WHAT: African People’s Socialist Party International Plenary

WHEN: April 17-19, 2026

WHERE: Center for Divine Love, 3617 Wyoming, St. Louis, MO (also broadcast live online)

CONTACT: [email protected]

From April 17 – 19, 2026, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) will hold a 3-day Plenary conference to assess the state of its work to unify and liberate the African Nation and to prepare its members and supporters for the final offensive towards victory in the anti-colonial struggle. This year’s Plenary is themed, “This Time ‘Til it’s Won! Power in Our Own Hands! It’s not just Trump, it’s the whole damn system!”

Since its formation in 1972, the APSP has declared its intention to govern, adopting an enduring Platform and pursuing a strategy to overturn the colonial mode of production by rebuilding the capacity of the African working class to feed, clothe, house, educate, heal and otherwise fend for itself. It has held seven Congresses where major initiatives have been adopted in a democratic process by the Party’s entire membership, with annual Plenary conferences in between Congresses to evaluate the implementation of those initiatives and correct course as needed.

The annual convening of the APSP’s Plenary was delayed after the 2022 FBI raids and subsequent federal trial of the Uhuru 3 on bogus charges of being Russian agents. APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela and two leaders of the Party’s solidarity wing, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel, were threatened with 15 years in prison and $250,000 fines each. They succeeded in defeating the U.S. government’s attempts to imprison and fine them by building a 2.5-year intensive public campaign that won support from across the political spectrum for the right to anti-colonial free speech.

In his call for participation in the APSP’s April Plenary, Chairman Omali Yeshitela declared, “We are coming into this new period in a victorious mode and I think it bodes well for things moving forward both for the African People’s Socialist Party and for all those throughout the world who are fighting for national liberation, self determination, socialism and peace on a foundation of social justice.”

While freedom-loving people throughout the world are courageously speaking out and putting their lives on the line in opposition to the unfettered genocidal frenzy of U.S. international and domestic military aggression, the APSP calls on freedom-loving people to, at the same time, go beyond protest and build the liberated economy to negate the colonial mode of production.

Chairman Omali describes the significance of the APSP’s upcoming Plenary. “The African People’s Socialist Party April 2026 International Plenary is the planning forum we use to deepen our organization, enhance our organizing and lead the African working class beyond spontaneous protest and social media militancy to the capture of actual contending dual power designed to negate the colonial domination of our people and the oppressed peoples of the world.”

The APSP’s April 17-19 Plenary will include presentations, workshops and training sessions on:

• Building a dual and contending economy and creating liberated territory. Review of the “Black Power Blueprint” in St. Louis where the Uhuru Movement has acquired scores of dilapidated properties, building a community farm, bakery cafe, community center, farmers market, outdoor events venue and basketball court, with a women’s health center and radio station in the works.
• Using the electoral process to seize political terrain. Featuring candidates and former elected officials New York Assemblyman and NYC Councilman Charles Barron, St. Louis Alderman Jesse Todd, candidates Akile Anai, Jesse Nevel and more.
• Security and self-defense for the community and the movement. Know your rights when the FBI knocks or you get stopped in the street. With a special presentation from Union del Barrio, the Mexican liberation organization respected for its recent success in community mobilization and protection against ICE raids in southern California.
• Campaign to repeal the Foreign Agent and Conspiracy laws used for political repression. Initiated by the Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! Campaign in 2025. Presentation of tactics and strategy to affect change in the law.
• Dred Scott Sanctuary City Resolution. How to expand traditional Sanctuary City protections to include non-cooperation with the spectrum of federal political raids in and against the Black and other colonized communities.
• Unifying the African Nation for total liberation. On-the-ground reports from the African Socialist International’s practical programs in South Africa, Sierra Leone and Europe.
• Independent Black-owned media. How to get involved in The Burning Spear newspaper production and distribution, Black Power Radio FM stations and the APSP’s Living History Archiving Project to preserve Black history.
• Science, engineering, agriculture, education and healthcare in the service of African liberation. Organizers share expertise from their international work in Ebola prevention, disaster relief, rain water harvesting and free tele-med and education services during the COVID pandemic.
• African women are equal makers and shapers of history. Reports on work to stop “Child Protective Services” kidnapping of Black children, organizing the annual “Black Mothers March on the White House” and building a revolutionary home for African women.
• Unity through reparations. The APSP broke ground with its 1976 establishment of a constituent organization – the African People’s Solidarity Committee (APSC) – bound to its leadership, designed to provide a vehicle for white people to stand in accountable solidarity with African liberation. APSC Chairwoman Penny Hess and Uhuru Solidarity Movement Chair Jesse Nevel report on reparations work.

