Chela Simone: Angela Davis, the constant in the quest for liberation, our struggle, consciousness, resistance, and the will to realize freedom. Angela Davis’s journey has been forged through her commitment to prisoners; those men and women who, through their revolutionary consciousness and actions, expose the role of prisons, slavery, and capitalism in America, and the American race, class, and gender inequality.
She has not been spared the fate of those who resist. She has been held facing execution by the state. She has been fired from teaching positions, and she’s lost friends and family to state-sponsored violence and terrorism. But, today I am so honored. She is standing with Mumia Abu-Jamal. Please welcome Angela Davis. (Applause)
Angela Davis: Thank you. Thank you. First of all, I would really like to thank Prison Radio for organizing this amazing event, and I want to also say happy birthday to Mumia. I cannot believe that he is 55 years old today. And, I think it’s really extraordinary that all of you are here to celebrate the publication of this amazing new book on jailhouse lawyers {Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A.] and it’s important that it’s happening in this city, in Oakland. This is the city of Oscar Grant. This is also the city of Lovelle Mixon (Applause), and, and I want to say that story did not have to happen the way it did, you know. Had police crimes, police brutality been dealt with in Oakland, that story would have ended very differently.
Now, it seems to me that Mumia’s words are always about hope. They’re always about moving forward. And, one of the things I recognize in reading this book is that he lets us know that hope often comes from those places where we least expect it, and I use the term hope because we have heard a lot about hope over the last couple of years, right? Has it been, yeah, the last, last two years.
And, many of us have become a lot more hopeful as a result of the massive mobilizations that happened around the campaign. Of course, we have to point out that just because one Black man is elected president doesn’t mean that all of the problems fall away. Particularly around issues of racism and poverty, and as we see now, the whole capitalist system is falling apart (Applause.) But at the same time I think we have to acknowledge that it is a new day, we’re thinking in different terms. There is a new arena of struggle, and I kind of see this period as sort of millennial. As a matter of fact, you remember in 1999 when we were going to make that transition to 2000, and you remember how excited and anxious everyone was because something extraordinary was supposed to happen (laughter)? And then 2000 came around, and everything was still the same, right? And we had to deal with George Bush. Well, let’s not talk about that.
But, this is a period when I think we can inhabit our histories differently. And here in the Bay Area, we are reminded of our histories when we look at the San Francisco 8, the police violence that we’ve lived with in the Bay Area for, for so long, but we’re also reminded that institutions have long memories as well. In a sense, they will not let us forget the history, the Black Panther Party, for example. They think of it in a different way, but we celebrate that history, and we inhabit those histories differently.
Mumia has become a symbol for all of us. A symbol of struggle, a symbol of hope, but he’s used as a — he’s used by the opposition as a way to demonize those who are hopeful about the future, and I was looking at an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer by a journalist who said that the case of Lovelle Mixon reminded him of Mumia. As a matter of fact, he said that, “Unlike Abu-Jamal, Mixon got the justice he deserved,” and that the courts probably would have failed to deliver when a SWAT officer shot and killed him in his sister’s apartment. How ironic that those murders happened 10 years after Oakland Public School scheduled a teach-in to support Abu-Jamal on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, no less. I mean, you see how he writes as if there were this one Black actor responsible for killing all police officers who have ever lost their lives.
Now we, I’ve been doing a lot of work with a number of organizations over the years around prison abolition, and I think we have to keep saying abolish the prison system [applause], abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. Not too long ago, the end of March, there was a cover story in Parade Magazine, you know, that magazine that you get in, I know you get in the San Francisco Chronicle, and it was a story about Jim Webb, who’s the congressman from Virginia, who is calling for a set of hearings designed to expose, examine, fix the prison system. As a matter of the cover of the magazine said, “What’s wrong with our prisons?”
Now, first of all, I think it’s good that that’s happening, but second of all, what they’re envisioning are a set of reforms that will make the prisons better, and thus replicating the whole sordid history of the prison system in this country. So, how do we intervene to make this moment productive? Well, one of the things I think we do is we look, we look toward Mumia for the advice he would give us, and he tells us that where there have been changes, major changes in the prison system, those changes have largely come from prisoners themselves. We are not aware of the extent to which the whole field of prison law was produced and created by prisoners themselves, and I think this is important for us, you know, whatever kind of work we do around prison issues, because there is still the tendency to assume that prisoners are the object of our work and not the subject, not the subject of their own destinies. And, these stories are so important to us because they emphasize the extent to which prisoners are involved in the ongoing campaign against the horrible conditions, but eventually also for the abolition of the system.
Now, Mumia’s book also gives us a sense of how to connect the tortures, and I know my voice is probably not going to hold out very long, but I do want to at least gesture toward the connection that he makes between the practices of torture in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and in the secret prisons and the everyday routine practices in U.S. prisons. Now of course, that now that we’re beginning to find out what really happened, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and etc, etc, we need to widen the net because it’s not only about those tortures but is the practice of tortures associated with domestic prisons as well.
So, let me say finally that if this is a millennial moment, it’s time to renew our efforts to free Mumia. We have to free Mumia [applause], and as you know, as you know, there are people all over the world, there are people all over this country, not nearly enough people in this country, more people in other countries who are following the case, and who are — who are naming streets after him and giving him honorary citizen, you know, he should be an honorary citizen of Oakland. Why can’t we make him an honorary citizen of Oakland? Tell, tell that to Ron Dellums (applause.) And our immediate goal is, of course, to join with people all over the world who are now desperately trying to prevent the reinstatement of the death penalty. But, our final goal is to bring Mumia home. He has spent too many years in those dark chambers of death. We need him now in our world, which is not yet free, but where right now we are attempting to accelerate our strivings to be free. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Chela Simone: Thank you all for coming out. Thank you, Angela Davis, for sharing your words with us. I really appreciate and honor you. Good night.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
