Hold The Flag High! MXCC Hosts Special Black August Appreciation!

THE MALCOLM X COMMEMORATION COMMITTEE

P.O. BOX 380-122, BROOKLYN, NY11238

www.MXCC519.org

Facebook: Malcolm X Commemoration Committee

973-202-0745; 917-346-8142

August 13, 2020

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MXCC Presents ‘Hold The Flag High!

A Special Black August Virtual Appreciation!

On Saturday, August 29th, 2020, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee (MXCC) will host another powerful virtual roundtable...“Hold The Flag High! Special Black August Virtual Appreciation!”...Live!On Facebook at 4pm.

This gathering will honor the Centennial Anniversary of the Adoption of the Black Liberation Flag by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. It will honor the UNIA’s Centennial of their First International Convention of the Negro Peoples’ of the World, and it will honor the 50th Anniversary of Jonathan Jackson’s bold ‘Extraction Mission’ in Marin County Courthouse where sought to free several Soledad defendants!

Special guests for this engaging dialogue will be Prof. Akinyele Umoja, author of We Will Shoot Back, Monifa Bandele, Policy Director of Movement For Black Lives and formerly of the Black August Hip Hop Campaign, author activist Asha Bandele, and Raymond Dugue of the NY Chapter of the UNIA.

Prof. Umoja will historicize Jonathan Jackson’s bold action. Monifa Bandele, who will be coming off of a one-day national convention for the Movement For Black Lives, will talk about those important current organizing efforts and recall the Black August Hip Hop project that sought to bring together Conscious HipHop between Cuba and the United States. She will also recall the pivotal presence of the exiled political prisoner Nehanda Abiodun who passed away recently and played an important role in that cultural work effort. Asha Bandele will tell of her moving story on political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim and how NY Attorney General Letitia James wrongly blocked his recent release from prison after 49 years. Incredibly, Muntaqim, now 68, contracted Covid19 and nearly died upon the denial of his release. Raymond Dugue will discuss the epic achievements of Marcus Garvey’s organizing legacy. In underhanded efforts to derail his mass appeal in the United States, Garvey was framed for Mail Fraud and became the first Black political prisoner of the Modern Age!

This release literally goes to press on the Centennial Anniversary of the Black Liberation Flag, adopted on August 13, 1920.

Panther political prisoner Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz, who is fighting for his freedom and Colon Cancer will be the special political prisoner spotlight. Incarcerated now for 49 years, he will be 77 on August 23rd.

Persons wishing to contribute to Relief Efforts for Mr. Shoatz can make contributions at https://www.paypal.me/PPOWs.

Black August was launched by the Black Panther Party to honor George and Jonathan Jackson who were killed within a year of each other, and to encourage organized support for political prisoners. Jonathan was killed in that ill-fated mission on August 7th, 1970. George, the legendary author of The Soledad Letters and Blood In My Eye, was killed in an Uprising at San Quentin Prison on August 21st, 1971.

In recent years, serious PanAfricanists have broadened the significance of Black August to remember horrible expressions that are representative of violent racial oppression such as the lynching of Emmitt Till on August 28th,1955, the tank and bulldozer attack by Philadelphia police on MOVE on August 8th, 1978, the savage beating and sodomizing of Abner Louima by NYPD on August 9th, 1997, and the recent spectacle police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9th, 2014. It has also come to include an appreciation of a broad range of profound resistance to oppression ranging from Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigns like the Defiance Campaign of Black South African women against Apartheid’s hated Pass Laws on August 9th, 1956, to urban Uprisings like the Watts Rebellion of August 11-15th, 1965, to the epic timemarking Slave Uprising of Nat Turner of August 21st, 1831 and the launching of the epic Haitian Revolution on August 14, 1791 and to also honor the birth of organizing legends like Marcus Garvey born on August 17th, 1887, Fidel Castro born on August 13, 1926 and Fred Hampton born on August 30th, 1948.

For more information about this event or the work of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, please call 973 202 0745...