A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The Occupation of Harlem kicks off on October 28. “Black activists have a duty to engage the Occupation phenomenon as full actors, as the voices of the men, women and children that have suffered the most wrongs at the hands of Wall Street.” Frederick Douglass is a guide to how African Americans should engage the white-initiated OWS phenomenon. “If it is an awakening, then our voices need to be in the ears of all those who are waking up, Blacks, whites, Latinos, everyone.”

Occupy Harlem! No One Has Suffered More Than Us From Plutocracy

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“There’s a desperate need to focus on Wall Street’s total economic strangulation of our communities.”

In 1847, in the first issue of the North Star , Frederick Douglass explained his decision to publish his own newspaper, rather than rely solely on The Liberator and other publications of the white-led abolitionist movement. Douglass, who was then only 29 years old, wrote: “The man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand the redress—the man struck is the man to CRY OUT…!” These words can inform and guide us, today, as African Americans consider their relationship to the Occupy Wall Street movement, a mostly white-initiated grassroots upswelling that has captured the national imagination like no political phenomenon in more than 40 years.

Frederick Douglass did not launch his newspaper in order to split from white abolitionists, but to speak to and for slaves and free Blacks, to engage them directly in the great movement of the time: abolition. He remained an indispensable figure in the larger abolitionist structure, and was a staunch comrade to those whites that proved themselves capable of dealing with Black people, not simply on the basis of equality, but as the primary actors in the struggle for their own freedom. In time, it was Douglass’s words, his principled militancy, that animated the abolition movement and post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction.

In the same way, today’s Black activists have a duty to engage the Occupation phenomenon as full actors, as the voices of the men, women and children that have suffered the most wrongs at the hands of Wall Street and the oppressive forces that protect it, and who are the most in need of redress. It is our duty to be the ones to CRY OUT – as we always have, but this time in the midst of what we hope may be a national awakening. If it is an awakening, then our voices need to be in the ears of all those who are waking up, Blacks, whites, Latinos, everyone.

“Rangel and too many other Black officials are beholden to the very plutocrats that rule New York City and its political life.”

It’s time to Occupy Harlem. Harlem Fightback Against War at Home and Abroad, along with the Peoples Organization for Progress and others, will kick off the occupation process this Friday evening, October 28, with a mass meeting at St. Philips Church, on 134th Street, in Harlem. (See flyer, below.) Organizer Nellie Bailey says “there’s a desperate need to focus on Wall Street’s total economic strangulation of our communities.” That also requires confronting the “supine leadership of Black communities, not only in Harlem, but nationwide” – what we a Black Agenda Report call the “Black misleadership class.” In Harlem, that means Congressman Charles Rangel who, as Ms. Bailey puts it, “has been in office for well over 40 years, and has received more money from the real estate industry than any other person in Congress.” Rangel and too many other Black officials are beholden to the very plutocrats that rule New York City and its political life.

And so it goes in Black communities throughout the country. That’s why the People’s Organization for Progress has been demonstrating every day for more than 120 days – and will continue their daily protest in Newark, New Jersey for 381 days. And that’s why the Black Is Back Coalition was formed in September of 2009, and holds its national conference in Philadelphia on November 5. (See flyer, below.)

These organizations bring our people’s voices to the Occupation movement, and will continue whether that movement does, or not. Because, as Frederick Douglass said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contact at [email protected] .

OCCUPY HARLEM MOBILIZATION

We stand in solidarity with Occupiers of Wall Street

Friday, October 28, 2011

6:30 – 9:30 PM

St. Philip’s Church

204 West 134th Street

(Adam Clayton Powell Blvd)

A call to Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants to occupy their communities against predatory investors, displacement, privatization and state repression. Let us assert our Dignity! WE MUST DEFEND OUR COMMUNITIES! THIS IS OUR STRUGGLE, THIS IS OUR MOMENT IN HISTORY. THIS IS PEOPLE'S POWER!

We stand in solidarity with all of our brothers and sisters occupying cities, towns and neighborhoods in the United States. We stand in solidarity with poor and working class people across the globe rising up against criminal predatory finance capital that has no regard for humanity, that has no regard for Mother Earth.

Wall Street, the epicenter of international finance capital, began its financial prosperity with slave profiteering firms, JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia Bank and Bank of America. In fact, Wall Street and most of the city’s financial district were built on the burial ground of captured Africans forced into genocidal free labor for centuries, a crime against humanity. The legacy of that crime against humanity manifested today in Jim Crow mass incarceration, a crisis of massive Black unemployment and the greatest loss of wealth for people of color from subprime lending frauds estimated between $164 billion and $213 billion.

Finance capital plutocrats have always controlled the US political system. They threaten

and received a $16 trillion bank bailout, the greatest thief of taxpayers' money in modern US history. And it's only the tip of the iceberg because the banks have an estimated $700 trillion of worthless derivatives, the BULL in the china shop that might very well bring down Wall Street.

