INTERVIEW WITH YOUTH LEADER
'Mumia is all of us'
By Greg
Butterfield
Philadelphia
About 100 youths gathered at Temple University Law School in
Philadelphia Feb. 20 for "Youth Make Revolution," a conference
for supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Organized by International
Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia, the conference drew an
enthusiastic, multinational crowd that included dozens of high
school students. Some came from as far away as Boston and
Montreal.
Besides making plans to mobilize young people for the April
24 "Millions for Mumia" demonstration in Philadelphia and the
April 23 International Student Walkouts, young activists
discussed police brutality, the impact of welfare reform, and
hip-hop as a tool of resistance.
Workers World interviewed Leslie Jones, a leading conference
organizer.
Workers World :What are the goals of the youth
conference?
Leslie Jones: The goal is to give young people the
opportunity to come together as an inclusive collective to
strategize and organize around life-threatening issues such as
police brutality. It will be a time for us to act--to not just
talk about it, but to be about it.
I suspect we will quickly find that our situations are
similar. It will take our collective efforts to organize and
back this system down from the terror it is raining down on our
communities.
WW: Why is it so critical for young
people to join the movement for Mumia?
LJ: It is important for young people to take up the struggle
to save Mumia's life because to allow this system to silence
people who speak out against injustice is to allow oneself to
be susceptible to the same terror, the same silencing.
Mumia's case reflects all of us, especially young people. It
was the criminalization of Mumia as a young man that this
system used against him when he was falsely accused of
murder.
As a high school student, Mumia spoke out against the likes
of George Wallace. He expressed himself through the Black
Panther newspaper. It was the 800-page FBI file on his
activities as a young person that contributed to the
prosecution's argument that Mumia wanted to kill a police
officer from the time he publicly expressed his political
beliefs as a young member of the Panthers.
Hell, they could use what I say and continue to say in this
struggle against me in the same way X number of years down the
road. Mumia says so himself. They don't just want his death;
they want his silence.
And it is that same thrust for our silence that led [New
Jersey] Gov. [Christine] Whitman to threaten the youth who
attended that Rage Against the Machine concert. It's that same
silence that has the recording industry on lockdown against all
forms of progressive/revolutionary lyrics.
It's that same silence that has seen to it that young people
are more likely to serve time than graduate from college.
Young people must step forward and assume a position
alongside our elders on the front lines because this system
does not discriminate against the lives it takes--from the
COINTELPRO conspiracy of the 1960s to the bombing of the MOVE
organization, which resulted in the death of young boys and
girls, to the murder of unarmed Black and Latino young people
by police.
We must take a stand--our lives depend on it.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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