By Noelle Hanrahan

Every action we take is immersed in the context of rampant white supremacy and misogyny. We either tell the truth or we bury it. To not resist in the face of any dehumanizing act is to be complicit with the oppressor. Every moment engenders liberation or cements oppression. Everything we refuse to see- increases our complicity. We must awaken to the reality. Every action you take has to be thought through a filter. How will this action break the dominant paradigm? How will this act realize the unalienable rights of women, the poor, and people of color?

Slavery is back in the U.S.; in fact it was never abolished. It was institutionalized as part of the 13th Amendment to the US constitution. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction". At the current rate of incarceration, half of all African-American men between the ages of 18 and 40 will be in prison by 2010. One out of every 146 adults is in prison and 5.1 million Americans are under correctional control, a percentage greater than in any other country. Texas and Florida are conducting assembly line executions.

Every day in America, thousands of men and women in U.S. prisons await death, alone, isolated, in solitary confinement, caged in a 8 by 10 foot barren cell. Each week the state methodically gasses, hangs, and electrocutes, shoots or poisons, a few. Procuronium bromide is the lethal sanitizing poison of choice, the fix for the rush to judgement and the thirst for death that demands a human sacrifice.

We don't have to resurrect memories of white lynch mobs of the 1950's to recognize a lynch mob mentality. Rampant public fear and deeply ingrained racism are a toxic combination. Every broadcast news and newspapers feed us hundreds of stories that orchestrate fear, while detailing chilling scenes of politicians campaigning for death. Mumia's insightful radio essays and melodic baritone, and his disclosure of torture and human rights abuses, if heard, would halt expansion of the US's largest industries human storage and slave labor.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a husband, father, grandfather, and African American has been a journalist for thirty two years and a resident of Pennsylvania's death row for two decades.

Whether Mumia Abu-Jamal's voice will reach the airwaves and ultimately whether he lives or dies -- will depend on our independence, the depth of our courage and our will to organize.

Join Mumia, seek the truth and risk your life to tell it.