color of Change. Former MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid, who now hosts The Joy Reid Show podcast on the Web (https://www.youtube.com/@TheJoyReidShow/videos?reload=9), served as emcee for the Friday session.
Among other speakers during Friday’s session were former New Orleans mayor and current Urban League president Marc Morial, Larry Hamm of the People’s Organization for Progress, former Maryland States Attorney for Baltimore City Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott and Maryland governor Wes Moore, who was introduced by his wife, Maryland First Lady Dawn Moore.
Ms. Mosby had prosecuted the police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 and was targeted by a number of conservative legislators and the Fraternal Order of Police. She was recently prosecuted herself for alleged improper use of retirement funds to purchase real estate and was put under house arrest for a year. Many Pan Afrikan activists rallied to support her during the court proceedings. Ms. Mosby spoke about her yearlong ordeal Friday in observance of the end of her house arrest from what supporters have called an unjust prosecution and conviction.
Governor Moore spoke about the accomplishments and continuing objectives of his term as governor of the state of Maryland, and gave verbal support to the work of SOTP. He continues to speak out in defense of his veto of the reparations panel, which a number of the attendees of the SOTP Convening have criticized because the existing research on the issue is incomplete and fails to take into account continuing issues that also require relief that a more comprehensive reparations effort could provide.
Reparations discussion
The Why We Can’t Wait Reparations Coalition’s Sis. Dreisen Heath (founder and reparations strategist) and California Black Power Network’s Kevin Cosney (co-founder and associate director) led a discussion around the reparations battle.
The establishment of Juneteenth as a national holiday was described as “a concession to our demands for the purpose of quelling our push for follow-up on reparations” that was presented to Back leadership “at a time when we had good pressure to establish the commission to follow up on [House and Senate reparations bills] HR 40 and S 40 and develop reparations proposals.” For those who were under the misconception that reparations were only for slavery, it was pointed out that reparations is also for post-emancipation harms such as the Black Codes, Jim Crow, racial profiling, COINTELPRO, political imprisonment, mass incarceration, redlining and ongoing institutional discrimination, not just for slavery. The five aspects of the relief required from reparations, according to Sis. Dreisen Heath, include the following:
Despite estimates that $200,000-$300,000 would close the individual wealth gap, changing the continuing conditions will also be required. Examples of ongoing harms include real estate appraisals that undervalue Black-occupied homes by $200,000 or more on resale and similar practices that would continue even after any monetary award.
It was also noted that there is a global Diaspora reparations movement, not just in the United States, attacking colonial powers. We are situated within a larger global struggle with local, state, federal, international, institutional, industry, corporate, statutory and individual harms.
Among local advocacy needed, it was pointed out that Maryland governor Wes Moore’s veto of the reparations panel (“I don’t need another study; I’m ready to act now”) must be challenged so he will be better informed in developing a reparations strategy. Several local activists, most notably members of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), have stated that the governor’s “misguided” veto was issued without a full accounting of the ongoing harms that must be properly addressed.
HR 40 and S 40 are part of the legislative fight. There are other efforts on that level: Reparations Now legislation, legislation for Black veterans to restore rights from the GI Bill, a reparations bill for Black Wall Street in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a bill for Black artists to retrieve their intellectual property and others. There was a call to action around continued organizing.
Public safety, state violence, housing disparities, education, healthcare and other issues are linked as consequences of past and current harm. These issues are being discussed and studied at the state level in California, for example.
Building power in the political and grassroots spheres continues on the local and national fronts.
Sherrilyn Ifill’s Address
Sherrilyn Ifill is an esteemed lawyer. She is the Vernon E. Jordan Jr. Esq. endowed chair in civil rights at Howard University, a law professor, and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She delivered what amounted to the keynote address for the Friday session.
Despite recent articles claiming that Black Americans’ approval ratings for the Trump administration are climbing (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-s-approval-rating-surges-among-black-voters/ar-AA1HTf5t?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=efc80c6fc7e54149a19b95ba2c16f952&ei=9), Ms. Ifill demonstrated the degree to which many of us have not yet awakened to the real harm Trump administration policies threaten us with, citing Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship and cut vital support programs on which the Afrikan American community depends in large numbers. The July 3 advance through Congress of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, which eviscerates the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid and other programs while cutting more federal jobs to help fund a huge tax break for billionaires, has yet to hit most Americans who apparently remain convinced that the pain this bill and related actions impose will impact other communities, namely the “illegal immigrants”, and will not adversely affect them in classic “pre-FAFO” fashion.
We include below her presentation in close to its entirety, as it seemed to encapsulate the legal and social ramifications of this time and the criticality of the struggle the country, and especially the Afrikan American community, will face. Her remarks come from the perspective that Afrikan Americans must continue to advocate and fight for our rights as citizens of this country, and as such our engagement on the civic level is needed as voters and community organizers, a position at least largely shared by the organizers of SOTP. While differing from the positions of many revolutionary Pan Afrikanists for whom the fight against imperialism and oppression calls for us to separate from this government and to struggle against it, her analysis nonetheless expresses the spirit of resistance and prescribes those actions we must take “within the system” to complement what we do “outside the system” in the name of revolution.
Here is the text of most of her presentation:
“The moment that we are in in this country is going to require us to multitask. They are coming at us 100 different ways and we have to come at them at least 50 different ways. We can’t put all our eggs in one basket.
“Now what I want to talk to you about is the seriousness of this moment. I don’t enjoy it. I’ve been a civil rights lawyer for 35 years. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do. It’s what I dreamed of doing from the time I was eight years old. And it happened, so I lived my dream. But I always believed, and I’m not capable of not believing, that it’s possible, it is possible for us as Black people in this country to be full first-class citizens. I’ve always believed that it was possible and I still believe it.
“Now I confess that this has been an incredibly disappointing time. There are many sacrifices I’ve made along the way, time with my children, dragging them to marches and explaining to them that we were working for a world, a better world for them. It is a sacred trust of human beings to pass on to your children a world that is better in its condition than the one that was passed to you. And the truth is, we cannot say that right now, which means we have failed in something fundamental. It’s a sin. So we have to get very serious about what this moment means. And what I am here to tell you, because I’ve had the opportunity to sit in rooms and hear what people are talking about, because I monitor the litigation in the Supreme Court, the policy moves, the legislation, the efforts of various federal agencies, is that we are in the greatest danger as a country that we have been in since the dawn of the Civil War. We are ready to fracture as a country.
“Now I teach at Howard Law School, and I run a center called the 14th Amendment Center on Law and Democracy, and the reason is that the 14th Amendment is the Constitutional amendment that remade this country. The first Constitution you all know about: the guys with the tri-corner hats, Hamilton and Jefferson and those people. Those are the people that, in the Constitution, said that Black people would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation. Those are the people who said in the Constitution that the slave trade could continue until 1808. They knew slavery was wrong, but that was their compromise to get all those signatures on the Constitution. And so, less than a hundred years later, that compromise produced the break that was the Civil War, where our country was fractured in two. When the war was over, the country had to be knit back together. And the knitting of the country, what was critical to the knitting, was the assurance that Black people would be full and free citizens. In 1857, the Supreme Court had decided a case called Dred Scott versus Sanford, and in that case the Supreme Court said that Black people had no rights that the White man was bound to respect. But they said something even more devastating, and the chief justice was a man named Roger Taney, from Fredrick, Maryland. What he said was that Black people not only were not citizens of this country, but could not ever be citizens of this country. What that meant was enslaved people were not citizens, but it also meant that free Black people who lived all over the country had now become stateless persons. And for that reason after the Civil War, the first order of business was to ensure the citizenship of Black people. And to ensure the citizenship of Black people, the framers of the 14th Amendment created something vitally important that you probably hear in the news today but that you think has nothing to do with you. It is the first line of the 14th Amendment and the first line of the 14th Amendment is ‘Every person born in the United States, or naturalized and subject to its jurisdiction, is a citizen of the United States and of the state in which they reside.’ We call it birthright citizenship. When you hear our president talking about ending birthright citizenship, you need to understand that birthright citizenship was created for us. It was created to ensure that we were full and free citizens. You’re not listening to the conversation because you think it’s about some other community.
