What would our ANCESTORS do?

[BUMPED: cause tomorrow is the big day]

[Note: On April 19th at 10AM there will be a demonstration in Support of Mumia in Philadelphia on 6th and Market Streets at the Federal Building. Listen to Public Service Announcements here. We will lend spiritual support to the demonstration in Brooklyn as well, at Live From Planet Earth. Free Mumia!]

No disrespect to Jesus at all. On the contrary, I appreciate the idea that individuals take the time to explore the life and times of Jesus and attempt to match what they perceive to be the best that humanity has to offer with their own actions.

With this in mind, I constantly have to think through what I feel the Ancestors would do. To really explore and think about what they would do and have done. My most recent inspiration is Kwame Ture. I mean his ability to make strategic moves, to think critically and clearly, to speak on the behalf of our humanity and believe so STRONGLY in it, you know? I mean that's so powerful... kind of like an immaculate conception of Freedom (in a space and time where our freedoms are often disregarded and sabotaged). I just can't get enough of him. And Araminta "Harriet" Tubman simply because she was so cosmic, so supernatural. Folks say that she would be all up and through plantations and never get caught! Brilliant war tactics and strategies coming from this resilient yet small woman! I LOVE that!

And so its with THESE things in mind that I reflect on our dear Elder, Mumia Abu-Jamal. I think that he represents the best that the Civil Rights Movements and Black Liberation Movements had to offer. He was raised up in IT (the tenacity and self-assuredness in Freedom) and continues to display an unwavering commitment to the ultimate goal of Freedom.

I mean that sense of self, that sense of "knowing" (in the sense of there is NO alternative, there is no way to tell em otherwise), to have faith and belief in your people, to KNOW who you are... that's just... I don't even have words for it... it's LIGHT.

It's more than any theory or ideology could possibly articulate because it just IS.

And that's what our Ancestors have left us with, you know? And it IS our responsibility to step into that essence, to wear it, embody it and OWN it.

My respect for the Elder Mumia Abu-Jamal can't even REALLY be put in words so Imma stop here. What BOGGLES my mind is how his responses are so clear and precise.

Nonetheless, Achali posted audio from this interview done by our good good Brothers JR and Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr and I felt the need to post an excerpt from the transcript:

Mumia Abu-Jamal Responds to Court Ruling; (Interview with the POCC's Minister of Information JR and Chairman Fred Hampton Jr on
The Block Report Radio Show and in The SF Bay View Newspaper.)


Mumia Abu-Jamal: I'm not going to tell people what to do or how to organize. They know how to do that. They need to trust in their own instincts. I believe in the people. I have always believed in it since I was a young teenager. The people never let you down, they do what is right because they know in their hearts what is right. And I commend them for it. I just did a piece, yesterday, about how we have a history that we forget about sometimes. A history of the courts being on the side of repression, being on the side, not of freedom, but on the side of enslavement. Literally, that is what Dred Scott was all about. If you look at Plessy vs. Furgeson, that is what that was all about.

A lot of people still believe that Brown vs. the Board of Education changed everything, well it changed some things for some people, if you were well to do and your parent is a lawyer or a doctor or a professor or something like that then, you're OK, you still have problems but you are OK. You have the resources to take care of your family and do what have to do to live a very good life, one that your parents and grandparents couldn't even think of. But if you are black and poor in this society, things have not really changed for you, in fact, in some ways they've gotten worse. I mean we talk about Brown v. Board of Education decided in 1955 or 1953, which ended segregation in law in the United States. But I went to high school in the 60s in a segregated school; I'd been in a segregated elementary school or segregated Jr. High school. The only real integration I received in my schooling was in summer school or college. And the same schools I went to as a kid are not very different for people who are the age of my grandkids or teenagers today. Segregation in law is one thing, segregation in real life is another. So we have to remember what we know and act on what we know. Remember what the elder Fredrick Douglas power concedes nothing without a demand.

Fred Hampton, Jr.: This has been addressed on a number of occasions, by you and other forces. Would you like to say something about what the case, Mumia Abu-Jamal, represents and why we have every apparatus from rappers being reprimanded when they speak about you in videos, to certain media outlets being reprimanded, to even the fact that the Governor of California on page five when he denied clemency for Stanley "Tookie" Williams, he pointed out the fact that Tookie Williams identified with such forces as Field Marshall George Jackson and including that of Mumia Abu-Jamal. What is this, what you represent is it a symbol? Would you state that for us?

Mumia Abu-Jamal: I think for many people especially for those in the establishment I represent, in many ways, their biggest nightmare. For many people who don't know, who have not lived...

VOICE: This call is from the State Correctional Institution at Greene and is subject to monitoring and recording.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: ...in that period and they do not know about the Black Panther Party and about the Black Liberation Movement the black liberation movement. They may know tangentially about the civil rights movement, they may think that everything is hunky-dory and nice now. Those people who live it they know it, they know otherwise, they know that life of a black person in the ghetto or a brown person in the Barrio today, is unmitigated hell. They are still fighting for their 40 acres and 2 mules because they ain't got nothing. And on top of that that they now have the contempt of the Black bourgeoisie which is now married with the contempt of the political class. But what they fear is black...

VOICE: You now have 60 seconds remaining

Mumia Abu-Jamal: ...What they fear is the black revolution re-igniting, you see, that is why we have the present politics we have, the politics of acquiescence where black people are apologizing about what the black preachers tell them in church. And that used to be one of the few sites where people could speak about freedom, could speak truth to power. Now it has to be politically watered down so that outsiders, people who have never been in a black church are going to dictate ...

VOICE: You now have 30 seconds remaining.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: ...what black people listen to, is madness. Ona MOVE

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