Mumia Abu-Jamal - Message to the Movement

MESSAGE TO THE MOVEMENT

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Featuring
Occupying Mumias Cell
by Alice Walker

ZUCCOTTI PARK PRESS

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a revolutionary journalist and author of many books, including Live From Death Row , Death Blossoms , We Want Freedom and Jailhouse Lawyers . Incarcerated since 1982, his demand for a new trial and freedom is supported by heads of state from France to South Africa, by Nobel Laureates Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, Desmund Tutu, by the European Parliament, by distinguished human rights organizations like Amnesty International and city governments from Detroit to San Francisco to Paris.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2012

Alice Walker, 2012

Produced by Greg Ruggiero

Cover design by R. Black

Translated to Spanish by Lori Berenson

ISBN: 978-1-884519

A huge thank you to Frances Goldin
for love, solidarity, friendship
and support right when it counted most

Special thanks also to Lori Berenson,
Noelle Hanrahan, Stuart Leonard,
Anthony Spirito,
Johanna Fernandez and Alice Walker

ZUCCOTTI PARK PRESS
PO Box 2726
Westfield, New Jersey 07090
www.zuccottiparkpress.com

Message to the Movement

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Dear Brothers & Sisters, Compaeros y Compaeras, to all those who rebel:

I greet you all. Not with the condescension of the elders, which has flavored virtually every media report you have read, heard or seen. Take no mind to those noises, for they are the shrill hissing of the envious or the fearful. They fear not what you are, but what you may become. They dread the rushing torrent of CHANGE.

I greet you with a feeling that Id almost forgotten to feel: Awe. Surprise. Glee.

For, if those of my generation are honest, they would tell you that not only didnt they see you coming, they didnt think it possible!

Like the scholars and so-called Arabists that head global Middle East studies who taught generations that the Arabs wanted, or even worse, needed strong military or royal rulers, they could neither see nor believe what became Tahrir Square. Thats because their knowledge, formed by crusts of racist presumption, could not imagine people cracking their shackles off their wrists and ankles.

Nor could they imagine you. In their age-leavened arrogance, they thought their generationthe 1960swere the real rebels, even as they are blind to the betrayals that have marked them as enemies of the very things they fought for as youths.

They sat down. They walked away. They smoked their brains out. They twisted their spines with yoga. Or, as an old movie title tells us, they experienced The Big Chill, and chilled out.

In a word, they sold out. They became lawyers, accountants, journalists, scholars, or worsepoliticians, and they served the very 1% that have forced you to take the streets, in fear, in fury, in dreadand, yesin hope.

I, an elder nearer to my sixth decade than my fifth, who studies constantly and reads like a scribe from the Middle Ages in a cell, didnt see it coming.

But you did. Like every generation of human who has come before, you regain that mad ability to surprise, and to surpass your elders. That, brothers and sisters, is your highest glory.

But, if I may share a few things with you, I would be honored, for I have seen some things that most of you have not. I have seen the foul insides of prisons longer than most of you have been alive. I have seen death rows, and holes, and places foul enough to curdle your stomach. I have seen betrayals that would dry crocodile tears. I have seen men wail at the moon with madness, and weep blood.

Many things have I seen, but thisthis Occupy movementhas surprised me.

Thank you all for that surprise.

What would I say to you? I would reach back to one of my elders, Malcolm X, who learned from his elder a very potent truth: Of all our studies, history best rewards our research.

Why History?

I really dont mean that boring shit you learned in high school (or often, in some colleges). Read true history. Read real history. Read Howard Zinns classic, A Peoples History of the United States. Read: There Is a River by Vincent Harding. Study. For by so doing you will do far more than to merely feed your head. This information will inoculate you against ignorance and the trap of ideological thinking. It will broaden your perspective. But it will do more.

It will show you that your job, as long as you are part of this movement (I hope until it prevails), isnt to remake history. Do not idolize, nor idealize the 1960s. If the Sixties were so cool, you wouldnt have to do what youre doing NOW.

Dont remake the 1960s: Make the 2010s!

Dont remake the wheel. Learn from our mistakes and those of our parents.

When you are engaged in a movement, go through with it. Dont sell out. Dont drop out. Dont stop. Or your childrenand grandchildrenwill inherit your failures, and be burdened with the Herculean tasks of trying to undo the mess resulting from what you failed to do.

This America is the way it is because many people took the easy road. They cut their hair. They shaved their beards. They took off their beads and peasant tops and put on power suits. In the 1990s people called it The Me Generationbut that generation gave you this generation, of a busted economic system built on broken dreams, shattered homes, and mass legalized thievery.

It brought you credit-default swaps, mortgage bonds, tranches and the Wall St. before you, standing as a Monolith of Greed.

That generation not only shattered your dreamsit shattered their own. They settled.

SO, DO NOT SETTLE or you will look in the mirror one dayand see them glaring back.

History isnt so that you can learn about yesterday. Its so you see why today is the way it is. It shows how the brick and mortar of time and sweat and blood and tearsand the dregs of politicscreated the world that you see before you.

In a nutshell, it teaches you what not to do.

OK, Mumiawhy do you say, Dont repeat the 1960s?

Why? Cuz most of what youve read and been told is a homogenized, cleaned-up, sweetened version of the 60s. It was marked by as many failures as victories; and it was ripe with betrayals.

I wrote a book about the Black Panther Party, with all of its warts. If you wanna read it, I welcome you to it. Theres betrayal aplenty in it (its called We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party ). When I say betrayal, I mean it in the larger sense. How could the schools throughout Black America be so sadly unproductive? How could the media be so craven? How could the political class be so whorish? (OK, a sexist term, but you know what I mean, dont cha?)

How could America go so wrong, on so many levels?

As I said, history gives us some insights into the nature of politics. Marx and Engels said, The modern state is but the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Look at how even the seemingly most progressive politician is in the employ of the corporate class. It was in the 1830s, after all, that the great French writer and observer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, Than politics the American citizen knows no higher professionfor it is the most lucrative.

Have you noticed how the much-vaunted U.S. Constitution is silent when it comes to economic rights? (Other than the right of the rich to own propertyeven other people?)