“Now it’s about them too, and you should understand that when that Congress was creating birthright citizenship, they understood and believed that the children of migrants who were born here would be citizens. You know how I know? Because they had a debate in the Congress. There were some members of Congress who were saying ‘Are we going to let ourselves be overrun these people?’ And the people they were talking about were the most disfavored racial minority at that time. They said, ‘Are we going to be overrun, are we going to let them take over California?’ And the people they were talking about were the Chinese. And what the other legislators said was, what we are saying is that the children of Chinese laborers; in this period Chinese people could not even become citizens of this country, they were barred from citizenship; but if their children were born here, they said ‘They will be citizens.’ So don’t listen to Trump when he says that children of undocumented migrants who were born here are not citizens. Every person born on the soil of this country is a citizen of this country and the state in which they reside. And if we allow them to begin to chip away at that on the theory that they are focused on other people, it is only a matter of time before they come for us. How do I know? All of the activities that we are seeing ICE engage in, around the country, we’ve seen what happened in Los Angeles, you know that this week we learned that ICE picked up a young man and prepared to deport him to Jamaica even though this young man is an American citizen born in Georgia, Black man.
“When we talk about due process, we’re talking about the right for you to come before a judge and say ‘No, I’m an American citizen’. So if people say ‘No, migrants don’t get due process rights’, that same 14th Amendment says every person gets due process rights, which means you can’t take something from me, the government can’t take something from me, without giving me a chance to appear before a tribunal, to appear before a judge and defend myself, and say ‘No, here’s my birth certificate. Here’s my mama. This is the hospital where I was born. I am a citizen.’ So when you hear them having a conversation about due process and you’re not paying any attention to it because you think it’s about other people, understand the only way you could prove that you were an American citizen is if you could come before a judge and prove it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life in a jail in Jamaica.
“You may have seen that some migrants were sent to the CECOT prison in El Salvador, one of the most notorious prisons. I’m not sure we’ve paid enough attention to that. Because if you heard the president in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, he thanked him for taking all those migrants and he said that ‘We need you to build five more prisons because the home-grown ones are next.’ Who are the people who are disproportionately in American prisons? Anybody here have a family member or a friend who ever was incarcerated? That’s who they’re talking about sending to these gulags. Disappearing people. Sending them, they’re now saying, not just to El Salvador, but Rwanda. So understand that the actions that this administration is taking, they are targeting, as they always do first, the populations that they believe are the most vulnerable, that will not arouse our anger and our activism, and then they move it ever closer. And that’s what’s happening right now. So our very physical safety, and you see what they’re doing, they’re rolling up into Home Depot, and asking you for your papers. They’re rolling up in supermarkets. So we have that threat going on.
“We have another threat going on. We have the threat of the unraveling of federal agencies that are critical to our lives and our livelihoods. The Department of Education. Now understand that there was no such thing truly as public education in the American South until after the Civil War. It was the Freedmen’s Bureau that ushered in public schools in the South. There were some public schools in the North. There was no public school system in the South. We created the public school system, basically. And White Americans were very fine with having a public school system so long as they could maintain a separate and unequal public school system. But after 1954 and Brown versus Board of Education when the Supreme Court said if you’re going to have a public school system you have to offer it equally to Black and White children, we have been in a resistance to public education ever since. And now the plan is, you know the new Secretary of Education for the United States is who? Linda Mcmahon, the head of the Worldwide Wrestling association, so you know that when you appoint somebody like that to oversee it, you know you’re not serious. And her job is to unravel and dismantle the Department of Education, which they are doing by defunding it. Now understand, this is illegal. Agencies are created by the Congress and only Congress can end an agency. But while this percolates its way up to the Supreme Court, which is a whole other story, they are stripping away all the money. Stripping away all the money. The Department of Education funds every IEP [Individualized Education Plan — Editor] and program of support for special education in this country. That’s not your state’s money. That is money from the Department of Education. No Department of Education, no money for special needs kids, no money for special education, no money for IEPs. So that’s happening even as we speak.
“The Department of Justice, which was created, one more time, for us, the Department of Justice was created in 1870 when Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Acts, the legislation designed to protect us from mob violence during Reconstruction. And they created the Department of Justice so there would be a federal arm that could prosecute those cases. Now when we hear about the Department of Justice, we hear about antitrust cases, we hear about all kinds of cases. But it’s important to understand that the core of it always was civil rights enforcement. And they have now taken the Department of Justice and flipped it. What they call civil rights enforcement now is representing White people who claim they have been discriminated against. They are focused in their so-called Civil Rights Division on the rights of the people they call Christians who believe that they have been subjected to religious discrimination. So they have taken away a vital resource that is designed to protect our voting rights, to protect us against police violence, to protect us against environmental injustice, to protect us against injustice in school discipline, to protect us against all these things that essentially has been upended.
“So what do we do about this? All of this is happening right now. It’s happening fast. I appreciate the call for reparations. I believe in it. But I need you to understand, we’re not making it to 2026 as a democracy, unless we reverse something. You hear me? We’re not. And I need people to understand how serious this is.
“So we have to come at this in multiple ways. We have to come at this like this, through education and organizing, and figuring out how to use our voice, we have to come at it, yes, through voting, but the push for voting rights among our people was always because we believed that political power would give us the ability to change the material conditions of our lives and our communities. It was never just about the symbolism of voting. It was because we believed it would give us the power to make change. So the ultimate goal is making change.
“What does that mean? How are we going to do this? How are we going to fight this thing? Anybody who tells you they have all the answers to how we deal with this unprecedented attack is lying to you. There are certain things that we know. We know we have to fight. Never in the history of our time in this country have we decided that we’re just not going to fight. We have to fight. They have decided that we are expendable, that’s what that foreign prison thing is all about. They have decided they don’t need us anymore. They believe that AI [Artificial Intelligence — Editor] can do all the things. They’re shortsighted, they’re wrong. We’re going to find out in a few months when we don’t have no crops because they got rid of all the migrants who were working in the fields. They may be wrong, but they’re taking action with the idea that they don’t need us. And when you hear them talking about these expansion ideas, it’s because all of the stuff that we’ve been saying about the population becoming majority-minority, they were hearing that too. That’s why they wanted Canada to be the 51st state, so it could be whiter. So they don’t want us in the electorate, they don’t feel they need us, they don’t want federal resources to go to us, and they want to strip away the safety net that we need to maintain us. So this is serious right now in this [“Big Beautiful” — Editor] bill, when they’re talking about stripping out Medicaid, when they’re talking about stripping out SNAP, and Social Security. I have a sister who’s living on Social Security right here in Baltimore. I don’t have the money to support her too. So we’d better start paying attention. Now, I always tell people to call their legislators and I mean that, and when I say that people in Maryland or New York say ‘Oh, I live in a blue state, my people know what they’re doing.’ No, that’s not going to cut it. You need to be calling [Maryland Congressman] Kweisi [Mfume]. You need to be calling Chris Van Hollen. You need to be calling your Representatives and your Senators. Now you have phones. You can find an app. It’s called ‘5 calls’. When you get that 5 calls app, it will tell you who all your Reps are so you can regularly call them. So you have to make that appeal to your Representatives. We have to occupy the public space. They want to intimidate us. And that means we have to be out. We have to be outside. Because they want us to believe there are more of them than there are of us. And it is not the truth.
