Socialist Action /June 2001
Commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal:
Occidental College Commencement Address
This is a transcript of the remarks made by
Mumia Abu-Jamal at the Occidental College Baccalaureate ceremony on May
20, 2001.
If you were fortunate enough to be at Baccalaureate,
you had the rare opportunity to hear the powerful voice of America's most
compelling prison journalist. Consider this a record of that event. College
politics and bureaucracy, however, made it impossible for many of you to
hear Mumia speak. If you missed the opportunity to hear Mumia's words, consider
this a second chance.
This speech is being distributed to honor the
wishes of hundreds of students who asked to hear Mumia speak at Commencement.
It also recognizes the reality imposed by a school administration that would
not allow a three minute and 47 second speech into their ceremony.
This transcript thus represents a final effort
to give Mumia a legitimate voice at this event. We urge you all to continue
the struggle to give voice to those whose silence we cannot afford. We ask
you to consider the following words from the "voice of the voiceless,"
words which, though confined to the page, refuse to be silenced.
-Occidental Students for Democracy
I thank you all for this invitation for me to address
your Baccalaureate ceremony at Occidental College in L.A.
I'm particularly pleased that hundreds of you have
organized for this to happen, weeks before anybody contacted me.
I've heard of your petitions and of your efforts
to lobby on my behalf. I was so impressed by your efforts that I immediately
agreed to share a few moments with you, on this, your very special graduation
day. Congratulations.
For many of you this is a time of elation and a
time of terror. Elation at the end of long hard study, terror at the unknown,
the world of work, of paychecks, jobs, and yes, unemployment. With the collapse
of the dot-com economy, the fear of unemployment is pervasive.
But I don't want to talk about that. I'm certain
that some of you have read my first book, "Live from Death Row,"
but how many of you know that much of what happens in U.S. prisons was never
written there. I speak to you all from another world, one that most of you
know nothing of. You won't learn about it by looking at Oz on TV, and very
little that's written is a true reflection of the horrors that lie on the
other side of the looking glass.
Imagine this: There are nearly 2,000,000 men, women,
and kids in U.S. prisons and jails. Imagine: If these people were all assembled
in one place, the gathering would exceed the population of states like Idaho,
Maine, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Nebraska.
Let's look at it this way, there are more people
in U.S. prisons than the entire population of Kuwait. America is home to
roughly 5 percent of the world's population. It is also the place where
about 25 percent of all the world's prisoners are encaged. I call it the
"prison house of nations." Hidden in this world are moments of
brutality, of loneliness, of alienation, and pervasive stupidity. This world
is the true face of American democracy. Hidden torture chambers designed
to demolish the mind and unhinge the spirit.
Way back in 1927, U.S. labor leader and socialist
presidential candidate Eugene Debs published "Walls and Bars,"
a book collected of his essays from prison. What he had to say almost 75
years ago is applicable today to the burgeoning prison industry that's all
around us. He said prisons were a place of brutality, perversion, and class
oppression. Debs lamented the cruel incarceration of youth. He called prisons
"instruments of the will of politicians."
Seventy-three years ago, Eugene Debs asked, "What
else can the prison be considered but a breeder of vice, immorality, and
disease, and condemned as an incubator for crime."
How little things have changed in all that time.
Prisons are places of unfreedom and the aura of terror that dwells in such
places reaches into national consciousness and eventually into everyday
life. There are certain neighborhoods in America that may be likened to
minimum-security prisons for the poor, where they live under the State's
ever present and unblinking gaze, where truly one's poverty is their crime.
These words have been designed to give you some
insight into a world that you do not know, and hopefully that you will never
know. I thank you for your invitation.
Ona move, Long Live John Africa, This is Mumia
Abu-Jamal.
© MAJ 2001
To communicate directly with Mumia, please write
to him at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal, AM 8335,
SCI-Greene,175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370.
Socialist Action /June 2001 |