Chairman Omali promises the upcoming Plenary will provide the ideological and practical leadership needed in this period: “In the 53 years of our Party’s existence, our leaders and institutions have survived police beatings, imprisonment, firebombings, FBI raids, armed assassination attempts, economic sanctions and other attempts to crush us. We have been able to thrive and grow because our theory of African Internationalism has been tested and proven correct in our practice, building genuine self-determination and creating liberated territory. Join us in our victorious struggle. This time ‘til it’s won, power in our own hands!”

Register now for the Plenary!

It’s not just Trump, it’s the whole damn system!

By Chairman Omali Yeshitela

We are coming into this new period in a victorious mode and I think it bodes well for things moving forward both for the African People’s Socialist Party and for all those throughout the world who are fighting for national liberation, self determination, socialism and peace on a foundation of social justice. 

This is our call to members of our Party, Movement and all those who would move beyond explaining the world to the practical tasks of changing the world, to attend this planning conference themed, “This Time Til It’s Won, Power in Our Own Hands! It’s Not Just Trump, It’s the Whole Damn System!”

A dying colonialism

The current crisis of the social system we know as the colonial mode of production requires our Party to move with a greater discipline, unity and strategic commitment more than anything at any time in our history. The U.S. continues to be at the helm of a social system that is demonstrating death throes that endangers the world, especially those of us functioning as hosts within the parasitic dialectic. A mass anti-African genocidal frenzy is not out of the question.

These are not just empty words. Not the kind of bluster frequently heard from militants or political organizations that too often cry “Wolf,” exaggerating the threat from the oppressor in order to proclaim their own significance. 

We are talking about the kind of mass repression, brutality and murder that is the political foundation of the existing social system commonly recognized as capitalism/imperialism. It is the foundation of the colonial mode of production which, when intruding into the lives of the colonizers, is characterized as “fascism” and “genocide” – both political terms that came into existence simultaneously as anomalies within the colonizer’s presumptive democratic society.

Within the U.S. alone, thousands of African men, women and children were murdered since the 1865 formal end of colonial slavery, most often with the participation of gawking, grinning murderous colonizers – men, women and children – who often competed with each other to acquire their favorite body parts from the hanged, burned, and shot-to-pieces black corpses.

These were gory, celebratory occasions. However, it was not new to the relationship of Africans to the European colonization of Africa and our people that would become the mode of production defining the process of existence for most of the world and liberating what would become Europe from feudal oppression, poverty and ignorance. Karl Marx recognized this when describing what he labeled the advent of capitalist white power as primitive accumulation of capital:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

In his book, “A History of Africa,” Historian Hosea Jaffe provides examples of the assaults on Africa by colonialists that would create Europe and define it as a liberal democracy:

“The Goree curator and Leopold Senghor put the total numbers murdered by European slavers at 200 million … How many more would have been killed had they gone meekly to slavery can only be imagined.  The death toll was about one in every three of the 600 million Africans who lived during those centuries of Dark Europe in Africa.  The death toll was created by the mode of the slave traffic, the long journey to the coast, the violent seizure of slaves from tribes and societies by chiefs collaborating with the Europeans, the lack of food and the long voyage…” 

Obviously this pre-dates “fascism” and the accepted 1948 legal definition of genocide by the United Nations that accompanied both fascism and genocide when the murder of European Jews within a system created and sustained by colonialism briefly normalized itself within a Europe, itself born as white power on the slaughter and indescribable repression of the colonized of Africa, Asia and what came to be known as the Americas.

The current crisis

Currently the U.S., functioning in its capacity as colonial hegemon, is facilitating and overseeing the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians by its white nationalist illegitimate Israeli proxy. It is also openly threatening the overthrow of the legitimate government of Venezuela, murdering scores of Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean coast of Venezuela with high tech bombing while thousands of US troops, some ensconced on the world’s largest carrier ship in the U.S. arsenal, engage in psychological warfare, terrorizing the population.

National Guard troops patrol the streets of Washington, D.C. and other African communities within the U.S. on the pretext of fighting crime in our oppressed community. Additionally the U.S. president has called on the U.S. Department of War to bring the war “home” to the U.S. by using our communities as training grounds for the military to fight the war against crime, buzz words traditionally used to target Africans for additional repression in the U.S. 

U.S. National Guard troops have also been deployed to the current U.S. southern border to protect the U.S. white-settler regime from the demographic change that promises to reduce the white settlers to a minority of the population by 2045. As our Mexican comrades have always truthfully claimed: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us”!

Flames of white nationalist “racial hatred” are being fanned daily, targeting African people within the U.S. and globally. The newly lowered number of refugees permitted to enter the U.S. facilitates the entry of white Boer supporters and beneficiaries of apartheid South Africa, claiming to protect them from oppression by Africans (black people) in neo-colonially occupied South Africa.

