Mumia's Baccalaureate Speech at Occidental College
The following is a transcript of the Introduction and text of Mumia's Baccalaureate speech at Occidental College. The Introduction is divided into two parts, the first of which is Toby Oshiro's and the second is Bre Fahs'. The transcript of Mumia's speech includes the paragraph added to the fliers handed out at Commencement, and it describes briefly the difficult process of getting permission to play Mumia's speech on our campus. We encourage anyone who would like to formally support this effort to directly contact--by phone or email-- the college President, Ted Mitchell. He can be reached at 323.259.2691 or tmitchel@oxy.edu . If you would like any more information, please contact Toby or Bre (oshiro@oxy.edu , fahs@oxy.edu ).
Toby Oshiro--Introduction Part 1
Imagine living on death row. Imagine knowing when and where and how you are going to die, and who is going to kill you. Imagine never being able to touch your children or your grandchildren. Imagine spending 23 hours a day in a six by ten foot cell. Imagine that your only hope of escaping this fate is the system that condemned you to death.
I can't imagine it. My guess is that you can't either. And that is why we must vehemently oppose the death penalty and why we must fight to preserve the voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal. If we cannot imagine spending our last days on death row, how can we understand the impact of the act we commit each time we sentence someone to death? When we act upon prisoners, we act upon ourselves. When we support state- sponsored killing, we become murderers.
Consider for a second how, if at all, you justify the death penalty. Now take out all the "buts," "howevers," and "ifs" and you'll find that either you're for killing people or you're against killing people.
Life is determined by beliefs and how one acts upon those beliefs. Belief must be acted upon to have any value. When we fail to do so, we fail to honor even our own lives. When we build prisons instead of schools, gated communities instead of neighborhoods, we sentence ourselves to an existence behind bars and lives lived in fear. When we murder those on death row, we extinguish our own spirits.
Once we open our ears to those we imprison, once we acknowledge the voices we have sought to silence, life suddenly becomes infinitely more complicated. When good and bad can no longer be defined by steel bars and plexiglass partitions, we will be forced at long last to stare into the looking glass and account for what we have done.
James Baldwin once wrote, "People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead." From the depths of the hell that we have created, Mumia speaks in a language so clear and true that even death is delayed: No one can imprison your spirit against your will. You must give it up, for them to take it, and it matters not on which side of the bars you stand. From death row, Mumia Abu- Jamal reveals to us the extent of our own imprisonment.
Bre Fahs--Introduction Part 2
Education is a tool of teaching us what we respect. The opportunities presented to us—4 years at Oxy, a chance to travel, a new relationship, an evolving transition into adulthood—offer us, at the end of the day, a chance to make decisions about what we respect, what wisdom we will glean from the books we read, what problems we will take responsibility for, what we will believe or disbelieve, and the cost of these beliefs—for ourselves, and for others. Leading a life is an expensive act.
Though today's graduation ceremonies call for a celebratory atmosphere, we must continue to ask important questions—questions which require spiritual, philosophical, and personal investment. What will we stand for? And, what won't we stand for? At what cost do we achieve personal happiness? To whom are we indebted? To whom do we answer? Admittedly, these are difficult, destabilizing questions. Asking them requires us to fall into the trapdoor of our truths, to suffer with those truths, and to emerge with any number of "symptoms": anger, outrage, fear, sadness, disillusionment, terror, and—perhaps—a certain kind of principled elation, a knowledge of satisfaction in the questions themselves. I do believe, certainly, that a life cannot be measured by the number of battles we avoid.
Silence carries a cultural currency equal to that of war, of religion, of love. Silence is at the heart of our nation's political and social agendas. This happens literally, as we depersonalize and marginalize certain messages, and at times, kill those we most fear. The case of Mumia has shown that, as subjects of a now conservative State, we value ideological silence more than we value life itself. We would rather kill than imagine a world in which a death row inmate would be allowed the chance to mirror our own failures, both as individuals, and as a nation.
The question of who is allowed to speak, and who will choose to listen, has become a haunting inquiry, even at Occidental, where we claim to value all voices. In a world so profoundly erred, and terribly expensive, we must be suspicious of silence, if not downright outraged at it. This outrage must become action. We must understand that, for some, the struggle against silence is the struggle for a life at all. As Nelson Mandela once said, "The struggle is my life." We are honored to share with you the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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% of the world's population. It is also the place where about 25% 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.
Posted May 28, 2001
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