Oakland Freedom Summer Project

The Uhuru Movement calls on students, artists, computer technicians, carpenters, plumbers and electricians, health care workers, teachers, young people and workers in general to come and participate in the Oakland Freedom Summer Project (OFSP) 2012, scheduled from July 9 to July 29.

The Oakland Freedom Summer Project is a multi-faceted project designed to advance the struggle for African freedom inside the United States and around the world.

This will be accomplished by hands-on, on-the-ground training through actual political struggle and the building and consolidation of existing institutions of the African Liberation Movement.

This year’s OFSP is like Freedom Summers of the past, such as the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, the Oakland Summer Project of 1984 and the St Petersburg Summer Project of 2011.

Years of organized black power political work had been done in those locations, making them prime venues for young people to come and work for the purpose of advancing  the people’s struggle to be free.

The same is true for present day Oakland, CA. This is the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and a city where during the 1980s, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) led countless struggles and created institutions to rebuild the Black Power Movement in the U.S.

The goal of this year’s Oakland Freedom Summer Project is to strengthen the movement for African political and economic power that the APSP built in the 1980s. 

Concretely, the Summer Project will initiate a serious renovation of the Uhuru House, resurrecting it as the revolutionary center for the African community in Oakland.

This process will include transforming half of the Uhuru House into the Uhuru Jiko (kitchen) that will serve as the base of operations for Uhuru Foods, a subsidiary of Black Star Industries.

Uhuru Jiko will also open up economic development within the community. It will be a place where our people can come to expand or start food and other businesses and offer hands-on nutrition and cooking classes.

In addition, we will revitalize the murals on the front of the Uhuru House. These murals present the likenesses of great African Internationalists and revolutionaries of the past and present including Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Huey P Newton and Chairman Omali Yeshitela.

The OFSP will also serve to strengthen the organizational capacity of the struggle for self-determination in the African community. 

Programs for political and economic self-determination will include a clothing drive, multi-media and street journalism classes to expose the U.S. government’s war on the black community, martial arts training and basic training on how to be an effective grassroots organizer.

Lastly, through the APSP-led All African People’s Development Empowerment Project, the Summer Project will launch community gardens in the East Oakland area. The first of which will be established in the backyard of the Uhuru House.

Register, donate and learn more on the Oakland Freedom Summer Project website.