Let us, the 99 percent, build a united people's movement of the poor, the working class and the middle class to reign in the one percent. ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!

Join us for this Occupy Harlem mobilization with guest speakers and the occupy site to be announced.

NO MORE BANK BAILOUTS! NO MORE WARS! WE WANT MONEY FOR JOBS, HOUSING, EDUCATION AND MEDICAL CARE.

Harlem Fightback Against War at Home & Abroad, People Organization for Progress, Harlem Fightback (list in formation)

Endorsements: (List in formation)

Telephone: 646-812-5188

Email:[email protected] gmail.com

Website: http://harlemfightback.wordpress.com/

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STOP THE WARS AND BUILD THE RESISTANCE

MARCH, RALLY AND CONFERENCE

PHILADELPHIA, NOVEMBER 5

Contact: Black Is Back Coalition National Office

Address: P.O.Box 55601

Washington, DC 20040

Phone: 202 681 7040

email: [email protected]

This is a call to join the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations in Philadelphia on Saturday, November 5 for a national rally, march and conference entitled “Stop the Wars and Build the Resistance.”

The U.S.-led attack on the government of Libya is the latest attempt of a dying, parasitic social system to rescue itself at the expense of the happiness and resources of the world’s peoples.

The people are fighting back – in Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Egypt and Iran in the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf.

The people are fighting back throughout the Americas – in Haiti and Venezuela and Cuba and Bolivia and Ecuador, and again in Nicaragua.

The people are also organizing in the North American concentration camps euphemistically referred to as Indian reservations.

These are the Other Wars. They are occurring against the people in the internal colonies—the Barrios and the criminalized African communities of North America, Europe and Australia.

The Other Wars are displacing millions of people on the African Continent, which has experienced hundreds of years of colonial domination, pillage and exploitation, all of which is also experienced by the millions of African people who have been displaced around the globe as enslaved captives.

The Other imperialist wars include the Africa Command or AFRICOM, the U.S. military apparatus that projects U.S. imperialist State power blanketing the entire African continent in a desperate effort to lock Africa into a permanent state of bloody, impoverished servitude.

The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations opposes these imperialist wars and supports the righteous resistance of the people in the struggles to regain their resources, sovereignty, dignity and happiness.

Stop the desperate efforts of a mortally wounded parasitic capitalist system built and sustained by the slavery, colonialism and centuries of genocide that provided the primary accumulation of capital upon which the modern imperialist system depends for its survival!

March and rally in Philadelphia on November 5 to Stop the Wars and Build the Resistance!

Stop the wars against African people in Africa, inside the U.S. and Europe and around the world! Stop the wars against the Native people, the Mexicans and so-called “Illegals.”

Stop the domestic wars against the Muslims and Arab peoples.

We are marching against all the imperialist wars. We are marching in Philadelphia because our real obligation is to stop the U.S. imperialist war machine that is headquartered in the U.S. and we understand that to stop the imperialist wars we must open up another front of resistance right here.

We are marching in Philadelphia because Philadelphia is prototypical of the war being waged against the internal colonies of the U.S. It is the city where police under the leadership of the first African mayor, dropped a bomb in 1985 that incinerated an entire African community, killing 11 men, women and children.

Over half of the more than one million people in prison in the U.S. are Africans, Mexicans and other indigenous people. Scores of political prisoners are rotting behind bars in U.S. prisons with little chance of release through normal legal processes.

In Philadelphia 72 percent of the 253,000 people stopped and searched by the police department in 2009 were African and Latino men.

Philadelphia is the city where U.S. use of mass imprisonment as a modern form of population control and colonial slavery and where the death penalty and political incarceration of colonized people is exemplified in the cases of Mumia Abu Jamal and the MOVE 9.

But the people are fighting back.

In Philadelphia, where a neocolonial black mayor has engaged in a vicious anti-African slander campaign to win white support for his reelection he is being forced to defend himself and the system from an independent campaign being waged by a real anti-imperialist candidate that is affiliated with the Black is Back Coalition.

We will draw the connection between the neo-colonial bombing of 1985 in Philadelphia by the city’s black mayor and the neo-colonial bombing of Libya in Africa by the first black U.S. president.

We are marching to change the contours of the political terrain in Philadelphia by forcing a public anti-imperialist discussion that will expose neocolonial, indirect imperialist rule used against the peoples of Philadelphia, the U.S. and the world. We are marching to demand freedom for the Cuban 5, to end the blockade of Cuba and the ongoing counterinsurgent interventions throughout South America.

However we are going beyond the traditional anti-war movement. We are not only opposing the popularly recognized wars abroad. We are not simply calling for peace. We are not pacifists; we are anti-imperialists that recognize that the way to stop the wars is to build resistance to imperialism itself.

This is a call for all anti-war and anti-imperialist activists to join with the Black is Back Coalition in Philadelphia on November 5 to open up a new front of anti-imperialist struggle capable of defeating imperialism and ushering in a new world free of war and exploitation.

Stop the Wars and Build the Resistance!