Viva May Day!

The following transcript is from an audio message played at May Day rallies around the country. Go to prisonradio.org to hear more commentaries by Mumia.

On the move! Long Live John Africa. There are only two peoples living on the land we call America who weren’t immigrants—the Indigenous, so-called Indians—and African Americans who were dragged here in chains and terror.

Every other person immigrated here or his ancestors did from Europe, from China, from India, from Ireland and yes, from Mexico. Truth be told, America was a land of Spanish settlement long before it became English and there’s the rub.

The brouhaha over immigration today is mostly a fear of the browning of America. Imagine that. The people who originally lived in what’s now California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, easily a third of what’s now known as the United States, are to be seen as permanent outsiders, invaders even, because of their brown skins, their Spanish speech, their Catholicism, and their unremitting hunger for land and labor.

On this May Day, a day sanctified for labor, how can we turn our backs on some of the hardest-working people in America? Don’t alienate them; organize them. Bring them into the farm workers’ union. Draft them into a national carpenters’ union. After all, ain’t they workers? Celebrate May Day by building workers’ movements. On the move! Viva May Day! From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.