(get update on the case this Sunday on UhuruRadio.com at 1pm U.S. ET)

Baltimore, MD – On March 18, 2008, five African eighth-graders were convicted of assaulting two white adults, 26-year-old Sarah Kreager and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Troy Ennis on a Maryland Transit Authority (MTA) bus on December 4, 2007 in a dispute over a seat.

The African students maintain that Kreager started the fight by spitting on and punching them, while Ennis made racial slurs and threatened to stab them. One student filed counter assault charges against Kreager, but prosecutors quickly dropped that case.

“No grown person should be spitting on kids,” declared Quentin Whaley Sr., 54, the father of one of the teens. “This isn’t 1857. This is 2008. We won’t be chattel property.”

The Baltimore Branch of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) denounces the conviction of the children and calls on the judge to release them without any further detainment or probation.

The state provided no evidence that linked any of these children to the beating. What is most certain is that the children on trial were the few remaining youth who did not run and were picked by the MTA police to be the fall guys.

InPDUM believes that the children were found guilty, not because of evidence of guilt but to relieve the fears of white people to live or visit the streets of Baltimore.

Nnamdi Lumumba, President of the Baltimore Branch of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement says, “We’re tired of the word of a white person being considered more credible than the statements of a black person."