Open threats by the U.S. to invade Nigeria to protect Christians is another public manifestation of an attempt to win mass approval within the U.S. and globally for repression of black people. All of which is magnified by U.S. president Donald John Trump’s verbal assault on Africans from Somalia in Minneapolis and on Somalia itself.

These are some of the historic and current examples of the threat our people face during this existential crisis of the colonial mode of production. They are examples of why this moment is of extreme significance for our Party, a Party determined to lead our people beyond this era of social media militancy and spontaneous protests not tethered to an anti-colonial end.

African people resist

Throughout the past two and a half years, the Party has led a magnificent and victorious campaign to push back and overturn the serious attack on the Uhuru Movement by the colonial state. Our fightback was exemplary and built a massive base of support, solidarity and admiration from every front of social movements throughout the U.S. and the world, across the political spectrum. 

The leadership of the Party redefined the understanding of “progressive” to mean, in fact, “where do you stand in relation to the African People’s Socialist Party”? The Party rebooted the African Liberation Movement, elevating the issue of the U.S. colonial Constitutional First Amendment to “anti-colonial free speech.” 

Nevertheless, the victory was bittersweet.

“No one’s going to jail; no one’s going to be fined.” These words by U.S. District Court Judge William Jung on December 16, 2024 at the Middle District Federal Courthouse in Tampa, Florida set off an avalanche of emotions from the scores of people who had come to court in support of our Party and Movement in the “court case of the century”.

The judge’s words at the sentencing of me, Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel brought temporary relief to our Party, Uhuru Movement members and the thousands of others who were organized by our Movement into the counteroffensive we initiated immediately after the July 29, 2022 military assault on seven of our homes and Movement offices in St. Louis, Missouri and St. Petersburg, Florida.

Although we were not sentenced to prison time and the multi-thousand dollar fines for me and Penny Hess called for by the federal prosecutors were ignored by the District Judge, we were sentenced to three years probation and 300 hours of community service. The judge acknowledged that we could do our hours “standing on your heads,” since community service is what we do anyway.

This statement by the judge recognizing our political work for which we were indicted and placed on trial, as “community service,” was a barely veiled acknowledgment of the fact that everything named in the indictment as a criminal act would be legal and protected speech, “if not for the requirement to register as a foreign agent,” according to the judge.

This is despite the colonial state’s criminal indictment of me, Penny and Jesse on two charges that carried a total of fifteen years prison sentences and $250,000 fine for each of us. 

In other words, had we committed perjury and registered as foreign agents as required by the U.S. colonial government we would not have been assaulted with pre-dawn military raids by FBI agents that threatened our lives and terrorized our communities in Florida and Missouri!

The court’s decision, while not giving the prosecutors all they asked for, was only temporary respite. As I have said all along I did not build our Party and Movement to keep me out of prison. 

Our goal is African self-determination, independence

Our Party and Movement were created to win the liberation of our people and to elevate the African working class to its proper station as the new ruling class perched on the pre-communist ruins of the colonial mode of production.

The colonial mode of production is a troubled mode of production. It is a mode of production that is suffering existential crises because it rests on a colonial faultline that threatens it with catastrophic economic and political disruption greater than the capacity of existing Richter scale measurements.

Thrust onto center stage in this period, our Party is mandated to carry out the critical tasks necessary for us to realize our role as the increasingly recognized vanguard of the African and world revolution.

The African People’s Socialist Party April 2026 International Plenary is the planning forum we use to deepen our organization, enhance our organizing and lead the African working class beyond spontaneous protest to the capture of actual contending dual power designed to negate the colonial domination of our people and the oppressed peoples of the world.

It is a planning forum that will provide strategic leadership for Africans throughout the world–in Haiti and the entire Caribbean, in Europe, the U.S. and Africa; in a word, on every continent and space we occupy as Africans.

This is our call to members of our Party, Movement and all those who would move beyond explaining the world to the practical tasks of changing the world.

The historic, powerful Black Revolution of the Sixties, though made on the backs of the masses of African oppressed people, was led by the African middle class or petty bourgeoisie. It was an anti-colonial revolution that fell short of elevating the African workers and masses to our proper station as the new ruling class. But, now, in our Party, Africans have an advanced force that functions as a general staff for our revolution. This time we have the ability to pursue our liberation to its conclusion.

In the 53 years of our Party’s existence, our leaders and institutions have survived police beatings, imprisonment, firebombings, FBI raids, armed assassination attempts, economic sanctions and other attempts to crush us. We have been able to thrive and grow because our theory of African Internationalism has been tested and proven correct in our practice, building genuine self-determination and creating liberated territory. Join us in our victorious struggle.

This time ‘til it’s won, power in our own hands!