Mumia on Press Freedom @ Grassroots Radio Conference, Spokane, WA, Sept. 2025
At the GRC Conference in Spokane Mumia Abu-Jamal is a world-renowned journalist, author, and former Black Panther whose reporting has exposed racism, classism, and state violence for over four decades. From death row, he has produced groundbreaking political commentary, challenging media censorship and advocating for the oppressed. His work stands as a testament to journalism as a tool of resistance — unapologetically political, fiercely truthful, and never neutral.
Audio Transcript
Message from Mumia Abu-Jamal to the Ida B Wells Media Defense Network (9/9/25)
Dear friends, colleagues, and comrades:
I greet you all as you struggle and endure against this, the latest wave of White nationalism. You wonder what radicals and revolutionaries have wondered for many years: What is to be done?
The answer lies in a place it has always been: in the bosom of history. What do I mean? Let us turn to the life and times of Ida B. Wells Barnett. In 1862, some three years before the end of the U.S. Civil War, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She would grow into a bold, crusading journalist, who used her art to crusade against that peculiar American practice and ‘sport’ called lynching, in favor of women’s rights and in defense of civil rights for Blacks. She faced death threats, had her offices attacked and destroyed by White mobs. In her writings, in the Free Speech Journals, she revealed the truths behind the lynching of Black men, and women, as based not on crime, but on White envy at Black economic success. She incensed many Whites when she wrote that many allegations of rape were actually initiated by White women who desired Black lovers.
History, said Malcolm X, best rewards our research. Ida B Wells’ example gives us the role of both journalist and activist. We know remarkable examples of scholar activists, like W.E.B. DuBois, or Angela Y. Davis, or Mark Lamont Hill. But what of journalist activists, like Ida B. Wells? She lived until 1931, still an active, thinking, movement journalist. She even wrote for the Garvey movement in her later days. As we enter this era of Trump-induced madness, of economic disruptions, and uncharted chaos, we must remember the clear, courageous voice of Wells Barnett and her activism. She didn’t stop. Neither can we.
We must write new chapters of our lived experiences, of struggle, of resistance, of enlightenment, and of social change, of movements. We face increased challenges before us. Incredible in some respects. But our ancestors faced more. Their example inspires us. Their words, which ripple across the river of time, still teach us, still move us, and still reach us. When we think about bourgeois journalism, or what I like to call corporate journalism, remember these words: It will not save us. It serves the same corporate interests of the political masters in control. And when they create chaos, they publish it and they profit from that chaos, and they wait for others to do the work to transform that chaos into reason, and to resist it. The bourgeois press will not resist it. And when we think about Ida B Wells Barnett, she was many things, but bourgeois she was not. She came from the people, from Mississippi, from Holly Springs, from the Black freedom movement, from women’s movements. She was one of the founders of the NAACP and many, many, many other groups because she understands that movements matter. That’s why she became a journalist activist.
We must learn from her noble example. We must become journalists and activists of today, and like Griots, tell the tales of the people, of their struggles, their resistance against this new and really old age of imperialism. We come from the people. We must give back to the people the glories that they present to us.
With love and not fear, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Thank you.
(Transcribed by Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe)