Dear brothers, sisters, friends, and comrades; On the MOVE! We greet you all who are there in California, and wish we could join you in the flesh. I join you in spirit here and in other cities where our people are gathering today. We gather both in celebration and in protest. We gather to celebrate resistance to the prison industrial complex and the courts, which have blessed this monstrous endeavor with a veneer of legality. We gather in protest of the obscenity of mass incarceration. We gather in protest of the torture of solitary confinement. We gather in protest against the indignity of the death penalty.
We must build a movement that makes change to these systems of oppression, not making it nicer, but abolishing it as relics of a bygone era, an age of ignorance. We must build a power that cannot be stopped, the power of a people bent on freedom. We are taught that courts protect the constitutional rights of all people, but that certainly isn’t the case. They support the government, the corporations, the wealthy, and the established. They support the very system of which they are a part. For the poor, the powerless, the prisoner and the pauper, they are closed doors, closed minds, and prisons itself bursting at the seams. Join us, and we will transform this grim reality. Join this freedom movement. On the MOVE! Long live John Africa. From imprisoned nation. This is your brother, Mumia Abu Jamal.
