I really wanted to really thank the students and the teachers of the Abolitionist school, and congratulate you on the subjects that you’ve studied, and the fact that you’ve completed your studies. I also want to really thank you for thinking about W.E.B. Du Bois. This is a man who had his impact in two centuries and who lived almost 100 years of life, but most people know about him through his work with the NAACP and his later life. They don’t know, unless they’ve really read and studied him, that he was one of the first Pan Africanists in America, and he worked with people from Jamaica and the other islands and in Europe and in Africa to try to build a place of strength right where people could talk about decolonization and freedom for Africans in Africa and for African Americans in the United States and in the West Indies and the colonies.
He was a deep thinker, right, who loved his people and if you read his early works and you think about the mind behind the words, you can hear kind of a reflection of that love for young Black people and for people around the world. You know, W.E.B. Du Bois was a giant of his time. He was one of the first people to go around the world and support freedom struggles, right, and especially the decolonization movement in much of Africa, so he knew some of the great minds that were moving in African countries and in the West Indies, and he talked to them, and he fought with them, and he organized with them, and this was, you know, mostly in the late 1800s and the very early 1900s.
His relationship with the US government was quite complex. People forget that he was charged with being an agent of a foreign power. That foreign power was the USSR, what was called the Soviet Union or Russia, and he was indicted, and he went to trial, and most of the people who praised him, who admired him, who respected him, well, they fell away, and it was only the working class people, the average people, the everyday people that held on to him and continued to support him. He was later acquitted of that charge, but he never forgot that lesson.
So, congratulations on your studies of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the greatest minds of the 19th and the 20th century, and I can tell you this, my favorite text of his is a book that’s really not well known, but it’s called Dark Water, and he wrote it, I think, about 20 years after his first book, The Souls of Black Folk, and it’s an angry, passionate, driving polemic, where he writes from a soul that has been scarred by, really, the racist attacks on Black people during the teens, the 19 teens of the early 20th century, and he sees America as it is, not as he wanted, he wanted it to be. So, read him, study him, and learn from him. I know he was an inspiration for Angela Davis and a lot of people who studied him in their youth. So, congratulations my friends. Congratulations for studying. Congratulations for graduating. But now you have to ask yourself, what do you do with what you’ve learned? That’s the real congratulations. With love, not fear. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
