Text of Mumia Abu-Jamal's Speech at Antioch University's Graduation Ceremony.

• Position: Transcript

Saturday, April 29, 2000

My congratulations to you all here today. To the students graduating, to teachers exulting in their graduates, to administrators rejoicing in their professors' successes, to parents who secretly hope this is the beginning of their children's financial independence and an end to their bills, to you all at an extraordinary college--Antioch.

I thank you for your gracious invitation and I hope these words have worth and meaning to you all.

I've thought long and hard about your proposed query about an individual's impact on the world.

Against what passes or matters, I'll answer a question with a question. Who do you admire?

Of course, in any huge student body, as I hope this graduating class is, there is a wealth of perspectives, or should be.

However, on any given list, if logical, the following figures will be found: Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, and W.E.B. DuBois.

Just a few folks, right? What are the common features of these people. Of course, they were all radicals or revolutionaries but that's not it.

Add Paul Robeson to that list. Does that help?

How about Angela Y. Davis?

Some quick wits out there in the audience might well conclude, well, they're all communists.

Close, but that's not quite it either.

For neither Malcolm X nor Ella Baker, to my knowledge, ever joined the party.

And, though I'm not certain, I don't think Paul Robeson was a member of the CPUSA.

When you look at these people, you find folks who committed class suicide, who turned their backs on the acquired class advantages and potential opportunities to give voice and supportive presence to the most oppressed sectors of their society.

Dr. Nelson Mandela, trained as a lawyer, then joined the armed wing of the ANC or African National Congress to further the African Liberation Movement in South Africa.

Malcolm X, with a stellar intellect, could surely have joined any profession that he set his mind to-- he chose to work for the dispossessed of the Black nation.

Ella Baker, writer and organizer, worked in the Civil Rights Movement and in exposing the sexual exploitation of poor women who worked as domestics.

Dr. DuBois, despite his patrician-like bearing, was a genuine radical and iconoclast who was constantly betrayed by his class brethren for his radical opinions. He was purged from the NAACP.

Similarly, lawyer, athlete and actor Paul Robeson was vilified for his support of socialism and had his flourishing career broken like DuBois before...