Episode #87: Africans in St. Petersburg Florida Demands Reparations! Take Back the Dome!

Black Power Talks

In this episode, we talk about the current surge in the movement for reparations to African people in the United States and elsewhere. In St. Petersburg, Florida, organizers with the Reparations Now Committee of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement are leading the Take Back the Dome Campaign in response to the decades of economic devastation that the building of the 86 acre Tropicana Field has caused the African Community in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The struggle over the Tropicana Field has implications for the liberation struggles of African people around the world. In the small Caribbean island of Barbuda, Africans are fighting wealthy white American land developers and neocolonial African politicians who have turned their communally owned land into vacation resorts.

In a repeat of the build up to the 1984 Summer Olympics, the African and Mexican-Indigenous Communities in Inglewood and South Los Angeles are being ripped up and exported to the surrounding deserts. In their stead, a new complex of sports stadiums have been developed. With the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood as the site of the 2022 Super Bowl, the working class communities have been promised economic development and jobs.

The history of Tropicana Field and the Gas Plant area suggests otherwise. But the history of resistance led by the Uhuru Movement offers a political way forward and revolutionary optimism for the people.

To discuss this with us today, we have Chimurenga Selembao. Chimurenga is the National Director of Organization for the African People’s Socialist Party and the President of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement branch. It is in that role where he leads the Take Back the Dome Campaign. A lifelong member of the Uhuru Movement, in 2001, Chimurenga took the Reparations Demand to the world stage at World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa.

Black Power Talks is produced by WBPU 96.3 FM "Black Power 96" in St. Petersburg, Florida. It is hosted by Dr. Matsemela Odom and Dexter Mlimwengu, bringing an African Internationalist perspective to the important issues of our world.