RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hope and change.

Here’s where you might have last heard of the Republic of New Africa.

Two hijackers who have been living in exile in Cuba claim they shot and killed a New Mexico police officer in self-defense after he stopped them in a stolen car in 1971 near Albuquerque.

Hill and Finney were interviewed in Havana, where they have been living since the 1971 hijacking of TWA Flight 106 at Albuquerque International Airport. Rosenbloom was shot days earlier.

At the time, the two men were members of a group called the Republic of New Africa, a Black Panther splinter group. They were driving across country when Rosenbloom stopped them.

After the shooting, the men went into hiding for several days and then called for a tow truck. They hijacked the truck and drove onto the tarmac at the airport where they commandeered Flight 106, which had 49 people aboard, to Tampa, Fla. They released the passengers there, and then took off for Havana after refueling.

Until now. At any rate.

On July 1, Chokwe Lumumba, an attorney with a long record of black radical activism, took office as mayor of Jackson.

A crowd of 2,500 packed the hall. The city councilors and other dignitaries, most of them African-American — Jackson, a city of 177,000, is 80 percent black — sat on the dais.

Then Lumumba smiled and raised his right hand halfway, just a little above the podium, briefly showing the clenched fist of a Black Power salute.

“And I want to say, free the land!”

Applause rang out, bells chimed, wooden staffs rose up and people shouted back, “Free the land!” That’s the motto of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), the movement formed in 1968 that sought to turn the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina into an independent black nation.

Jackson’s new mayor is a former vice president of the RNA and a co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a national group born in 1993 that seeks self-determination for African-Americans — whom it calls New Afrikans — “by any means necessary.”

That glosses over a few minor details.

RNA was involved in a small number of shootouts with police and FBI agents. Three people who hijacked a TWA flight in 1971 claimed to be members of RNA. The group’s militancy led FBI officials to raid RNA bases. A 1971 raid in Jackson, Mississippi led to the death of one policeman and the arrest of Imari Obadele for murder of the police officer. Six other prominent RNA members were arrested.

And a few other minor details…

The May 19th Communist Organization (also variously referred to as the May 19 Coalition, May 19 Communist Coalition, and various alternatives of M19CO), was a US-based, self-described revolutionary organization formed by members of the Weather Underground Organization.

The M19CO name was derived from the birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X. The May 19 Communist Organization was active from 1978 to 1985. M19CO was a combination of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. It also included members of the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa

From 1982 to 1985 it committed a series of bombings, including bombings of the National War College, the Washington Navy Yard Computing Center, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, New York City’s South African consulate, the Washington Navy Yard Officers’ Club, New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, and the United States Capitol Building. Three officers were killed during the Brinks Robbery

And there’s plenty of hope and change in the air.

Marxists from all over the U.S. traveled to Jackson in the final weeks of the campaign to push Lumumba over the top.

Already, Mayor Lumumba has appointed a bona fide communist to this transition team – Bill Chandler, Executive Director of the very influential Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance.

Chandler is a veteran of Cesar Chavez‘s United Farm Workers, he is a former Communist Party USA affiliate and was recently a member of the National Coordinating Committee of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Communist Party splinter group.

Given his radical background, it’s not surprising that Lumumba was also backed by the ultra-radical African People’s Socialist Party, a Maoist group which dreams of black-led revolution in the most “oppressive” nation in the world, the United States of America.