April 24th Statement By Mumia Abu-Jamal
Ona Move! LLJA!
I greet you all, and thank you all for coming here today; for perhaps the first time in her history, your presence here today proves that Philadelphia can become a City of Brotherly Love. We stand today in support of life, in a city that is drunk with the drug of death. We stand in a city that wages a quiet war against the poor, by the wicked withdrawal of resources from them; it is a quiet war which reveals its battle scars in the fractured, shattered buildings that line ghetto streets; the black captives of this war, shackled and manacled, choke the city’s prisons and jails, men and women who are, more often than not, prisoners solely because of their poverty; for the poor can pay no bail; and the poor can ill afford a decent lawyer - thus, prisons become social sinkholes of the poor and rejected, for in this city, poverty is a serious crime.
Your presence here today is testament to the fact that a poor man, like myself, is worthy of your support - and for that, I thank you.
You are standing against the prosecution of people solely for their political beliefs; you are standing against the state that crafts confessions out of whole cloth; you are standing against the State’s capital of death, a city that rivals the death belt of the Deep South in its return of death sentences; you are standing against the corruption of the government that runs on the political promises of death.
We stand today in support of freedom, in a city that boasts more prisoners than some states; in a state that spends more on dungeons than schools; in a state that has criminalized education for the imprisoned!
Ona Move! My case, which has attracted many of you here, is one case among many; how many know of the MOVE 9, men and women sentenced to a century in state dungeons despite their innocence? We must not just know that, we must act on it, by building a powerful and militant movement with freedom as its goal, with justice as its goal, and with life at its center! We can do this today, and this we must do, to transform our present into a new tomorrow.
Revolutionary Teacher, John Africa sez, "When you are committed to doing that which is right, the Power of Righteousness will never betray you!" LLJA!
What you are doing today is as righteous and as natural as a spring rain! Let us continue doing it! and build!
To Freedom! To Liberty! To Life!
Ona Move! LLJA! FTM9! FAPP!
Ona Move! Your brotha, MAJ
Live FDR!