The Uhuru Three Trial Was the Inevitable Outcome of Russiagate

On September 12th, the federal trial of three members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) concluded in St. Petersburg, Florida. While the more serious charges of acting as unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government were dismissed by the jury, the trio of Uhuru Movement activists were still found guilty of the lesser offense of “conspiring to defraud the United States.”

The week-long hearings came more than two years since the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first raided the African nationalist group’s headquarters in the Tampa Bay area along with other Uhuru properties, including the home of its octogenarian founder, Omali Yeshitela, in St. Louis, Missouri.

With supporters declaring victory and the defense confident the remaining charges can be overturned on appeal, the verdict was cause for relative celebration. However, the split decision itself was incoherent—how could they have conspired to defraud the government if they weren’t working for a foreign power?

The purported scheme was that the APSP knowingly collaborated with the Kremlin in a foreign influence operation to sow division and interfere in U.S. elections through a Moscow-based businessman named Alexander Ionov. When the APSP released videos criticizing the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine and (unsuccessfully) ran candidates in local St. Pete elections, prosecuting attorneys argued it was at the initiative of Ionov.

Alexander Ionov [Source: bbc.com]

In 2015, Chairman Yeshitela and other representatives of the APSP traveled to Moscow to attend conferences hosted by Ionov’s Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia NGO. The Russian political figure is reportedly an associate of the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, billionaire restaurateur and CEO of the private security contractor, PMC Wagner.

During the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Prigozhin’s company Internet Research Agency (IRA) was indicted for conducting a cyber-meddling campaign to inflame discord between American voters using social media.

Omali Yeshitela stands before his home and speaks to supporters after FBI raid on July 29. [Source: stltoday.com]

IRA accounts on Facebook were said to have chiefly focused on African-Americans by promoting Black Lives Matter protests of police killings and violence perpetrated by law enforcement. Even if true, the special counsel report acknowledged there was no proof the Russian government participated in IRA’s activities and a lack of evidence connecting the Kremlin to the St. Petersburg, Russia-based firm.

Since there was nothing to back up the indictments of the Russian nationals in the IRA scandal, special prosecutor and former FBI director Robert Mueller counted on none of the individuals prosecuted in absentia ever appearing at the kangaroo court. As soon as Prigozhin unexpectedly hired lawyers to defend the “trolls,” Mueller delayed the star chamber proceedings and the case was eventually dismissed.

This did not preclude corporate media from nicknaming the former hot dog vendor-turned-oligarch “Putin’s chef” because the Russian head of state happened to frequent one of his restaurants and the Kremlin contracted his catering service.

Yevgheny Progozhin [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Last year, the Wagner Group staged an abortive mutiny after the chief mercenary found himself at odds with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu over the Ukraine war. Russian President Vladimir Putin was blamed by the West for Prigozhin’s fatal plane crash a few months later, even though the Kremlin had nothing to gain from his untimely end. The Russian equivalent of Academi (formerly Blackwater or Xe), Prigozhin’s soldiers of fortune have played a key role in Moscow’s increasing foothold in Africa and his falling out with Putin only benefited the ECOWAS countries.

Russia, which has no colonial history in the continent, revived the Soviet-era tradition of helping African countries break from the yoke of Western dominance with Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso’s Alliance of Sahel States, while Wagner has been crucial in bringing stability to the conflict-ridden Central African Republic.

Citing screenshots of text messages as confirmation of Ionov’s ties to Russian intelligence, the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges Moscow promoted various secessionist movements in the United States, including the CalExit independence campaign to secede the nation’s most populous state from the Union. While the African People’s Socialist Party may take inspiration from the legacy of Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, the Uhurus are not ethnic separatists. As a matter of fact, they are not a race-based organization at all, as Chairman Omali’s two co-defendants—Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel—are both white comrades in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement.

The Uhuru 3. Penny Ness is on the left, and Jesse Nevel on the right. [Source: indyliberationcenter.org]

While much of the focus has been on the Uhuru Three, it should be noted that such advocacy does apply to the fourth “co-conspirator” in the case, Augustus C. Romain, Jr., whose nom de guerre is Gazi Kodzo. The latter is an ex-APSP Secretary General who founded the reactionary and cult-like Black Hammer Party in the wake of his banishment from the Uhuru Movement in 2018.

