The Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! Campaign condemns the brutal state repression and violence against the “Stop Cop City” movement, including the police assassination of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, an Indigenous and queer Defend the Atlanta Forest activist who was shot 57 times while sitting in a tent with their hands raised.
We condemn the subsequent arrests of dozens of protestors who seek to stop the city of Atlanta from destroying the untouched Welaunee Forest which borders a working class African community and which the city is planning to turn into a huge colonial police training ground to further attack African and other colonized people.
We denounce the police raids on the office of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and demand that the state attorney general drop all charges against the 20 protestors and three bail fund organizers who are facing decades in prison on bogus charges of “domestic terrorism,” “money laundering” and “charity fraud.”
Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! recognizes these attacks on the presumed First Amendment right to freedom of speech and political assembly as an extension of the U.S. government’s assault on the right of African people to free speech as exemplified by the July 29, 2022 FBI raids and subsequent indictments of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and other members of the Uhuru
Movement, known as the Uhuru 3.
The struggle for the right of African people to speak out in opposition to the U.S. government’s oppression of our people and to openly advocate for our liberation is the precondition for any semblance of free speech and democratic rights for everyone.
We salute the Stop Cop City activists who have been organizing for over two years in opposition to the plans by the city of Atlanta to construct this $90 million military compound to be used as a training center for police to harass, arrest, brutalize and kill African people with impunity.
It is the Atlanta police who are the real terrorists, not the comrades who have taken to the streets to oppose them. We remember 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks who was shot and killed by Atlanta cops just weeks after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. African people in Georgia are more likely to be shot in the back or unarmed than whites, and since 2010 Georgia police have shot and killed
Africans at a rate twice that of whites.
African, Indigenous and colonized peoples are fighting back, demanding our right to organize and advocate for our liberation from colonial oppression. We will continue to fight and we will win!
Hands Off Uhuru! Stop Cop City!
Defend the right to free speech!
Stop the police terror against the African community!