“We have to anchor ourselves in unity. I remind people, and sometimes it hurts my students’ feelings when I tell them this, Black people constitute 13% of the population of this country. When I said this in my class last semester, a young man said ‘Damn, not even 15.’ Yeah, not even 15. And of all the groups growing in population in this country, we’re not. We’re staying steady. We’re not growing. Asian Americans are growing. Latinos are growing. We’re not growing. Now the reason you didn’t know we were 13%, I know a lot of you all didn’t know that, you thought we were more, the reason you didn’t know that, and the reason that White people, when they do the surveys in the Washington Post, think that we’re 50% of the population, is because, maybe they’re just crazy, but the other reason is because we punch above our weight. And because we have so much cultural power, we so much dominate the cultural space, people actually think we’re bigger in the population than we actually are. I know you all are taping but don’t tell anybody, we’re only 13%. And what 13% means is, we cannot be disunified. We can’t afford it. I’m not saying we’ve got to love everybody, the same way, but we have to understand our common survival is tied together. and I’m going to tell you something else about the 13% that’s going to make you salty. We’re not going to make it without allies from somewhere.
“So I know we’re in our feelings right now. You know, last November was tough. I’m still mad. My face is set up. At all times. But understand, we are going to have to build bonds with allies if we are going to make it, because these people are coming for the whole thing. It’s not like before where they do a little something on affirmative action, a little something here. They want the whole thing. They want to return us to a condition of complete disempowerment. They want to strip our history. They want to strip our accomplishments and our contributions to this country. They want to suppress our culture and our voice. They want to make us believe that we don’t belong here. And that’s why I encourage you and talk about the 14th Amendment. Every other group talks about the part of the Constitution they love. The gun advocates talk about their 2nd Amendment rights. They’re going to have a big long gun on their back and they’ll be in the McDonald’s ordering a Quarter Pounder. And you’re like, ‘Well why do you need that long gun?’ And they say ‘Because it’s my 2nd Amendment right.’ And all kinds of people will tell you about their First Amendment right. ‘You can’t tell me what to say, I have the First Amendment rights. I have First Amendment rights to religion. I have First Amendment rights to protest.’ We’ll say in conversation, jokingly, ‘I plead the Fifth.’ Because we know the Fifth Amendment is the right not to incriminate yourself. But when we experience discrimination, when we experience bias, when we experience prejudice, do we ever say they violated our 14th Amendment rights? And the reason it’s important is because we have allowed the entire conversation about race and racism to be about feelings, to be whether or not you’re a good person, or whether you have a racist bone in your body, whether you even see race. I could not care less. What I care about is that the Constitution, as my idol Barbara Jordan said, the Constitution, she used to say, says that we are free, full, first class citizens of this country, and that we are entitled to equal protection. The first time the word and the concept of equality shows up in the constitution is in that 14th Amendment. Did you know that? People are walking around thinking America is a place of equality and justice. Not in the first Constitution. And we know it wasn’t in the first Constitution because I just told you about the three-fifths clause. Where did we get that idea from? You know where most people get it from? From the Declaration of Independence. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ Well, the 14th Amendment reached back over the first Constitution to the Declaration of Independence and pulled that concept into our Constitution for the first time in 1868. This was huge. This was the transformation of this country. That’s what they’re fighting against. People who are saying ‘Oh, they want to turn things back from the civil rights movement’. No baby, they want to turn things back from 1868.
“So, let me finish by saying, what we’re doing here is important. But what I’m asking is that everyone understand the state of the danger that we’re in. That you be prepared to make your contribution, because there are going to be other ways in which we’re going to have to participate. It’s going to be marching, it’s going to be boycotts, it’s going to be other ways that we have to engage in order to stop this onslaught. I know you usually don’t vote in the in-between elections, but I don’t feel sure we’re going to have one in 2028, so you might want to show up in 2026. Because in 2026, I want to remind you, every seat in the United States House of Representatives is up for election. Let me say it again. In 2026, every seat, every single one, all 435, are up for election in 2026. And if there is a party change, it will take that speaker gavel out of the hand of little Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House, and Congress will be able to do its job in pushing back against some of the excesses that Trump is engaged in. That’s the only hope. 33 Senate seats are up for election. So every House seat and 33 Senate seats. If you stay home in 2026, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what to tell you. Because I don’t think 2028, without some shift in the political landscape, is going to happen as an election year in which that kind of change that we’re used to can happen.
“So, the last thing I would leave you with is to not forget that, and when you vote this time, vote the way we should have been voting all this time but if we’re honest with ourselves haven’t been. Vote for every race on that ballot. School Board, Sheriff, all of the bond issues that decide whether we’re going to allocate money toward opening the public schools in the summer, all that stuff that you skip. It says ‘Pick 3 judges’ and you don’t know who they are, so you just keep it moving, all that. It’s timeout for that. We need all the power we can get. My mantra always is, leave no power on the table. And every time you don’t show up, you give them power. I’m going to give you one other one. Jury service. Stop trying to get out of jury service. You all want to complain about the criminal justice system, but you don’t want to be … these are all the things, these are the places where we have a voice and the potential for power. We have to decide that we’re going to be new citizens, citizens in a different way than we’ve been before. Because these people have shown that they are prepared to take the whole thing. So if you’re with me on that, if you’re with me on that, spread the word in your family, spread the word in your community, follow good resources on social media so that you’re getting good information, I know you don’t want to hear all this foolishness that’s out there but there are people doing great work that you can follow. You know Roland Martin, you know his show. Get yourself in a position that you can understand what is going on, because it’s no joke. I now have a grandson. And by God, I will not give him a world that is worse than the one that was given to me. Make that pledge to yourself as well. Thank you very much.”
Youth Presentations: “Tubman Talks”
Jill Cartwright moderated a youth panel (ages 18-35) and introduced the other speakers.
DaQuan Rayford said: “I hear a lot of my peers say, ‘I could never go through that in civil rights; I could never let them treat me that way’. Whatever you are doing now is what you would have been doing during civil rights. If you are sitting down right now and you are not paying attention to anything, that’s what you would have been doing during civil rights. That’s what you would have been doing during any other period that we have been through. So the time is now to step up and to speak out.”
Taz Gaines, Organizing Black (Baltimore): took “a moment to bring into the space Bilal Abdullah Jr. who was murdered by Baltimore police department this past Tuesday” before describing the work of Organiing Black: “We are young folks, 18-35, we think the world can change using political education, direct action and participatory governance. We’ve been working in the city around local control, we’ve been working around Cop City that’s coming here … [a] $300 billion investment which is way more than what they spent and what they invested in Atlanta. … The reason why we want to stop things like that is because we want our folks to still be in community with us. One of the things that people kept talking about today that I really think is central is our connection to each other. How do we stay connected to each other, whether it is coming to things like this, whether it is inviting folks to Sunday dinner again, sitting on the porch talking to your people, all of that.”
Sis. Mo spoke about the need to recognize and heal the trauma that many youths experience: “Trauma that is not transformed is transferred.”
Tyleek Mcmillan recalled words from an elder, “We’ve been in the house so long that we’ve forgotten what the storm feels like. … Often today in our lives we find ourselves in storms. … If we’re not prepared for the storm, we have the possibility of losing it all. And it reminds me that you can’t get to the other side without a storm.”
Audience Reports and Comments
An activist from Minneapolis, Minnesota noted the continuing need for police reform in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, voter registration, political action and the prevention of gun violence.
Sis. Ertha Harris of Baltimore spoke about her projects: the House of Chiefs event hall, her Tight Knit radio show on AM radio station WOLB, and her ongoing support for former States Attorney for Baltimore City Marilyn Mosby.
Sis. Danielle spoke about her work organizing young people and student clubs at Morgan State University.
Jaylen Powell, attending from Delaware, spoke about her work as the CEO and founder of Out Loud.
Activists from the audience stated that communities need more than just to be heard; they need to know that when their voice leaves the room, action will be behind it. Activists and would-be leaders need to meet the people where they are: the barber shops, the projects and other places.
Bro. Cliff of KUUMBAReport, the Sixth Region diaspora Caucus (https://srdcinternational.org) and the Maryland Pan Afrikan Cooperative Coalition stated that we must avoid I-Have-The-Answer-ism. Different organizations need to intentionally coalesce because no one organization can solve our people’s problems.
There was somewhat of a consensus that if our enemies have used divide-and-conquer to keep us down, the answer must include building unity.