Unlike his former alumnus, the Georgia-based sect does advocate racial separatism and has attracted significant controversy over its conservative and often anti-Semitic views since it first drew notice during the George Floyd riots in 2020. Along with the APSP, Black Hammer was implicated in the unproven Russian influence plot by the Justice Department which claimed that Kodzo accepted financial assistance from Ionov to stage protests.

While some of the demonstrations were against U.S. support for Ukraine in front of CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, the Black Hammers also participated in rallies against the COVID protocols and vaccine mandates with the Proud Boys, the far-right group embroiled in the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.

Although there is no evidence of infiltration by law enforcement within Black Hammer, the sedition trial of Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio revealed that the pro-Trump group’s Cuban-American leader and several of his cronies were privately acting as federal informants.

Separate from the Uhuru case, Kodzo faces a slew of charges stemming from alleged abuse of his devotees, including kidnapping, assault, false imprisonment, aggravated sodomy, and street gang activity. During the police siege of the Black Hammer home, the body of an 18-year-old follower was discovered dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound following a standoff with Georgia cops.

It cannot go without mention that the use of phony rival off-shoots and agent provocateurs was practiced by the FBI throughout its notorious Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) from the mid 1950s to the early 1970s.

A declassified memo from 1968 states one of the primary objectives of the project was to avert a coalition of Black liberation groups. Around the time that the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP) emerged in 1965, a Black nationalist faction called the US Organization appeared on the scene and competed with the Marxist-oriented Panthers for recruits. Similar to the FBI’s infiltration of the Nation of Islam (NOI) that deepened the Elijah Muhammad-Malcolm X split which many believe resulted in the latter’s assassination, the Church Committee report on COINTELPRO showed that the Bureau deliberately instigated mutual hostilities to “capitalize on the differences between the BPP and US.”

The dispute would eventually turn deadly with the 1969 murders of four Panthers by US members in Southern California. According to a 1974 report by respected author and journalist Dick Russell, the police and FBI directly aided the US Organization in its gun battle with the Panthers, who derogatorily referred to their foes as the “United Slaves.”

This has been corroborated by reality television courtroom star Judge Joe Brown, who originally shot to fame for his removal from the reopened James Earl Ray investigation over an apparent bias in believing Ray’s innocence. At the time, Brown was the Black student union recruiter of the two Panthers shot to death on the University of California, Los Angeles campus. US founder Ron Karenga, who is notably the creator of the alternative African-American holiday Kwanzaa, would go on to enjoy a successful academic career despite serving time for the torture of two female followers.

Ron “Maulana” Karenga, 1971. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Oddly enough, the seven principles of Kwanzaa inspired the beliefs and logo of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the small band of self-proclaimed “urban guerrillas” who kidnapped and (disputedly) indoctrinated Patty Hearst, the heiress granddaughter of wealthy publishing magnate, William Randolph Hearst, in 1974.

The de facto leader of the SLA, Donald DeFreeze, was also reported by Russell to have been a government informant and the SLA a front organization in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation CHAOS. Initially exposed by legendary journalist Seymour Hersh in The New York Times, CHAOS was an extensive and unlawful domestic spying operation directed at the peace movement and Black militants. Like the congressional Church and Pike Committees, the outcry over Sy Hersh’s exposé brought about the limited hangout of the Rockefeller Commission findings.

A violation of the agency’s own charter prohibiting espionage on American soil, CHAOS was hatched on the basis of uncovering international communist intrigue within Black Liberation circles and the counterculture. Despite internal reviews indicating the absence of any foreign funding or training of anti-establishment movements, the clandestine program continued until the Watergate scandal erupted.

Like the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the actual purpose of CHAOS was to penetrate the New Left in order to tarnish its respectability with violence and drugs. Shockingly, the black ops were even recently linked to the Sharon Tate murders in the bookCHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by award-winning reporter Tom O’Neill, which also dives into the agency’s MK-ULTRA experiments and its sub-project, Operation Midnight Climax.

O’Neill also draws a thread to COINTELPRO. One of the many organizations disrupted by the FBI was the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the mostly-Black student group from which the vanguard of the BPP coalesced. 83-year-old Chairman Omali began his lifetime of fighting racism with the St. Petersburg chapter of the SNCC as a young man before he founded the APSP in the early 1970s.

