04-01 - Bob Brown

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Bob Brown is an internationally known organizer, researcher, scholar, lecturer, and author. He has spent almost two-thirds of his life participating in the struggles for human and civil rights, Black Power, Pan-Africanism, socialism and peace.

He joined the Chicago Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963, while attending Morgan Park High School, and participated in countless boycotts, demonstrations and campaigns that were organized under the leadership of Bob Lucas, Elmo Taylor and Ruth Cummings of CORE, Lawrence Landry of ACT, Monroe Sharp and Joyce Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Jorja (English) Palmer of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, and Anas W. Q. Luqman of the Malcolm X Society. Brown also worked with the Chicago Freedom Movement, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King.

From 1963 to 1967, Bob volunteered to work with a host of independent and grass-roots election campaigns in Chicago, including Dick Gregory for Mayor (1966), Sammy Rayner for Alderman Ward (1967), and Dick Hatcher for Mayor of Gary (1967). He supported the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (1964-65), the Lowndes County Freedom Organizations, which was the first Black Panther Party (1965-66), the United Farm Workers Association’s grape and lettuce boycotts (1964-70), the fishing rights struggles of the American Indians (1964-67), the Movement for the Independence of Puerto Rico (1966), the Chicano land grant struggle (1966-67), etc.

As a college student, Bob dropped out of Loop Junior College in 1966, in order to work full-time with CORE and SNCC, where he served as the Director of its Midwest Office. He graduated with a B.A. in Urban Politics and Behavioral Sciences from Shaw University’s University Without Walls Program in 1974. Since then, he has completed graduate courses in Sociology, Political Science and Non-Profit Administration, Pan-African Studies, and International Affairs.

In 1968, at the request of Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, Bob co-founded the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and served as a Midwest Organizer. In 1983, he helped Harold Washington become the first African Mayor of Chicago, and served as National Coordinator of Third World Outreach for the Mobilization for Survival and the 1 million person United Nations Demonstration for Disarmament. In 1984, he volunteered to work in Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaign. In 1992, he helped Carol Mosley-Braun become the first African woman in the United States Senate.

In 1995, Bob served, at the request of the Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, as the National Coordinator for Logistics and the National Field Director of the Million Man March and Stay-at-Home Campaign. In 1996, he helped Dr. Conrad Worrill and the National Black United Front take their petition and campaign to the United Nations in Geneva charging the US Government with genocide for its introduction of crack cocaine into the ghetto. In 1998, he helped Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network organize demonstrations against the National Democratic and Republican Conventions. This helped lay the groundwork for Rev. Sharpton’s Presidential Campaign. In 2004 and 2006, respectively, Bob served as the National Coordinator of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania’s (South Africa) Presidential and Local Government Elections Campaign.

From 1967, Kwame Ture, until his transition in 1998, Bob, and a host of others, have struggled to realize Kwame Nkrumah’s call to build the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. Kwame and Bob were also members of the Democratic Party of Guinea, which was found by Ahmed Sekou Toure. Currently, Bob is an organizer for the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (GC), which is a inheritor and continuator of Kwame Nkrumah’s, Ahmed Sekou Toure’s and Kwame Ture’s life-time of work, study and struggle.

Bob Brown has devoted his life to working with, supporting and serving Oppressed Peoples, especially students and youth, in every corner of Africa, the African Diaspora and the World. He has supported and worked with a host of progressive movements and organizations, including the African Awareness Association, Alliance for Global Justice, American Indian Movement, Azanian Peoples Organization, Ba’ath Party, Black Consciousness Movement of Azania, Black Consciousness Movement of Brazil, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Communist Party of Cuba, Crusade for Justice, Dalit Movement, Dominica Labor Party, Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, International Indian Treaty Council, Irish Republican Movement, La Raza Unida Party, Latin American Defense Organization, Latin American Solidarity Coalition, MOJA-Gambia, MOJA-Liberia, Movement for the Independence of Puerto, Nation of Islam, National Joint Action Committee of Trinidad, National Black United Front, National Front for the Liberation of the Congo, New Jewel Movement, Nicaragua Network, the No War on Cuba Movement, Palestine Liberation Organization, Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, Puerto Rican Socialist Party, Revolutionary Committees Movement of Libya, Sandinista National Liberation Front, Sein Fein, Southwest African Peoples Organization, Students for a Democratic Society, Venezuela Solidarity Network, Young Lords Party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, and others.

Currently, Bob is a co-plaintiff, with the City of Chicago, in a multi-billion dollar qui tam (whistle blower) lawsuit against 12 defendants who committed perjury on their Slavery Era Disclosure Affidavits and who failed to disclose their, and their predecessor entities’, slavery era records. Oral arguments on defendants’ Joint Motion to Dismiss have been held, and he is waiting for the Judge to issue her decision. If the Judge dismisses this historic and precedent-setting lawsuit, Bob will appeal.

Regardless of the Judges’ decision, he will continue to demand the enforcement of the Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinances in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Wayne County, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond (California) by any and all means necessary, including mass education, mobilization and organization, consumer boycotts, demonstrations, and nonviolent civil disobedience.

During the past 40 years, Bob has traveled to, organized, and/or lectured on campuses and in communities in all 50 states in the United States, as well as in Canada, Cuba, Brazil, Martinique, Mexico and Trinidad; Belgium, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland; Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon; Azania (South Africa), Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea (Conakry), Libya, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.

Bob has researched, authored, and co-authored, extensively, for the various movements and organizations that he worked with over the past 44 years. Tens of thousands, and in several instances millions, of copies of these materials were mass reproduced and distributed throughout the United States, Canada, and other areas of the world. He edited the recent republication of a collection of essays entitled Stokely Speaks; From Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (Lawrence Hill, 2007). Mumia Abu-Jamal authored the Introduction. Bob also authored and self-published a book entitled Slavery and the Slave Trade Were and Are Crimes Against Humanity!

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