What is USM?

The Uhuru Solidarity Movement is the organization of white people formed by and working under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its leadership, Chairman Omali Yeshitela.

Our mission is to organize in the white community to build a mass movement for white reparations to African people in the form of political and material solidarity with the African community-led struggle for African liberation, self-determination and national liberation.

As the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee, USM’s mission is to extend the struggle for African freedom and justice into the white population.  Our mission is to recruit millions of white people to reject our historic allegiance to the white ruling class and the system of white power imperialism and instead to take a stand in principled unity with Africans, Mexicans, Indigenous, Arab and colonized, exploited peoples around the globe.

We believe that reparations are owed to African people for six centuries of colonialism, slavery and genocide that built the pedestal of white wealth and opportunity from which all white people benefit. We unite with the right of African people to lead their own struggle for self-determination. Our job, as defined by the African People’s Socialist Party, is to organize our own white communities.

The Uhuru Solidarity Movement organizes throughout white communities in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere to build a genuine anti-imperialist movement inside the belly of the beast. We hold fundraisers, political actions, events, studies, forums, and more to build a revolutionary culture of reparations to African people.

All white people who hate injustice, oppression and war are invited to join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and build the movement for reparations and solidarity with African liberation.

Principles of Unity

1. We are Under the Leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party!

The USM is under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party, the revolutionary Party of the African working class struggling for the liberation and unification of Africa and African people everywhere. Our work as USM is held accountable to the leadership of the APSP. We are a strategic front of the African liberation movement inside the white community, bringing the struggle for Black Power and African self-determination into the belly of the beast.

2. We Organize in the White Community for Reparations to African people!

We organize in the white community for reparations to African people by raising resources for the programs of the African People’s Socialist Party. Material solidarity is the cornerstone of our work. We go back into white society where the stolen wealth of African people is hoarded and we work to raise resources in solidarity with African liberation as a concrete act of reparations. As white people, we recognize it is not our role to organize African or Indigenous communities. Our responsibility is to organize white people to stand in solidarity with African and Indigenous liberation!

We take responsibility for the fact that white society rests on the pedestal of the oppression of African people and the genocide against the Indigenous people of the Americas. We recognize that white people have a completely different reality from African people because of our relationship to this system as the beneficiaries of centuries of slavery and oppression. We believe, as Che Guevara once said: “Solidarity is not a matter of well-wishing, but sharing the same fate, in victory or in death.”

3. We Stand in Solidarity with African Self-Determination!

We unconditionally unite with the right of African people to lead their own struggle for freedom and self-determination. We unite with the leadership of the African working class who set the terms for their own liberation struggle. As Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party has said, “[African people] are our own liberators.”

Our Leadership and Structure

Under the Leadership of the African People's Socialist Party

African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela African People’s Solidarity Committee Chairwoman Penny Hess

African People’s Socialist Party

The Uhuru Solidarity Movement is an organization of the African People’s Socialist Party. We work under the leadership of the revolutionary party of the African working class.   The African People’s Socialist Party is a worldwide revolutionary organization of African workers and peasants fighting for the total liberation and unification of Africa and African people everywhere under the leadership of the African working class. The APSP is guided by the political theory of African Internationalism.   As explained in Article 3.0 of the African People’s Socialist Party’s Constitution:

“The aims and objectives of the APSP-USA are to lead the struggle of the African working class and oppressed masses against U.S. capitalist-colonialist domination and all the manifestations of oppression and exploitation that result from this relationship. The Party recognizes that the particular character of the oppression of African people within U.S. borders is domestic or internal colonialism. Leading the struggle to end the system of domestic colonialism and smash the U.S. capitalist-colonialist state is the immediate task of the African People’s Socialist Party-USA and the African working class in the U.S.”

Chairman Omali Yeshitela

The African People’s Socialist Party was co-founded in 1972 by Chairman Omali Yeshitela. The Chairman is our leadership in the Uhuru Solidarity Movement as well. Chairman Omali Yeshitela is the foremost revolutionary leader and theoretician of our times. Having survived the U.S. counterinsurgency against the Black Revolution of the Sixties, Chairman Omali Yeshitela emerged as the “last man standing” and has devoted his life to rebuilding and completing the African Revolution.   Chairman Omali led the campaign to make reparations a household word with the establishment of the International Tribunal on Reparations for African People which was first held in Brooklyn, New York in 1982. Hearings of the tribunal, which determined that the U.S. owes African people in the U.S. $4.1 trillion in reparations for stolen labor alone, have been held thirteen times.   The Chairman is a world-renowned leader who has spoken in Africa, throughout Europe, the Bahamas, Russia and all throughout the United States and Canada. He has published dozens of books and pamphlets including his most recent, Vanguard: The Advanced Detachment of the African Revolution.   Other books by Chairman Omali Yeshitela:     Omali Yeshitela Speaks (2005)     One Africa! One Nation! (2006)     Quotations From Chairman Omali Yeshitela (2012)     Uneasy Equilibrium: The African Revolution Versus Parasitic Capitalism (Commemorative Edition, 2014)     Distributor Kit   In 1976 the Chairman made the historic breakthrough of forming the African People’s Solidarity Committee, addressing the longstanding contradiction in the question of how white people can play a principled role in the African Liberation Movement.

African People’s Solidarity Committee

Chairman Omali Yeshitela formed the African People’s Solidarity Committee in 1976 as an organizational vehicle through which white people, citizens of the oppressor nation population, could relinquish our historic loyalty to imperialism by embracing African Internationalism and the African Revolution as our own. APSC’s mission was defined as material solidarity with the African Revolution, as a concrete expression of reparations to African people for our historic role in carrying out the terror against African people and reaping the benefits of their oppression.   The Chairman’s groundbreaking decision to form the African People’s Solidarity Committee, a cadre organization of white people committed to extending the African Revolution into white society, has made it possible for the African working class to set the terms for what genuine, principled solidarity from a white person looks like.   Members of the African People’s Solidarity Committee are involved in many areas of the Party’s work to build the foundation of a liberated, anti-colonial African economy. APSC members participate in building many of the Party’s economic institutions as a stand of reparations to African people. APSC also leads the mass work of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement. The National Chair of USM is appointed by APSC’s National Central Committee with approval from the APSP and Chairman Omali Yeshitela.   The first white person to join APSC and fully embrace the line of African Internationalism was Penny Hess. Penny Hess was present at the founding conference in 1976 and continues to lead as the Chair of APSC to this day.

Chairwoman Penny Hess

Penny Hess is the Chairwoman of the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC), the cadre organization of white people under the direct leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party.   As the first white person to answer the call of the African Revolution to build genuine white solidarity with the struggle for liberation by African people in the U.S. and around the world, Chairwoman Penny has been a member of APSC since its founding by the Party in 1976.   Under the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the African People’s Socialist Party, Penny has raised and helped popularize the demand for white reparations to African People.    Chairwoman Penny is the author of Overturning the Culture of Violence, detailing the complicity of the white population in colonial genocide against African and oppressed peoples. This book is strongly recommended to all members of Uhuru Solidarity Movement. It concludes with a call for white people to join the rest of humanity in the fight for justice, reparations and African Revolution.   Chairwoman Penny organizes and has been part of many reparations campaigns such as the Marches Against Genocide, the founding of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, and many fundraising institutions of the African People’s Socialist Party such as the Uhuru Bakery Cafe’, Uhuru Foods and Pies and the Days of Reparations to African People.