Omali Yeshitela speaking before crowd in late 1960s. [Source: apspuhuru.org]

Even though the Uhuru Movement has consistently advocated reparations for slavery since its inception, prosecutors said its organizing of a 2015 United Nations petition accusing the U.S. government of genocide against Africans was done at the behest of Russia. Historically, such insulting and racist denial of the political agency of Black Americans is nothing new, especially in relation to Moscow. Throughout the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and Black progressive groups were constantly red-baited with allegations that the USSR was using them to fan the flames of racial divisions in the United States.

Anti-integration protest in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1959. [Source: Wikipedia.org]

When celebrated activist and performer Paul Robeson partnered with his lifelong colleague William L. Patterson of the Communist Party USA to present the document We Charge Genocide to the United Nations in 1951, Washington put pressure on the UN Commission on Human Rights to ensure it was never adopted.

Authored by the Patterson-led Civil Rights Congress and endorsed by dozens of prominent intellectuals, the 240-page paper accused the federal government of complicity in genocide for failing to pass legislation or prosecute those responsible for lynchings. Once Patterson returned from delivering the petition to the UN delegation in France, the State Department revoked his passport and banned him from leaving the country.

One of the signatories of We Charge Genocide was historian and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, but it would be the civil rights pioneer’s circulation of a different petition that made him a subject of persecution. Similar to the Uhuru Three, the DOJ indicted Du Bois in 1951 for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by chairing a peace center that promoted a worldwide list of signatures calling for nuclear disarmament.

Since the Stockholm Appeal was first approved by the Soviet-supported World Peace Council, the Justice Department insisted Du Bois was working on behalf of Moscow. During his court case, the Pan-African scholar found himself abandoned by many of his colleagues including the NAACP itself, and it was only after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness that Du Bois was finally acquitted. Even though the charges were dropped, the renowned sociologist was still forbidden to leave the country for nearly a decade.

[Source: zinnedproject.org]

Paul Robeson’s passport was rescinded as well, but that was just the beginning. One of the most popular entertainers in the country at the time, the baritone vocalist was already on the FBI radar for both his membership in “subversive organizations” and a daring speech given in Paris at the World Peace Congress in which he spoke out against the Cold War.

In his 1949 address, Robeson proclaimed that Black Americans would never participate in a conflict with the Soviets as long as they were still deprived of civil rights in the United States. His controversial remarks resulted in a probe by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), his blacklisting by Hollywood studios, an attack by the Ku Klux Klan and racist mobs on his concert in Peekskill, New York, and even his Rutgers All-American college football statistics erased from the record books.

Although his lifelong activism laid the foundations for the Civil Rights Movement that reached its peak in the 1960s, its leadership distanced itself from Robeson once the cause went mainstream due to his refusal to renounce communism or his affinity for the USSR. Since his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1934, Robeson talked openly about the lack of racism he encountered amongst Russians in stark contrast to his experience at a stop in Berlin where he and his wife were accosted by Nazi brownshirts. While his ability to travel was eventually restored, Robeson’s physical and mental health deteriorated under suspicious circumstances that led many to believe, including his son, that he was a victim of MK-ULTRA.

Paul Robeson in Moscow, 1958. [Source: theblackquakerproject.org]

Prior to his scandalous speech to Parisians, Robeson had performed the protest ballad “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” a tribute to the Swedish-American labor activist, Joseph Hillström. The next month, he would famously sing the pro-union classic to mineworkers in Edinburgh, Scotland. An organizer in the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill had been a folk troubadour himself before he was executed in 1915 by the state of Utah after being framed for homicide in a period of widespread suppression.

The state tyranny only escalated with America’s entry into World War I, upon which President Woodrow Wilson moved to crush societal unrest and criminalize opposition to the war after reversing his campaign pledge to maintain U.S. neutrality.

Wilson’s political opponent, Socialist Party leader and IWW co-founder Eugene V. Debs, was arrested for making an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary under the 1918 Sedition Act.

An amendment to the previous year’s Espionage Act, both laws were ostensibly passed to contain foreign intrusion—but really to make criticism of the war effort a crime and restrict freedom of expression. In fact, most people today who cite the phrase “shouts fire in a crowded theater” have no idea that the dictum originates from the closing arguments made by the prosecution in the Debs trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would soon adopt the metaphor to uphold the landmark 1919 decision of Schenck v. United States which ruled that fellow Socialist Party member Charles Schenck’s attempt to obstruct the draft during wartime wasn’t protected under the First Amendment. While the maxim itself might make sense, it was Schenck’s distribution of flyers opposing conscription to American servicemen that was analogized to falsely creating a panic in the middle of a national emergency.