Audience members emphasized the need to override the governor’s veto of the bill for the reparation study panel and to repeal the 13th Amendment which allowed slavery to continue for those convicted of crimes, leading to the enslavement of those ensnared in the prison-industrial complex.
The importance of recognizing intersectionality was stressed by an audience member from Boston. We are also Haitian, Boricua, disabled, LGBTQ+ and others.
Black people are represented among targeted federal employees in large numbers.
Black homeowners in Baltimore and Maryland need an association that will represent them and fight for their rights.
Several breakout sessions were held during the day Friday, including ones about health and wellness, economics, mutual aid and coalitions.
State Of The People’s Plan to Organize Our Voice
A specific session, one that perhaps encapsulated the ultimate purpose of this Convening and the other stops in the Power Tour, discussed SOTP’s plan to establish delegates in the 50 US states, Washington DC and the territories toward a national meeting of delegates akin to the 1972 Gary, Indiana Black Political Convention. Town Hall Meetings in the Afrikan American community would help crystallize the Black Agenda for the various states, and the community would elect delegates from their state to participate in a national delegate convention. The delegates would be required to represent not their own personal views or those of their organizations but the needs and aspirations of Black people in their state as determined in the Town Halls. The assembled delegates would help determine the national Black Agenda that SOTP would then use to provide leverage in campaigns to deal with the national legislative, judicial and executive branches of the United States government.
There are numerous similarities to other efforts to build a Black Agenda on the local, national and international levels, from the National Black Radical Political Convention to the State of the Black World to the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus’s (SRDC) work to establish a delegation of Diaspora Representatives.
SRDC’s plan specifically calls for many of the same steps that SOTP is advocating: Pan Afrikan Town Hall Meetings; the development of local, national and global Diaspora Pan Afrikan Agendas; and the election of Representatives at the local, national and global levels to advocate for Afrikan People at the African Union, United Nations and Organization of American States, something that Ancestor Malcolm X instructed us to do 60 years ago. The main differences here seem to be
Since this effort is only now being kicked off as of July 2025, there will certainly be more developments in the coming weeks as SOTP works to connect with on-the-ground activists in the local communities. It will be necessary to work with a variety of organizers and activists across numerous areas of activism and organizing, from culture to economics to local politics and more if this effort is to be successful and truly represent the voice of Black America. We will further discuss the progress of SOTP’s plan and the similarities and differences in these approaches in subsequent articles.
This week, the Afrikan American community recognizes the holiday of Juneteenth, regarded as the day enslaved Afrikans finally learned of their freedom across the United States as the news reached enslaved populations in Texas.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth) describes the holiday in this way:
… referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War.[8][9] In the Civil War period, slavery came to an end in various areas of the United States at different times. Many enslaved Southerners escaped, demanded wages, stopped work, or took up arms against the Confederacy of slave states. In January 1865, Congress finally proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for national abolition of slavery. By June 1865, almost all enslaved were freed by the victorious Union Army, or abolition laws in some of the remaining U.S. states. When the national abolition amendment was ratified in December, the remaining enslaved in Delaware and in Kentucky were freed.
Early celebrations date back to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. They spread across the South among newly freed African-Americans and their descendants and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. Participants in the Great Migration brought these celebrations to the rest of the country. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, these celebrations were eclipsed by the nonviolent determination to achieve civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African-American freedom and African-American arts. Beginning with Texas by proclamation in 1938, and by legislation in 1979, every U.S. state and the District of Columbia has formally recognized the holiday in some way.
Juneteenth is also celebrated by the Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped from slavery in 1852 and settled in Coahuila, Mexico.
The day was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when the 117th U.S. Congress enacted and President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was adopted in 1983.
There will be numerous celebrations and commemorations in the immediate Maryland-DC-Virginia area this week. We will provide information on a few of them below, and links to other sources of information. If you know of a Juneteenth event taking place this week that we may not have heard about, feel free to let us know at cliff@kuumbareport.com and we will see about announcing it on this Web site.
Rita Church Community Center Kwanzaa Celebration, June 18
The Oliver Senior Center, Harford Senior Center and Waxter Senior Center are holding a Juneteenth Celebration on Wednesday, June 18 from 12 noon – 2 PM. There will be games, food, live entertainment, giveaways and vendors. The event will be held at the Rita Church Community Center, 2102 St. Lo Drive, Baltimore, MD 21213. To register, go to https://tinyurl.run/iusl19 or call (410) 396-3861.
State of the People National Convening, June 19 – 21
The State of the People National Convening will take place from June 19 – 21 at The Empowerment Temple, 4217 Primrose Avenue, Baltimore, MD. A number of panelists and guest speakers will discuss building a Black Agenda, Black Paper Town Halls and Delegate Training. To register, go to https://stateoftheppl.com. For more information, call (410) 209-9687 or visit https://stateoftheppl.com/baltimore.
More Juneteenth Events in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia
WTOP News in Washington, DC has put together a schedule of Juneteenth events in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia.
https://wtop.com/local/2025/06/juneteenth-2025-a-roundup-of-celebrations-in-dc-maryland-and-virginia/
Juneteenth 2025: A roundup of celebrations in DC, Maryland and Virginia
WTOP Staff
June 15, 2025, 4:15 PM
The U.S. will observe Juneteenth on Thursday.
Officially recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, Juneteenth dates back to 1865, when a Union general informed enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, that the Civil War was over and that they were free.
This was two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
WTOP has curated an extensive list of D.C.-area events organized in celebration of Juneteenth 2025. Go to the link https://wtop.com/local/2025/06/juneteenth-2025-a-roundup-of-celebrations-in-dc-maryland-and-virginia/ to find out the details.
“No Kings” supporters display signs on an overpass at the Baltimore Beltway,
IT SEEMED TO START with the antics of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which US Congressmember Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington State) referred to as the “Department of Greed and Evil” and has also been lampooned as the “Doggy”, “Dogebags”, “Department of Grabbing Everything” and other unflattering euphemisms. But not long afterwards, the Trump administration seems to have further weaponized DOGE’s “smash and grab” military-style tactics on a much more personal, and (if that’s possible) menacing level. After the (so far) successful detention of Columbia University student and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the taking of Maryland’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on trumped-up charges of gang activity (which are now pending in a US court after his return to the United States) and the brief (though ultimately unsuccessful) March 25, 2025 broad-daylight abduction of Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk in Somerville, Massachusetts, followed by the coercion of Columbia University to allow the restriction of free speech on campus in a manner not seen since the days of the Red Scare, the administration has returned its focus to the enemy Trump had targeted in 2015 when he launched his first presidential campaign from Trump Tower’s golden escalator: the immigrant population in the United States. After branding Mexicans as “rapists … importing drugs”, Haitians as AIDS-infected dog-and-cat-eaters and Nigerians as being unwilling to “return to their huts” back home in their “shithole countries” and after blustering about annexing the Panama Canal, buying Greenland and making Canada the 51st state, Trump has moved his xenophobic gaze further inward as he has moved to execute his campaign promise to get rid of the immigrants (unless, of course, they’re White South Africans or Norwegians). The DOGE model is now being used to carry out nationwide masked, armed raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against not only the “violent illegal immigrant criminals” about whom Trump has repeatedly stoked fears in his numerous “America Is A Hellscape” speeches, but also against student-visa holders, green card holders, those under Temporary Protective Status and even some US citizens whom Trump has successfully convinced some people, including judges and the occasional Supreme Court justice, are a danger to the United States because of the offensive (to him) exercise of their free-speech rights. As Trump revels in his Kim Jong Un-style military parade, held coincidentally on Saturday, June 14, the 250th anniversary of the US Army and his own 79th birthday, his administration has proposed the end of birthright citizenship and the abolishment of habeas corpus (when they have been able even to define it), perhaps the final hurdles that must be cleared in order to usher in the authoritarian dictatorship he seems to covet so dearly. The massive “No Kings” Protests, rallies and marches that took place that Saturday, in defiance of his threat of “severe punishment” to be meted out to those who would dare protest on his special day, have not only put a damper on his coveted celebration, but demonstrated to the world that this emperor truly has no clothes (a distasteful image I will now try hard to banish from my mind).
