I join you all from the american State of Mass Incarceration, a state of poverty, oppression, environmental racism, police violence and governmental repression : it is not unlike what is happening to Brother Keziah in Paris* — governmental repression against dissent.
Generations ago, the american civil rights movement was born by the brutal torture and drowning of a teenage boy, Emmett Till.
Today, a global human rights movement was born from the slow motion brutality of police violence against a man, George Floyd, who died in his forties. George Floyd … He died by a knee on his neck. From a teenager to a man in his forties, the repression is the same, the racial hatred is the same, the deadly result is the same.
What is a human right without the right to life? We’re asking that question throughout the black world, sparked by George Floyd, but it didn’t begin there, it cannot end there.
In an age of global pandemic, black and brown people are the first to get sick, the first to get fired and the most to die from COVID-19 and also the last to get medical treatment , the last to get vaccines. Where’s the human rights there?
That question may be asked in the black world entire.
We join you in this day of resistance against slavery in all its forms, against the black world, and one of its greatest avatars, Frantz Fanon who wrote and worked and lived for the wretched of the earth.
For Keziah!
Free Keziah!
From the Prison-Nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
