The African People's Socialist Party was founded in 1972 from the merger of Florida Black-power organizations around Yeshitela's Junta of Militant Organizations, taking "Uhuru" — freedom — as its watchword. The party built an unusual dual structure: African People's Solidarity Committee organizing among whites under Black leadership, economic institutions from bakeries to radio stations, and, in 1982, the African National Reparations Organization, whose people's tribunals put reparations on the political map a generation before the mainstream took it up.
Headquartered between St. Petersburg and Oakland, the party understood itself as heir to the criminalized Black movements of the 1960s, and its history of police raids on Uhuru houses and confrontations over police killings — most explosively after the 1996 killing of TyRon Lewis in St. Petersburg — kept it in the state's sights.