In case anyone needs a bit of a refresher, here is a little of how we got here (with several articles cited and linked so you can look up the sources and so I don’t have to re-write everything):
The DOGE Raids
An article from Sean O’Kane of TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/30/doge-left-united-states-institute-of-peace-office-with-water-damage-rats-and-roaches/, DOGE left United States Institute of Peace office with water damage, rats, and roaches, dated May 30, 2025, discusses the aftermath of DOGE’s raid on the United States Institute of Peace.
The chief executive of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) says Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency left the nonprofit’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in disarray, full of water damage, rats, and roaches, according to a new sworn statement first reported by Court Watch.
The statement from the executive, George Moose, comes just a few days after a federal judge ruled that DOGE’s takeover of the nonprofit was illegal. And this week [late May 2025], Musk has claimed he is stepping away from DOGE …
DOGE started its takeover of USIP in mid-March after a standoff that saw the nonprofit call the police on Musk’s government workers. Moose said at the time that DOGE staff had “broken into” the USIP headquarters in Washington, despite the fact that the nonprofit is not part of the executive branch and isn’t subject to the White House’s whims.
“It was very clear that there was a desire on the part of the administration to dismantle a lot of what we call foreign assistance, and we are part of that family,” Moose said at the time, referencing the Trump administration’s and DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development.
…
Moose wrote in his statement that, ahead of the judge’s ruling, the headquarters had been “essentially abandoned for many weeks” before USIP regained control. He said that DOGE had failed to “maintain and secure the building,” including “evidence of rats and roaches.”
“Vermin were not a problem prior to March 17, 2025, when USIP was actively using and maintaining the building,” Moose wrote.
An article from the Economic Policy Institute dated February 6, 2025, https://www.epi.org/policywatch/doge-shuts-down-usaid/, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) shuts down USAID and State Dept. seeks to absorb parts of the agency and eliminate the rest, discussed DOGE’s raid on USAID, which appears to have made the agency even less useful than it was by eliminating the agency’s initiatives that actually did some good.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire Elon Musk and a team of his followers, entered the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), shuttering much of the agency and its functions. They’ve sent home a majority of the Washington D.C.-based staff on administrative leave, ordered that staff located abroad travel back to the United States, and altogether roughly 10,000 staffers from around the globe are to be placed on leave. There are serious questions about the legality of this maneuver, given that the agency was created by Congress.
Musk has recently said that President Trump has agreed to shut down USAID, and called the agency a “criminal organization” and that it was “time for it to die,” and that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” On February 3, Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled plans to restructure and potentially abolish USAID, and noted that “In consultation with Congress, USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”
Impact: USAID is a federal agency that was started during President Kennedy’s administration, to manage the U.S.’s foreign assistance and manage numerous projects abroad that seek to “end extreme poverty, and promote resilient democratic societies…by partnering with individuals and citizens around the world.” USAID distributes the vast majority of the foreign aid that Congress authorizes, and all of the agency’s disbursements were paused as part of the January 20, 2025 Executive Order, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.” The agency funds projects in a number of areas such as agriculture, human rights, health initiatives, and others. Some of the programs and funding support workers around the world through initiatives to improve labor standards, increase access to justice for workers, and promote gender equality and migrant worker rights, for example.
While we have often been critical of several of USAID’s initiatives, such as pushing Monsanto’s GMO BT cotton on Indian farmers which resulted in the collapse of the farmers’ crop yields and directly led to thousands of farmer suicides, other initiatives for food aid and the provision of antiretroviral drugs to fight AIDS are apparently now being discontinued, which are now predicted to lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths among vulnerable populations in Afrika and elsewhere in the world.
An article from Reuters by Tim Reid, Alexandra Alper and Nathan Layne, with additional reporting from Julie Steenhuysen and Leah Douglas, and editing by Ross Colvin and Suzanne Goldenberg, on April 24, 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/100-days-doge-lots-chaos-not-so-much-efficiency-2025-04-24/, 100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency, indicates a pattern of the Trump administration that has repeated from his previous stint in the White House: replacing professionals with political loyalists who are fundamentally unqualified (Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson from his first term; Linda McMahon, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Elon Musk and others in this term) and who then go about eviscerating professionals in government agencies under their control to cripple those agencies’ operations through personal incompetence or lack of tools and resources to operate.
WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) – At the Social Security Administration, lawyers, statisticians and other high-ranking agency officials are being sent from the Baltimore headquarters to regional offices to replace veteran claims processors who have been fired or taken buyouts from the Trump administration.
But most of the new arrivals don’t know how to do the job, leading to longer wait times for disabled and elderly Americans who depend on these benefits, according to two people familiar with the situation. Asked about the changes, an SSA official said in an email that reassigned employees “have vast knowledge about our programs and services.”
At the Internal Revenue Service, the internet has become so patchy since President Donald Trump ordered remote workers back to overcrowded offices that staff are resorting to personal hotspots, crashing their computers at the height of tax processing season, two IRS officials told Reuters. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.
Nearly 100 days into what Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk have called a mission to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient, Reuters found 20 instances where the staff and funding cuts led to purchasing bottlenecks and increased costs; paralysis in decision-making; longer public wait times; higher-paid civil servants filling in menial jobs, and a brain drain of scientific and technological talent.
“DOGE is not a serious exercise,” said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves.
The examples – previously unreported – span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.
Although these accounts do not provide a comprehensive picture of the project by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically cut the cost and size of the federal bureaucracy, they do reveal collateral damage resulting from DOGE’s efforts to make the sprawling federal bureaucracy more efficient.
…
Musk and his lieutenants have to date provided little concrete evidence about how the government is operating more efficiently as a result of the mass layoffs and terminated government contracts.
DOGE teams that have burrowed into a swath of government agencies and their computer systems operate in great secrecy, dozens of government officials have told Reuters.
A DOGE website that gives regular updates on what it claims it has saved U.S. taxpayers – $160 billion to date – has been riddled with errors and corrections.
…
So far, the people most affected by DOGE’s efforts have been recipients of foreign aid. Since its founding on Trump’s first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world’s needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency’s employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department.
At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.
…
In January, Trump fired 17 inspectors general, whose mission as government watchdogs includes reducing waste and fraud.
An article from Economic Times, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/as-musk-exits-doge-employees-are-being-booted-from-offices-many-fired-staff-now-being-rehired/articleshow/121730883.cms, As Musk exits, DOGE employees are being booted from offices; many fired staff now being rehired, discussed the fallout coming from Musk’s resignation from DOGE, how many of its employees may now be out of jobs and how some previously fired employees must be “quietly” re-hired.
Now that Elon Musk has stepped down from his role in the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) he helped establish is collapsing. Many of his allies are being stripped of their credentials, while long-term government employees quietly celebrate. The power dynamic has shifted quite quickly.
The ICE Raids
And now the “jack-booted thugs” swing into action. An article from NBC News by Marlene Lenthang dated January 29, 2025, Here are the cities where ICE raids are taking place (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/are-cities-ice-raids-are-taking-place-rcna189390), reported that:
The Trump administration is planning to conduct major immigration raids in three U.S. cities per week, according to three sources familiar with the planning. One of the sources described the operations as “all hands on deck.”
The raids are being carried out with ICE; the U.S. Marshals Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; FBI and other federal agencies.
ICE’s 25 field offices were told in a meeting with senior leadership over the weekend to enhance their “routine operations” by meeting a quota of between 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day, the sources said. The quota was first reported by the Washington Post.
Asked about the reporting, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, told NBC News that he did not have a quota and that the goal is to “get as many criminals as possible.”
