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OUR MISSION

Pan-African Community Action (PACA) is part of a historic and global movement for Pan-Africanism, or the liberation and unification of Africa, and of African people on the continent and in the diaspora, under the economic system of scientific socialism.

As part of the Pan-African movement, PACA is a grassroots group of African/Black people organizing for community-based power.

PACA undertakes to build community-led power through political education and participatory programs of action that avow and advance: 1) our human right to informed consent and self-determination and 2) collective community control over the elements of land, political systems, economic systems, systems of justice (such as police and judicial), social systems (such as education and culture), and ecological systems.

In order to realize this shift in power, PACA is helping build a movement led by the most impacted of our communities, which we understand to be low-income and working-class African women and other low-income and working-class African communities who are marginalized, such as those who are queer, trans, or disabled.

PACA is explicitly anti-capitalist. We stand against all forms of race-, class-, gender-, and sexual orientation-based oppression.

We stand for full community access to the resources necessary for a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of individuals and families, including: food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services. We also believe that all people have the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond one’s control.

 

HISTORY & BACKGROUND

PACA emerged in November of 2015 in direct response to the apparent cover up by DCMPD of the killing of 27 year old Alonzo Smith in the midst of heightened struggle around the killings of 25 year old Freddy Gray in Baltimore, 28 year old Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas, 17 year old Laquan McDonald in Chicago, 12 year old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and others.

PACA was initiated by a core group of 5 people from throughout the DMV area who accepted the thinking that led Malcolm X to form the OAAU, in accordance with his 1964 statement, “…today you’ll find in the United Nations, and it’s not an accident, that every time the Congo question or anything on the African continent is being debated, they couple it with what is going on, or what is happening to you and me, in Mississippi and Alabama and these other places. In my opinion, the greatest accomplishment that was made in the struggle of the Black (people) in America in 1964 toward some kind of real progress was the successful linking together of our problem with the African problem, or making our problem a world problem.” (Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 137-146.)

ORGANIZATIONAL DOCUMENTS