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:

• Restitution: return of the people to a dignified place
• Compensation: other communities have been compensated for the harms done to them
• Satisfaction: the apologies, the admissions, the commitment to atonement, the public acknowledgements, education about what happened historically
• Rehabilitation: trauma-informed care, access to community wellness rooted in Afrikan centered practices to lift up Black livelihoods
• Guarantees of Non-Repetition: building up the structures we need, taking legal statutes off the books that harm us

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

1. the organizational structure of the effort, with SOTP being guided, perhaps, by a national body that then gives the plan and strategy to the localities while SRDC’s plan depends more on the local communities organizing themselves to help inform the national and global sociopolitical strategy; and
2. that SOTP’s plan seems to be geared toward leveraging the voice of Black America (such as they are able to elicit, organize and harness it) to petition the United States government for more just treatment of its Afrikan American citizens, while SRDC’s plan is aimed at influencing global organizations to put pressure on the United States and Western governments where Afrikan People live while providing opportunities for us to “come home” to Mother Afrika instead of “taking our case from the wolf to the fox” as Ancestor Malcolm X described going to the United States government for redress of our grievances.

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.