As work stoppages and anti-war sentiment grew across the country, news of the Russian Revolution abroad served as a catalyst for both working class militancy and the hyper-nationalist fervor of the first Red Scare. In 1919, when a walkout by shipyard workers led to a citywide general strike in Seattle, Washington, the local authorities called in federal troops to arrest dozens of Wobblies as “ringleaders of anarchy.”

With the powers that be already looking to foster an environment of paranoia and suspicion, the mayor and local press pointed the finger at foreign conspirators when union organizers in the Pacific Northwest handed out pamphlets expressing solidarity with the Soviets. That same year, government sources fed propaganda to the media about “Bolshevists” being responsible for race riots across the U.S.—or as an October 1919 headline in The New York Times put it, “REDS ARE WORKING AMONG NEGROES.” Even then, it was unthinkable that an uprising by blacks could have occurred autonomously.

Leaflet from the Seattle General Strike [Source: wikimedia.commons.org]

Then known as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the FBI centralized its authority under the pretext of fighting communism. A key player in the U.S. government’s early domestic assault on the left was 24-year-old DOJ lawyer J. Edgar Hoover, whose first assignment in heading the Bureau’s newly-created Radical Division was to carry out an abusive crackdown, starting on the second anniversary of the October Revolution in 1919. Following a series of mostly unsuccessful “propaganda by deed” mail bombing attacks by anarchists on politicians, bankers, and law enforcement officials—including the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C.—the Justice Department and BOI rounded up thousands of suspected radicals for mass deportation.

Among those detained in the infamous Palmer Raids were foreign-born anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, both émigrés from the former Russian Empire who were subsequently expelled back to the Soviet Union (which they would ironically both denounce over the Kronstadt Rebellion). The anti-communist hysteria contributed heavily to xenophobia toward immigrants, particularly those involved in revolutionary politics, culminating in the controversial trial and capital punishment of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston, Massachusetts. Although the Palmer Raids would receive backlash from legal experts and directly lead to the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the FBI’s powers only expanded in the coming decades.

Ben Shahn, “Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco,” 1931-32. [Source: khanacademy.org]

At the helm of the Bureau for nearly a half-century, Hoover consolidated power and ran America’s secret police around his cult of personality. The warrantless surveillance and state terror used against dissidents by the Radical Division was a precursor to COINTELPRO which Hoover would launch during the second Red Scare.

The covert and illegal projects were carried out under the category of counterintelligence to discredit any political dissent, including the black freedom struggle, as an effort by foreign entities and a communist plot to harm the United States. When the Black Panthers began their armed patrols and marched on the California State Capitol to protest gun control measures, it was treated as if the global anti-colonial struggle had arrived home. Amassing millions of files and deploying undercover spies to manipulate causes from within became the formula for Hoover’s witch-hunt of the Communist Party, as well as the civil rights, Black power and anti-war movements.

COINTELPRO would only become public knowledge when peace activists broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and sent the documents they came across to several newspapers in 1971. Spanning multiple presidential administrations, the top-secret program’s extra-legal activities went as far as targeted assassination in the case of Black Panther Party revolutionary Fred Hampton, who was drugged by an informant and then executed during a violent Chicago police raid at the direction of the FBI in 1969. Given that another main goal of COINTELPRO was to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement”, the 21-year-old Hampton’s murder was likely just the tip of the iceberg.

While the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that James Earl Ray was the lone gunman in the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Memphis jury in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the King family in 1999 unanimously agreed that the slain minister was gunned down as a result of a conspiracy involving U.S. government agencies.

Years earlier, G-Men had already delivered an anonymous blackmail letter to MLK, encouraging him to take his own life. In 2023, the surviving children of Malcolm X announced similar plans to bring a $100 million civil action against the FBI, CIA, and New York City Police Department for concealing evidence after the convictions of two men wrongly jailed for decades over his killing were overturned. A recent Netflix docu-series posited that the feds had placed moles within both Malcolm’s inner circle and the NOI, while the actual trigger man was a now-deceased member of the Nation’s Newark, New Jersey mosque.

