Black Alliance for Peace

Background

The Black Alliance for Peace was founded on April 4, 2017, which was the 50th anniversary of an anti-war speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church. ⁴

Black Alliance for Peace states that it views U.S. history and current political debates from the “the Black radical perspective.” ¹ It claims that the United States is “the first White supremacist republic in the history of human societies.” ¹ The group also claims that “not one decade of peace has existed between African descendants and white authorities.” ¹

Support for Far-Left Groups

Black Alliance for Peace is a co-sponsor of the Code Pink campaign Divest from the War Machine (DWM) campaign. ⁵ In 2017, the group opposed the Trump administration’s proposal to increase military spending and its policy toward North Korea and China. ⁶ The Trump administration’s rhetoric, according to BAP, was putting the U.S. on a war footing to increase support for military spending. ⁶ BAP called military spending an “ongoing theft of public funds” that “goes straight into pockets of the 1%.” ⁶

Another radical-left group supported by Black Alliance for Peace is the Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases. ⁷ BAP is a founding member and BAP national organizer Ajamu Baraka is an executive committee member of Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases. ⁸ Other organizations whose officials have endorsed the coalition include Communist Party USA, Green Party of the United States, Friedrich Engels Institute for Marxist War and Military Analysis, and 9/11 Truth Action Project. ⁹ BAP contributes to the coalition’s cause through the “U.S. Out of Africa! Shut Down AFRICOM” campaign, which opposes the existence of United States Africa Command. ¹⁰ BAP has expressed disapproval of the 2011 U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya, framing deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi as Libya’s “leader” and calls his death a “murder.” ¹⁰

Baraka and other BAP members participated in the Women’s March on the Pentagon in October 2018. The Women’s March on the Pentagon was started in response to the Women’s March not including an anti-war stance in its platform. ¹¹ In its “Anti-Imperialist Pledge” the Women’s March on the Pentagon referred to the U.S. and its military as “The Empire.” ¹² According to the group, the military and capitalism should be replaced with spending on environmentalist projects and socialized health care. ¹²

Policy Stances

Black Alliance for Peace opposes the 1033 Program, which allows the Department of Defense to transfer excess equipment to local law enforcement in the United States. ¹³ While the Obama administration curtailed the program, BAP claimed the changes did not go far enough. When the Trump administration announced it would roll back those restrictions, Baraka said that the administration “intends to make war on Black and Brown people in the United States.” ¹³

Baraka wrote an article titled “North Korea Issue is Not De-Nuclearization But De-Colonization” for the radical-left website Black Agenda Report. ¹⁴ The article labels the Democratic Party, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and liberal cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN as “right-wing neoliberals.” ¹⁴ Baraka blamed the U.S. for making North Korea feel threatened and forcing it to pursue nuclear armament as a deterrent. According to Baraka, white supremacy and “the rule of whiteness through the dominance of the Western capitalist elite” is the reason that the U.S. feels it can bring about a peaceful solution on the Korean Peninsula. ¹⁴

BAP supported the regime of deposed socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro. ² The group characterized any U.S. intervention in Venezuela is just another attempt to “subvert and overthrow Black and Brown countries targeted for regime change.” ² In April 2019, BAP members joined those “demonstrating solidarity” outside the Venezuelan embassy on behalf of the Maduro regime. ² In October 2025, BAP reaffirmed its support of Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship. ¹⁵

In January 2026, the National Black Radical Organizing Conference (NBROC) organized a virtual call between Community Movement Builders (CMB) founder and executive director Kamau Karl Franklin, BAP national coordinator Erica Caines, and Black Men Build (BMB) organizer Laurick Ingram. During the call Franklin made several statements such as comparing the United States (U.S.) to an empire while organizing groups like his are “dealing with wartime. This is not a time of know your rights. This is a time of community self-defense, of organizing our community to block these folks out so they can’t do as much harm as they’ve done to us in the past.” ¹⁶ He also blamed the U.S. for preventing such groups “from being able to put forth militant left radical ideas that are resonating with our people.” ¹⁶ Ingram later called convicted cop killer Assata Shakur a “national hero” and that ““Assata…should have parades, she should have a memorial… It should have been shut down everything, all over the U.S. when she passed, and it wasn’t.” ¹⁶

Critique of the Biden Administration

Black Alliance for Peace has criticized the Biden Administration over the U.S.-Africa Summit held in December 2022, calling the Summit a, “Meeting of Uncle Tom and Uncle Sam”.¹⁷ BAP also opposed the draft resolution sent by the Biden Administration resolution to the United Nations Security Council calling for the deployment of troops to Haiti.¹⁸

Second Trump Administration

Opposition to Ukraine Aid

In March 2025, Black Alliance for Peace wrote a statement attacking the Ukraine Solidarity Network and governmental support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, which BAP called a “proxy war.” BAP attacked Ukraine Solidarity Network for speaking about self-determination while remaining silent about the Palestinians who were “facing another illegal siege by Israel in occupied Gaza.” ¹⁹

BAP wrote, “This is the terrain of white privilege that must be confronted. The power to define who is human and who has rights. A power that is assumed by the supporters of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and a significant segment of the ‘whitish’ left that attempts to obscure its Eurocentric class collaboration in left rhetoric.” BAP claimed that the U.S. backed a coup in 2014 and claimed that it  “ousted democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, legitimized a dangerous fascist element already present in the country now installed in the police, military and government.” BAP then claimed the new Ukrainian government engaged in persecution against ethnic Russians. BAP instead laid blame for the Russian invasion on NATO expansion and the “geostrategic goal of some sectors of U.S. capital to disarticulate the Russian and German economies in order to strengthen U.S. leverage over all of Europe,” accusing the U.S. and NATO of engaging in aggression against Russia. ¹⁹

BAP also went on to attack the American and European center-left: “instead of challenging the U.S. empire, the chauvinistic social imperialist left parrots the simplistic and rightist framing of global class and national struggle as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, ignoring the complex historical and geopolitical factors at play.” BAP accused the center-left of siding with imperialism, which it called “the highest stage of development of capitalism,” echoing the title of Vladimir Lenin’s 1916 book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and further accused it of siding with the forces allegedly waging war against Black and brown people worldwide. BAP went on to say “a victory for NATO and the West would be a disaster for the Global South.” ¹⁹

Call for Global Boycott of the United States

In January 2026, BAP issued a call for a global boycott of the United States in the aftermath of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration-enforcement agents and in support of BAP’s opposition to enforcing immigration law, among other items. “U.S. officials have chosen to operate outside the bounds of law and basic morality,” declared BAP in a statement, “from supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and illegal settlement expansion, to launching a direct military strike on Venezuela that kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores, his wife, to escalating repression against migrants and racialized communities inside the U.S. that has led to murder. These are not isolated policies, but interconnected expressions of an empire that relies on illegal violence abroad and domestically to enforce dominance.” ²⁰

BAP called for international soccer governing body FIFA and the International Olympic Committee to strip the U.S. of hosting rights to the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics, and to ban both the U.S. and Israel from participating in the competitions. ²⁰

The International Action Center, which supported BAP’s call, favorably compared BAP’s proposed boycott to the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. ²⁰

Criticism

In March 2025, Canadian author Jeff Pearce, who self-describes as “leftwing,” denounced BAP for hypocrisy and its failure to support persecuted Ethiopians. Pearce also attacked BAP for its Ukraine stance, criticizing its historical analysis of the Russia-Ukraine conflict as false. ²¹