Next week in a federal courtroom in Tampa, the U.S. government will open its case against three members of a St. Petersburg Black nationalist group, contending they acted as illegal agents of the Russian government without giving notice to the attorney general.
Omali Yeshitela is the longtime chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, also known as the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, which has been based in St. Petersburg since 1972 (with chapters in St. Louis and Oakland).
Along with two members of the party’s “Solidarity Front,” Penny Hess and Jesse Nevel, “the Uhuru three,” as they are calling themselves, were indicted in April 2023 along with one other U.S. citizen and three Russian nationals for allegedly working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign “malign influence campaign” in the U.S.
The three Uhuru members held a press conference at their party headquarters in South St. Petersburg on Wednesday, where they declared their innocence and mocked the evidence the U.S. government has assembled against them.
“It is first and foremost and above all an attack on the African Liberation movement and attack on the Black community itself,” said Nevel, 34, who, like Hess, is white. “A continuation of the U.S. government’s historic attacks against the struggle for Black people for struggle and independence.”
The case
The facts of the case as laid out by the government start with a Russian citizen named Alexsandr Victorovich Inovov, who, working with officers of the FSB, allegedly used members of different U.S. political groups as foreign agents of Russia. The indictment claims Inovov began hosting conferences with the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia in 2013 that were funded by the Russian government.
According to the indictment, after attending a conference in Moscow in 2015, the Uhurus “entered into a partnership” with Ionov “to publish pro-Russian propaganda, as well as other information designed to cause dissension in the United States and to promote secessionist ideologies.”
Hess, 78, said on Wednesday that the case is an attack on free speech, because nowhere in the indictment does it allege that the party has ever done “anything like murder or fraud or theft of anything like that.”
“Yes, he spoke in Russia,” she said about Yeshitela’s participation in the conference as listed in the indictment. “He spoke in Spain. He has spoken all over Europe. He has spoken in many, many places in Africa, in Jamaica, just all over the world.”
Yeshitela, 82, spoke last at the press conference. He grew angry and at times emotional in questioning the rationale that somehow he had been influenced by the Russians. He said that what had informed his politics was living and enduring racism as a Black man growing up in Florida in the pre-Civil Rights era.
“Did the Russians shape me?” he asked. “What shaped my experiences? St. Petersburg, Florida, in the beginning, shaped my experiences. The St. Petersburg Times [where he worked for a time as a reporter; now the Tampa Bay Times], in the beginning, shaped my experiences. Just living as a Black person living under terror all the time. I was the same age as Emmitt Till when they murdered Emmitt Till,” he said, referring to the 14-year-old Black kid abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store.
“I was there when the civil rights movement was heating up! And I was here when Black people were being hosed with high-powered water hoses. When Black people were just trying to vote. Black children, Black people, just wanted to join Joe Biden’s [Democratic] Party! That was what shaped my understanding. Not Russia!”
‘Wedges’
In its indictment, the federal government notes that among the foreign policy objectives of Russia’s government leadership was to expand its sphere of influence, and that’s why agents targeted the U.S. and other countries.
The indictment alleges that Russia sought “to create wedges that reduce trust and confidence in democratic processes, degrade democratization efforts, weaken U.S. partnerships with European allies, undermine Western sanctions, encourage anti-U.S. and anti-Western political views, and counter efforts to bring Ukraine and other former Soviet states into European and international institutions.”
The Uhurus have long been critical of the U.S. government and foreign policy. Its working platform going back to 1979 has called for the release of all Black people in prisons, withdrawal of the police “from our oppressed and exploited communities,” and for the U.S. government and “the international European ruling class” to pay reparations to Africa and African people.
The indictment asserts that FSB officers “supervised Ionov’s efforts to actively direct the campaign of a candidate for local political office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019.”
The indictment does not list any candidate or race. Over the years, members of the Uhuru movement have run for local office on several occasions. Yeshitela himself ran for mayor of St. Petersburg in 2001, finishing fifth in a nine-person field. Nevel ran for mayor in 2017, receiving 1.7% of the vote. Another member of the group, Eritha Akile Cainion, who now goes by the name Akile Anai, ran for city council in 2017 and 2019.
Ahead of the trial, the group plans a rally and march Saturday morning at their headquarters in South St. Petersburg.
The trial begins on Tuesday, Sept. 3, at the federal courthouse in Tampa. Among those organizers say will be in attendance are Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. If the Uhuru 3 are convicted, they say that they could face as much as 15 years in prison.
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