In the years since oversight and reform were supposedly brought to the national security state in the wake of the House and Senate investigations into intelligence abuses, the war on black freedom groups continued indefinitely. The FBI had long since infiltrated the Panthers to engineer a schism between the Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver wings while the former was exiled in Algeria, ultimately leading to the party’s demise. Cleaver’s expulsion caused its more militant adherents to splinter underground into the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the ranks of which included activist Assata Shakur, godmother and step-aunt of the late rapper, Tupac Shakur, whose parents were both ex-Panthers. Assata was incarcerated for the alleged murder of a New Jersey state trooper in 1979, but later escaped from prison and fled to Cuba where she was granted asylum and remains to this day. (In 2013, she became the first woman ever added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.)

Well after the dissolution of the BPP, the FBI’s war on the black left endured. In May 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) controversially dropped two explosives on the compound of the MOVE organization, an eccentric radical group that combined Black liberationism with communal living and animal rights. The helicopter airstrike killed eleven people, including five children who died in the ensuing blaze, while hundreds of neighborhood residents were left homeless. It soon came to light that the C-4 used to incinerate an entire city block was supplied by an FBI special agent to the PPD bomb squad. In a profound understatement, the MOVE commission inquiry found the use of force by law enforcement was excessive and the city government’s actions indefensible.

A view of Osage Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after the bombing of the MOVE headquarters, 1985. [Source: atmos.earth]

Earlier, the Philly police force had fabricated evidence and intimidated witnesses to ensure the high-profile conviction of MOVE member Mumia Abu-Jamal for the shooting of Officer Daniel Faulkner. (Until his contested death sentence was thrown out by a federal court in 2001 and later reduced to life in prison, Abu-Jamal was “perhaps the world’s best-known death-row inmate”, in the words of the newspaper of record.)

Mumia Abu-Jamal [Source: socialism.com]

Although the U.S. government’s war on Black Americans never ceased, it was no longer able to remove their agency by assigning it to foreign influence once the Soviet hammer and sickle flag lowered over the Kremlin for the final time in December 1991. That is, until U.S.-Russia relations began to sour and Moscow was accused by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the intelligence community of interfering in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

Around the time of the Mueller inquiry, leaked FBI counter-terrorism division documents dispatched nationwide to thousands of police departments showed the Bureau had designated “Black identity extremists” as an emerging threat accountable for the increase in violence against police. In reality, the baseless terminology was coined to give grounds for the FBI’s monitoring of citizens participating in the decentralized Black Lives Matter cause.

In the aftermath of Clinton’s surprising election defeat, fears were sparked by the establishment about a connection between Russia and the surging popularity of BLM. Then-Senator Kamala Harris even claimed that the firestorm surrounding the national anthem kneeling protests by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes was masterminded by “Russian bots.”

When BLM marches mobilized countrywide in 2020, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN and National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, Susan Rice, blamed the public disturbance on “foreign actors” in a televised CNN interview. Rice—who is known as “tea girl” in Nigeria in reference to the mysterious death of the West African country’s one-time presidential candidate, M.K.O. Abiola—suggested that the civil disorder was “right out of the Russian playbook.”

Susan Rice with Rwandan genocidaire Paul Kagame in 1998. [Source: countere.com]

If the truth be told, the only script being dusted off was the tried-and-true Red Scare trope of tying the advancement of black people to meddling by Moscow. This time, to a resurgent post-Soviet Russia under Putin that refuses to dance to Washington’s tune. In the middle of the Uhuru Three trial, prosecutors even brought a so-called “expert witness” to give testimony reciting Moscow’s supposed history of disinformation warfare and Cold War espionage strategy of “active measures.”

Simultaneously, the Harris campaign kick-started a new round of hyper-militarist election advertisements targeting the Ukrainian and Polish-American diaspora residing in key battleground states to rejuvenate Russophobic hysteria in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

While the Uhuru Movement itself has been highly critical of the corporatization of BLM, from the perspective of the U.S. government there was no distinction between them.

Unlike the reformist mis-leaders of a broad agenda attached to Democratic Party-affiliated “philanthropic” foundations and the non-profit industrial complex, the African People’s Socialist Party couldn’t be co-opted. Unsurprisingly, liberals who support BLM are nowhere to be found during the Biden administration’s inquisition of the Uhuru Three. As one of the last vestiges of the authentic Black left among an ever smaller few that assess the Russia-Ukraine conflict accurately, the APSP inevitably became casualties of the neo-McCarthyite atmosphere. Thankfully, the jury was mostly able to see through the obvious political motivation behind the government’s case.

Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hess, and Jesse Nevel still face up to five years in prison and are scheduled to be sentenced in mid-December, after which they immediately plan to appeal. See https://handsoffuhuru.org/.