Here are the major cities where arrests had unfolded by late January, according to the article: New York City; Chicago; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Phoenix; San Diego; Denver; Miami; Atlanta; Seattle; Various cities in Texas; and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
An article in The Immigrant’s Journal on January 28, 2025 by Esther Claudette Gittens (https://theimmigrantsjournal.com/analysis-of-ice-raids-in-2025-targeted-locations-and-methods-of-identifying-undocumented-immigrants/), Analysis of ICE Raids in 2025: Targeted Locations and Methods of Identifying Undocumented Immigrants, noted that
Reports indicate that ICE agents have conducted enforcement actions in public areas, though specific instances are less documented.
Methods used included setting up checkpoints to request identification from individuals, boarding buses and trains to conduct random checks, utilizing surveillance technologies to monitor public spaces and targeting sensitive locations.
A significant policy shift in 2025 has been the removal of restrictions on enforcement actions in sensitive locations such as schools, churches, and hospitals. The administration rescinded previous guidelines that limited ICE operations in these areas, arguing that law enforcement should not be restricted. This change has led to increased fear within immigrant communities, with concerns that individuals may avoid seeking essential services due to the threat of enforcement actions.
Locations cited in this article include Chicago, New York and Aurora, Colorado.
In 2025, ICE has significantly expanded its enforcement operations, targeting a wider array of locations and employing advanced methods to identify undocumented individuals. The removal of restrictions on sensitive locations and the integration of advanced surveillance technologies represent a notable shift in immigration enforcement strategy. These actions have profound implications for immigrant communities and raise important questions about civil liberties and the balance between enforcement and humanitarian considerations.
A Newsweek article by Dan Gooding, dated January 28, 2025 (https://www.newsweek.com/map-ice-illegal-immigration-raids-trump-administration-2020613), Map Shows Where ICE Raids Have Taken Place Across US, mentioned a New York Times/Ipsos poll taken between January 2-10 of this year which found that Americans initially largely supported Trump’s mass deportation plans.
Americans largely support his mass deportation plans. A New York Times/Ipsos poll, carried out from January 2 to 10, found 55 percent of voters strongly or somewhat supported such plans. Eighty-eight percent supported “Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have criminal records.” Large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the immigration system is broken.
An example of the personal upheaval caused by the ICE raids was detailed in a June 7, 2025 article on Nexstar Media by Vivian Chow (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/southern-california-father-detained-by-ice-at-immigration-hearing/ar-AA1Gh9QB?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=d6e67267f3734a8a8620157d1e77fb68&ei=66), Southern California father detained by ICE at immigration hearing:
Moe Rahman, 38, lives in Orange County and has been married to his wife for 10 years. He was born in Bangladesh and his family moved to the U.S. when he was 4 years old.
On May 7, Rahman had a routine check-in appointment in Santa Ana. However, instead of receiving an update on his immigration case, he was detained by ICE and transferred to a facility in Adelanto.
News reports flashed on television screens of raids taking place in cities across the United States, primarily (if not entirely) cities and states led by Democratic Party mayors and governors. Communities who dared to confront or even question these raids were often met by heavily armed paramilitary personnel in armored vehicles, wearing Kevlar and masks, brandishing military style weapons and deploying “flash-bang” grenades and teargas. When ICE agents launched raids in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom condemned the ICE raids, according to an article by Helen Jong for Channel 4 Los Angeles on June 6, 2025 (https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/cruel-and-chaotic-la-mayor-bass-gov-newsom-slam-ice-raids-in-downtown-la/3717684/), ‘Cruel and chaotic.’ LA Mayor Bass, Gov. Newsom slam ICE raids in downtown LA.
“It sows a sense of terror in the community. It’s bad enough that it happened at this location, but the way this goes and spreads throughout the community, people are not sure where they are safe,” Bass said, explaining that another raid during which day laborers were arrested at the parking lot of Home Depot in Westlake happened near a high school.
Governor Newsom also took to social media to criticize the raids, calling them chaotic and reckless.
“Continued chaotic federal sweeps, across California, to meet an arbitrary arrest quota are as reckless as they are cruel,” Newsom said. “Donald Trump’s chaos is eroding trust, tearing families apart, and undermining the workers and industries that power America’s economy.”
The Los Angeles City Council released a joint statement denouncing the raids. The article continues:
Senator Adam Schiff called the raids “unconscionable” as they targeted LA’s immigration communities.
“Today’s detention of, and injury to David Huerta, President of @seiuusww [Service Employees International Union California — Editor], and a U.S. citizen, while acting as a community observer during an immigration raid in LA is another terrible example,” Schiff said in a social media announcement. “This is part of a larger campaign of intimidation by the White House. And it must end.”
Huerta was later released on $50,000 bond, according to reports. The article adds:
LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis also said the raids were “deeply disturbing,” saying ICE agents targeted some of the most vulnerable residents of LA.“
“The individuals detained are hardworking Angelenos who contribute to our local economy and labor force every day,” Solis said. “Los Angeles County remains committed to standing with our immigrant communities, providing support through our Office of Immigrant Affairs and our network of nonprofit partners.”
The Los Angeles Police Department reiterated that it does not cooperate with federal agencies’ immigration raids as California and Los Angeles are sanctuary entities.
An Al Jazeera article, published June 7, 2025, provides a bit more detail on the Los Angeles raids and some of the legal justifications that are being made for them (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/7/ice-launches-military-style-raids-in-los-angeles-what-we-know), ICE launches ‘military-style’ raids in Los Angeles: What we know:
The raids, which were carried out in a military-style operation, have intensified concerns about the force used by federal immigration officials and the rights of undocumented individuals. …
ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) reported the “administrative arrest” of 44 individuals for immigration-related offences.
An administrative arrest, unlike a criminal arrest, refers to detention for civil immigration violations such as overstaying a visa or lacking legal status, and does not require criminal charges. These arrests can result in detention, deportation, temporary re-entry bans and denial of future immigration requests. …
Soto added that members of the community had effectively been “kidnapped” as officials, wearing masks had not shown warrants or any form of documentation when carrying out arrests. …
What sets these raids apart from typical civil enforcement actions was their military-style execution, experts say.
According to witnesses, legal observers and advocacy groups, federal agents involved in the operations were heavily armed and dressed in tactical gear, with some wearing camouflage and carrying rifles.
Agents arrived in unmarked black SUVs and armoured vehicles and, at certain points, sealed off entire streets around targeted buildings. Drones were reportedly used for surveillance in some areas and access to sites was blocked off with yellow tape, similar to measures which would be taken during a high-threat counterterrorism or drug bust operation.
The ACLU described the show of force as an “oppressive and vile paramilitary operation”. Civil liberties groups said the tactics used had created panic in local communities and may have violated protocols for civil immigration enforcement.
Trump Ups the Ante, Sends In the Marines
All of this popular resistance was, of course, intolerable to the self-proclaimed lover of free speech who sits in the White House, so swift punishment was needed, taking care to seek to place blame for the situation in Los Angeles on the Democratic mayor and governor, so he sent in the National Guard, followed quickly by a contingent of Marines, in what appears to be a violation of Posse Comitatus.
The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385, original at 20 Stat. 152) signed on June 18, 1878, by President Rutherford B. Hayes that limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. Congress passed the Act as an amendment to an army appropriation bill following the end of Reconstruction and updated it in 1956, 1981 and 2021.
The Act originally applied only to the United States Army, but a subsequent amendment in 1956 expanded its scope to the United States Air Force. In 2021, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 further expanded the scope of the Act to cover the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force. The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state’s governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission.
The title of the Act comes from the legal concept of posse comitatus, the authority under which a county sheriff, or another law officer, can conscript any able-bodied person to assist in keeping the peace.
— from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
An article in USA Today by John Bacon, Trevor Hughes, N’dea Yancey-Bragg, Michael Loria, Tom Vanden Brook, Davis Winkie dated June 9, 2025 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/06/09/ice-raids-los-angeles-protests-live-updates/84110835007/), 700 Marines heading to LA for riot assistance; Newsom calls move ‘deranged fantasy’ of Trump, describes the deteriorating situation there:
Amid moves from the Trump administration to deploy as many as 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, California Governor Gavin Newsom is firing back with all tools in his arsenal, including 800 additional officers, a lawsuit and invectives warning Trump is acting like a “dictator.”
