Oakland Uhuru Movement Tours Chairman Omali:
Oakland Committee for Community Control of Education is Launched!

OAKLAND, CA — From July 11 through July 20, 2003, Oakland's Uhuru Movement came together to sponsor a tour of Chairman Omali Yeshitela. Our goal was to begin a process to overturn the many contradictions confronting African people.

From the relationship between the U.S. war in Iraq and its war on the domestically colonized African community, to the dire conditions of hunger and poverty facing African people worldwide, Oakland's Uhuru Movement struggled to address all of these contradictions in a series of forums and workshops led by Chairman Omali.

While all of these events were tremendously successful, a forum on the crisis of the mis-education of African children in the Oakland public school system has sparked a fire in Oakland's African community and among its allies.

The event was titled "Pushed Out or Dropped Out – How the Oakland Schools Have Failed African Children," and was held on a regular Wednesday rally night for the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM). The Oakland Uhuru House was filled to standing room only capacity with African students, parents, teachers and other concerned community members.

It is not surprising that this event captured our Movement's energy and vision. Oakland's African community, which gave birth to the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the '60s, has a particularly rich history of struggle and activism around the question of education. As a consequence of the struggles of the BPP, through the 1980s Oakland had a majority-African, community-elected school board that had the power to hire and fire teachers and determine the curriculum and other critical components of education. Neo-colonialist Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris dismantled this system of community control when he was a state assemblyman.

Secondly, the current education crisis for the African community is so blatant and ugly, only the most hardened and adamant white nationalist would fail to address the crisis. The dropout rate for black children in the Oakland Public Schools (OPS) is hovering at a staggering 75 percent. Over 800 freshmen entered Castlemont High School in 1999, an African community high school, while a little over 200 graduated. In 2001, the Oakland City Council voted to allow the Oakland Police Department (OPD) itself to preside directly over "discipline" inside the school system.

Along with the Chairman, the event featured a presentation and panel participation by Randolph Ward, state appointed Oakland Unified School District Superintendent. Accompanying the Chairman and Ward, long time African community activist Nneka Simon provided a presentation that addressed the school system's collaboration with the prison industry. Nneka illustrated the role of the U.S. education system in providing young Africans to fill up its ever-increasing cells, generating billions of dollars for the U.S. economy.

In his presentation, Chairman Omali, who was based in Oakland and led the APSP and the Uhuru Movement from this city from 1981 to 1994, provided a history of the struggle for community control of schools in Oakland. The Chairman eloquently described both the particular process inside Oakland in which the African community gained — and then lost — community control over education.

Since the July 27 meeting, the Oakland InPDUM has been meeting every week. We will hold an education forum and workshop on September 27, 2003 to create education resolutions and build a movement where the community controls what goes into our young people's minds.