Africa400 discusses the topic Beyond Neo-Liberal Capitalism: Building Independent Power Bases on Wednesday, May 5 as they open Pan-African History Month.  Mama Tomiko and Baba Ty welcome Special Guest Baba Ajamu Baraka. 

A human rights defender whose experience spans four decades of domestic and international education and activism, Ajamu Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are in the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles.

Baraka is an internationally recognized leader of the emerging human rights movement in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of efforts to apply the international human rights framework to social justice advocacy in the U.S. for more than 25 years.

Baraka played an important role in bringing a human rights perspective to the preparatory meetings for the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) that took place in Geneva and in Santiago, Chile as part of the Latin American Preparatory process, as well as the actual conference that he attended as a delegate in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

Ajamu Baraka was the Founding Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network (USHRN) from July 2004 until June 2011. The USHRN was the first domestic human rights formation in the United States explicitly committed to the application of international human rights standards to the U.S. Under Baraka, the Network grew from a core membership of 60 organizations to more than 300 U.S.-based member organizations and 1,500 individual members.

Prior to leading the USHRN, Baraka served in various leadership capacities with Amnesty International USA (AIUSA).  As AIUSA’s Southern Regional Director, he played a key role in developing the organization’s 1998 campaign to expose human rights violations in the U.S. Baraka also directed Amnesty’s National Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, during which time he was involved in most of the major death penalty cases in the U.S.

He is currently an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a writer for Counterpunch. He was the 2016 Green Party nominee for Vice President of the United States. Baraka currently is the national organizer and spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace.

https://blackallianceforpeace.com/
https://www.ushrnetwork.org/

Listen to the May 5 broadcast here:

Africa400 can be heard live every Wednesday at 2:00 PM (Eastern Time, United States) on HANDRadio (https://handradio.org).  After the show, the audio can be heard on an update of this post as well as the HANDRadio Podcasts Page and the Media Pages of KUUMBAReport (https://kuumbareport.com), KUUMBAEvents (https://kuumbaevents.com) and the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (https://srdcinternational.org).