“Los Angeles: don’t take Trump’s bait. Trump wants chaos and he’s instigated violence,” Newsom said in a post on X. “Stay peaceful. Stay focused. Don’t give him the excuse he’s looking for.”
Newsom’s move to rally support comes after Trump ordered National Guardsmen to Los Angeles without the governor’s consent and after the president even suggested Newsom should be arrested.
Trump has even resorted to provocation in his rhetoric, creating the suspicion that he wants to provoke violence in Los Angeles, perhaps to distract public scrutiny from the actions of his sycophants in Washington, DC. According to a story from The New Civil Rights Movement by David Badash, dated June 9, 2025,
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-warning-sign-trump-under-fire-for-new-violent-slogan-as-he-sends-marines-to-la/ar-AA1Go7st?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=afc2de55bfbc42a3b3213e4ab02646d4&ei=17,
‘A warning sign’: Trump under fire for new violent slogan as he sends Marines to LA,
President Donald Trump has unveiled a new slogan amid the ongoing protests in Los Angeles, warning critics of his deportation policies, “If you spit, we will hit”—a statement critics say could incite violence. As tensions rise, Trump is escalating the federal response, expanding the National Guard presence and now ordering U.S. Marines into the city.
In a Monday afternoon Truth Social post, Trump wrote:
“’If they spit, we will hit.’ This is a statement from the President of the United States concerning the catastrophic Gavin Newscum inspired Riots going on in Los Angeles. The Insurrectionists have a tendency to spit in the face of the National Guardsmen/women, and others. These Patriots are told to accept this, it’s just the way life runs. But not in the Trump Administration. IF THEY SPIT, WE WILL HIT, and I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before. Such disrespect will not be tolerated!”
Trump is also sending in heavily armed, masked and unidentified ICE raids while at the same time attempting to outlaw masks being worn by protesters, according to June 8, 2025 articles by Rachel Scully of The Hill
(https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-protesters-not-allowed-135106247.html?guccounter=1), Trump says protesters will not be allowed to wear masks and the administrators of Mahomet Daily (https://mahometdaily.com/trump-bans-protester-masks-citing-nothing-to-hide-while-ice-agents-conceal-identities-amid-raids/).
Here is an excerpt from the Mahomet Daily article:
Trump Bans Protester Masks, Citing “Nothing to Hide”, While ICE Agents Conceal Identities Amid Raids
… Yet, in a striking juxtaposition, ICE agents conducting the very raids that sparked the protests are themselves routinely wearing masks, often obscuring their identities completely. This practice, now common across the country, has drawn sharp criticism from civil liberties advocates and lawmakers, who argue it undermines transparency and public trust.
ICE officials, including acting director Todd Lyons, have defended the use of masks, citing threats, harassment, and “doxxing”, the online publication of personal information, as justification. Lyons explained that agents have been targeted, with their families’ identities and locations posted online, sometimes accompanied by death threats.
New York Congressman Dan Goldman told The Point, “Why are you wearing masks? I was a federal prosecutor for 10 years. I worked with ICE agents, I worked with law enforcement agents. I never saw any of them wear masks. This is brand new. And the question is, if everything is legitimate and proper, why are you wearing masks to hide your face.”
…
“It is the height of hypocrisy, but it also really reflects something underneath, which is the cruelty and the fear and the terror and the anti foreigner sentiment that this administration is moving forward with, and they know that it’s not favored by many, which is why they’re worried about being seen.”
Commentaries concerning these anti-mask laws were published by the American Civil Liberties Union (https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/states-dust-off-obscure-anti-mask-laws-to-target-pro-palestine-protesters), States Dust Off Obscure Anti-Mask Laws to Target Pro-Palestine Protesters, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/criminalizing-masks-protests-wrong), Criminalizing Masks at Protests is Wrong By Matthew Guariglia and Adam Schwartz from June 9, 2025.
Robert Reich’s Appeal for Peaceful and Intelligent Protest
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor whose writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. He penned the following appeal for peaceful and intelligent protest (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/why-trump-wants-to-turn-america-violent-opinion/ar-AA1GqfVP?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=b85fde5e3caf4c7fad78296d65445901&ei=72):
Why Trump wants to turn America violent
Opinion by Robert Reich • June 10, 2025
The man who launched an attempted coup on the United States in 2020 and instigated an insurrection at the Capitol that resulted in five deaths now claims that people in Los Angeles are launching an insurrection. They’re not.
Yesterday, the Pentagon activated 700 Marines out of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, to join the 4,000 federalized National Guard’s military occupation of parts of Los Angeles.
Trump doesn’t give a damn whether the troops are necessary. Nor does he care how many people are injured or even killed in his raid on Los Angeles. The show of military force is the point. It gives him the appearance of power.
Like any bully, Trump is fundamentally a coward. Humiliated by China, Harvard, the Supreme Court, Elon Musk, and the federal courts, Trump has launched a war inside America on vulnerable people inside America, in a place — California — most of whose inhabitants loathe him.
All of this was manufactured by Trump. It was and is his creation. The frightful specter of federally controlled troops in American streets has historically signaled a social crisis — forcing integration in Arkansas, protecting civil rights marchers in Alabama. But Trump is sending the military to Los Angeles at a time when state and local officials say there is no need.
Let’s be clear: Trump and his lackeys want blood in the streets. They have been planning for it. “Looking really bad in L.A.,” Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after midnight Sunday night. “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
The bully-in-chief has appointed a bunch of tin-pot bullies to every position of lethal force in the federal government — and is now activating them.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristy Noem is a Trump stooge seemingly without understanding of the U.S. Constitution. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears willing to go along with whatever Trump wants. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is a maniacal xenophobe. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a brain-dead Trump sycophant. Border czar Tom Homan is a toady who has not ruled out arresting California’s leaders if they obstruct federal law enforcement.
***
The central struggle of civilization has always been to stop brutality. Unless we prevent the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe.
A civil society is the opposite of what Trump seeks. A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It moves as far as possible away from brutality.
Every time the stronger brutalize the weaker — whether it’s Trump and his flunkies bullying immigrants and the state of California, white supremacists bullying Black and Latino people, giant corporations bullying customers with high prices, the wealthy bullying the public to get giant tax cuts, Elon Musk bullying poor people by cutting programs they depend on, police bullying poor Black people, powerful men bullying women through sexual harassment, politicians building their power by bullying racial or ethnic minorities, Netanyahu wiping out Palestinians in Gaza, Putin trying to take over Ukraine — it’s fundamentally the same playbook: Stoke fear. Exploit desperation. Suspend the rule of law. Fan brutality.
Unless the bullies are stopped, an entire society — even the world — can descend into chaos.
Our duty is to stop brutality. Our responsibility is to hold the powerful accountable. Our challenge is to stand up to abuses of power. Our moral obligation is to protect the vulnerable.
This week and through Saturday, protest but please do it peacefully. Do not be provoked into violence. Take videos of any brutality Trump’s agents are wreaking, to show the rest of America and the world. Be smart. Be careful.
“No Kings”: Trump’s ICE Raids and Military Parade Face Popular Resistance
As of this writing, it would appear that protesters are largely taking Mr. Reich’s advice, though Trump, his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and his press secretary continuously insist that the protesters are nothing more than “violent radical left criminals who hate America”. On Saturday, July 14, the “No Kings” marches, rallies and protests took place protests across the United States, including Central and South Florida, including Mar-A-Lago (https://youtu.be/QfpYYNknGcA?si=OY1aLGOyCTLYAtD8, https://youtu.be/2zyJT2kNIzM?si=YAvFGJW_awSxlzpW, https://youtu.be/dcBozKswAGM?si=aYqiDZIMZpLTfXVo, https://youtu.be/2zyJT2kNIzM?si=YAvFGJW_awSxlzpW and https://youtu.be/1Ajfv50Pqgk?si=ZfYebVOL6m-2Uly5); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (https://youtu.be/6pT-B49-9Vk?si=PgXzaQkoa2LpjO3Z and https://youtu.be/udBac5U7Lf0?si=GEd3u3N_wUT-ISsi); Cleveland, Ohio (https://www.youtube.com/live/qa8L6opIRm8?si=_YaSGcDl2Y9vIr81); Manhattan, New York City (https://youtu.be/CXzWcbiyTYQ?si=bKtqQauvDzZqG8ox); Dallas, Texas (https://youtu.be/_fw3CHhHj8k?si=OUvE_HWf1UCjhYYU); Arizona (https://youtu.be/rCPqoX9qw74?si=nBtQUan4agCY0-V_); an Omaha, Nebraska meatpacking plant (https://youtu.be/LroKaDcjKM4?si=riTgTKFESCD5Qfsg); and other locations around the country (https://youtu.be/JJQS22Off2E?si=iCzuqtW_QPxsRHBO and https://youtu.be/sH7SMgvHOrs?si=LEgXN8Gr5oBhItKB).
A protest of Trump’s North Korea-style military parade in the streets of Washington, DC was also met with a protest (https://www.youtube.com/live/GCiMElf0cUk?si=Si3XSbvIspgk2wyY and https://www.youtube.com/live/GCiMElf0cUk?si=66b1O66TnkWT8tBU), though that one was not officially designated a “No Kings” protest. Of some interest is the list of apparent sponsors of both the parade (Lockheed Martin, Coinbase, Palantir, UFC and Amazon among others) and the “No Kings” protests (Walmart heiress Christy Walton, who took out an ad in The New York Times supporting the protests, which led to some backlash from Trump supporters against Walmart).
Meanwhile, Trump is considering adding more countries to his list of nations whose citizens are to be restricted or denied from entering the United States (https://wapo.st/3SOaeED) and Congress member Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) appeared on DemocracyNow! to warn of the United States’ current course toward dictatorship (https://youtu.be/Y7r9W1QGqSE?si=b3Lhf2SKDzrmz7Q2).
The extreme political rhetoric, laced with xenophobia and grievance-peddling, is only stirring up an already hot pot of simmering anger. The situation in Minnesota is particularly concerning since on June 14, 2025, a gunman, apparently posing as a police officer, assassinated Democratic State Delegate and former Speaker Melissa Holtman and her husband Mark, and also shot and seriously injured Democratic Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, both in what have been determined to be targeted political shootings (Rep. Melissa Hortman, her husband killed; Sen. John Hoffman, his wife shot in ‘targeted’ shootings | FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul). This would seem to indicate, as many on the political left have feared, that Trump’s bombastic, divisive rhetoric has continued to embolden armed members of his ultra-right-wing “base” to acts of violence, similar to the January 8, 2011 near-assassination of US Congress member Gabby Giffords (D-Arizona) and the June 14, 2017 mass shooting of US Congress person and then U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika at a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Virginia that seemed to target Scalise.
The temperature has been turning up for a long time now. And we’re seeing a lot of old models of repression being remixed, recycled, reborn and reused. The detentions of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others, especially Ozturk literally being snatched off the street in broad daylight by masked ICE agents, smack of the disappearances that ensued after the overthrow and assassination of Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 (September 11, 1973 to be exact). The military-style raids in primarily Democrat-run cities across the country conjures up images of authoritarian regimes around the world invading towns, villages and communities that would not tow the line for the dictator. And if Trump gets his way, we might see something akin to Tianenmen Square in 1989 in the future. But we’ve even seen that before, right here in the US. We’ve seen it in post-Reconstruction terrorism against Black communities from Wilmington, North Carolina to the Red Summer of 1919 to Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. We’ve seen it in violent SWAT raids against Black Panther headquarters in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. We’ve seen it in the targeted assassinations of Bunchy Carter and Fred Hampton by police. We’ve seen it in the fates of political prisoners from the Palmer Raids to the Red Scare to COINTELPRO to MOVE. We’ve seen it in the repressive plans of political ideologues from the Contract On America to the Tea Party to the Project for a New American Century to the Freedom Caucus to MAGA to Project 2025 and Agenda 47. And we’re seeing it in Trump’s current favorite Central American country of El Salvador, where president Nayib Bukele is arresting prominent critics of his regime, perhaps to bury them in one of the prisons Trump is urging him to build for the imprisonment of US deportees and other insurgents. Too many of us have been asleep through all of these signs of the advance of fascism, authoritarianism and oligarchy in the US and around the world. Some of us even cheered these developments because we thought we could profit from the dispossession of others, such as the LGBTQ+ people who threaten our sense of manhood, womanhood and family, or the immigrant community that some self-described Black Nationalists see only as competition for limited resources that we feel uniquely entitled to. The current repressive developments are geared toward appealing to our narrow sense of self-interest, as though the oppression of others will somehow guarantee our freedom and uplift. We too easily forget the immortal words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We are currently living in a time approaching that of German pastor Martin Niemoller, who had been an early supporter of the Nazis but, as the injustices piled up and he faced imprisonment himself from the regime he would come to resist, learned the hard way the consequences of silence and inaction in the face of tyranny and discrimination.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Martin Niemöller
For decades, the birthday of El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz/Omowale/Malcolm X has been celebrated by Pan Afrikanists, Black Nationalists, freedom fighters, civil rights activists, Black Power organizers and the general public. Many of us consider The Autobiography of Malcolm X to be the one book that truly inspired us to study or even embrace a life of Pan Afrikan activism. His growth from street hustler to Nation of Islam national representative to champion of universal human rights, even as he maintained his commitment to Black People’s right to defend ourselves against right-wing White violence and oppression, continue to inspire many of us to follow his example of principled commitment to building and nourishing the Black Community while championing global human rights.
Every year, the Soul School Institute would sponsor a bus trip to New York City to commemorate Malcolm X’s birthday. Babatunji Balogun, Soul School Institute’s leader, arranged for the bus, planned the itinerary and provided instruction as we would visit places such as the eateries where Ancestor Malcolm would eat and teach adherents and idle passersby, the Audubon Ballroom where assassins extinguished his shining light in a hail of gunfire, and the Ferncliff Cemetary where the remains of Ancestor Malcolm and his wife Dr. Betty Shabazz now lay in eternal rest. The bus trip provided an opportunity for those of us who had studied him to see first-hand the world in which he lived, for those unfamiliar with him to learn more about his role in shaping the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and for all of us to pay respects, however meager, to his memory and enduring legacy.
The bus trips to New York were sadly interrupted for several years, first by the COVID Pandemic, then by the untimely passing of Babatunji Balogun in 2021, reportedly from COVID. Since that time, there has been a void in our consciousness as a community, once filled by the annual Malcolm X Birthday Bus Trip. Now that void is being filled again.
Bro. Haki Ammi is the President of the Teaching Artist Institute (TAI) as well as a supporter of the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus, National Action Network and numerous other Civil Rights, Black Nationalist and Pan Afrikan organizations in Maryland, the United States and internationally. On Monday, May 19, what would be Ancestor Malcolm X’s 100th Birthday, Bro. Haki is sponsoring the “100 For 100” Malcolm X Remembrance Tour,
“a transformative and educational journey as we celebrate the life and legacy Malcolm X on his 100th birthday. This historic day trip, organized by the Global World Activists community, offers a unique opportunity to explore key landmarks in the fight for social justice and civil rights.” (from the announcement and flyer)
Scheduled trip details include visits to the Schomburg Center, the Shabazz Center, the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X’s Burial Site, the African Burial Grounds and an African Marketplace.
The bus departs from the Lot H Parking Lot (west on North Avenue to the 2500 block, then north to Warwick Avenue, to Loop Road, then to Lot H) at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland at 6:30 AM sharp. Tickets are $145 per person and include breakfast, snacks and lunch. It is recommended to carpool to the Lot H Parking Lot if possible.
The flyer is pictured above. For tickets or more information, please contact Bro. Haki Ammi, (410) 209-9687.