Black Community Convention

Transit strike leaders, police brutality survivors and education activists will join with community members in a Black Community Convention to craft a “Black Agenda for the Black Community”, at the Uhuru House black community center, July 28 and 29, 2012. The Black Community Convention is the culmination of the month long Oakland Freedom Summer Project, an effort to prepare the Uhuru House for the installation of a commercial kitchen that will be open to the community. The Oakland Freedom Summer Project has also succeeded in opening up a free lunch program for children, developing the community garden and also in renovating the front of the Uhuru House.
At the Black Community Convention, the he public is invited to come out to hear presentations from:

• Cephus Johnson, uncle of Oscar Grant (killed by BART police)
• Denika Chatman, mother of Kenneth Harding (killed by S.F. MUNI police) and leader of the July transit strike
• Sheilagh "Cat" Polk, District 3 candidate for Oakland’s School Board

According to International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement President Diop Olugbala, “We are holding this event because it’s time to set the black agenda for the black community. If you ask ten different black people what freedom means you are likely to get ten different responses. But if we are going to see transformation in the Black community we must unite around one program and one strategy to liberate the Black community. This is what the Black Community Convention is all about.”
The Convention will kick off with a keynote presentation by Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party. Founder of the Uhuru Movement and Uhuru Houses nationally, Yeshitela is credited with the revival of black rights struggle in Oakland in the 1980s after the demise of the Black Panther Party. Panther founder Huey Newton made his last public presentation at the Uhuru House in 1989 where he declared that “They might have destroyed the Panthers, but we still have the Uhuru House.”

Since his early activism with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee registering black voters in the south in the 1960s, Yeshitela has built an international organization for the unification and self-determination of African people worldwide. Today, the Uhuru Movement has branches throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa, building self-reliance institutions and organizing for political power for black people.

Community participation workshops at the Convention will include:
• Building a Movement to End Police Violence in the Black Community
• Liberate the Schoolhouse Shut Down the Jailhouse! We Demand African Community Control of Education
• Surviving and Prospering in the Economic Crisis

The Black Community Convention will take place Sat & Sun, July 28-29, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Uhuru House, located at 7911 MacArthur Blvd. in East Oakland.

For more information, call 510-569-9620 and for media inquiries, call 510-295-7834.

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