He is a co-founder and current chairman of the African People's Socialist Party (formed in 1972) which leads the Uhuru Movement.

[2] Yeshitela conspired with Aleksandr Ionov, a Russian agent taking directions from the FSB to spread pro-Russian propaganda in the United States.

The Gas Plant District no longer exists, as it was razed to create Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays.

In 1959, during his senior year at Gibbs High School, a class discussion was held on "the advancement of African people.

In protest at the colonial policy of the United States, Yeshitela wrote a 12-page letter to US President John F. Kennedy declaring his inability to serve in an army "that protected the likes of George Wallace and a tradition of oppression of African people.

[11] He worked in many fields such as manual labor in a carpet sales and installation warehouse, and as a "copy boy", a proofreader and an apprentice printer for the St. Petersburg Times.

Yeshitela attended meetings and participated in some actions led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but did not agree with their tactics and objectives.

Yeshitela participated in the Civil Rights Movement in his youth during the 1950s and 1960s as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an influential organization.

The membership-based structure gave the SNCC chapter in St. Petersburg, Florida, the same character as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, forming around the same time in Oakland, California.

Yeshitela and SNCC believed that the funding would be better used to provide jobs, economic development and other improvements to the black community in St. Petersburg.

"[17] Yeshitela goes on to state that "the bourgeois ideology of 'racism' serves to unite the vast majority of whites and even some Africans in support of the imperialist agenda.

[19] The purpose of the demonstration was to utilize the issue of the mural "to galvanize public opinion to effect the changes" that SNCC had been pursuing.

[20] The degrading mural reflected the minstrel culture that was popular throughout American media during the height of Jim Crow.

"[19] As well, "The offensive mural represented a city where African people for decades were confined to housing in a small, two-mile square area of south St. Petersburg that was subjected to a curfew after 9 p.m. every night.

"[19] Herman Goldner, the Mayor of St. Petersburg rejected the demands made by Yeshitela and SNCC stating, "our minorities had to learn to be less sensitive.

The mural incident was prompted by white reporters and cops laughing at an older African woman who spoke at the December 29, 1966 demonstration at St. Petersburg City Hall.

Yeshitela writes that the elderly woman "spoke 'broken English,' used double negatives and split infinitives, and the media and police personnel found her funny, treating her like entertainment.

[26][non-primary source needed] JOMO also developed a strong presence in other parts of the US South, including Louisville, Kentucky.

Many years later, Geronimo Pratt, for example, told Chairman Omali Yeshitela that he had been a member of JOMO in the late 1960s when he was stationed in Florida.

The Burning Spear Newspaper is the oldest institution of the Uhuru Movement and predates the formation of the African People's Socialist Party.

The Burning Spear was formed in December 1968, on the second anniversary of the city hall mural incident, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

"[30] The cover of the December 1969 Burning Spear depicted the Snow Hill mural that Yeshitela tore down three years earlier.

[31] In the 1980s, Omali Yeshitela encountered a white British man in a black bookstore, standing in the middle of the floor, with The Burning Spear in hand, extolling the virtue of the newspaper as an honest purveyor of the truth.

The newspaper also praises Russia[32] and fully supports Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, calling it a defensive operation.

Through FBI counterintelligence programs such as COINTELPRO, the U.S. government's counterinsurgency against the Black Revolution of the Sixties involved the assassinations of leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Hutton, and Fred Hampton and the destruction of their organizations.

The Working Platform was revised and adopted, once again, at The First Congress of the African People’s Socialist Party held in Oakland, California, in November 1981.

[37]Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the APSP organized the first World Tribunal on Reparations to African People in the US on November 13 and 14, 1982 in Brooklyn, New York.

Unlike some understandings of reparations, the APSP and the World Tribunal did not stop its analysis at colonial enslavement but instead brought it to the contemporary time.

[39] In his civic activism in his native St. Petersburg, Yeshitela has stressed his view that political and economic development will bring an end to the oppression of African communities throughout the world.

"[41] Yeshitela has self-published several books and pamphlets with the African People's Socialist Party's Burning Spear Uhuru Publications: