By Mumia Abu-Jamal
September 25, 2026

I always look to the ancestors, the old ones who came before us, who lived in these bodies before we were born. Those who not only look like us, who walk like us, who talk like us, who dream like us, who feel like us, who weep like us. Those who came before, those who suffered that which is today almost incomprehensible.

Those are the people I look to because their blood, their sweat, their fears and their loves run through my flesh, my blood, my consciousness, my being. We live in bodies created, birthed by the ancestors. So I always think of them and try to remember, you know, what lessons they wanted to pass down to us.

When I think about us having a hard time today, and then I think about the lives they lived in a land that calls itself “the land of the free and brave,” and I look at the torture and the terrors and the humiliations and the stolen labor of 400 years plus, I know that nothing we face will be harder than what they faced every day of their lives.

So in a real way I consider us, of this generation, the people who are living a dream compared to the ancestors. As hard as it gets, it doesn’t come close to what they went through. Remember that. It should give you strength to continue to struggle against the empire.

‘Death by incarceration’

When I think about this, you know, I have to recognize that the words “death by incarceration,” created by abolitionists, fathered by people who have relatives in these places, while an apt and accurate reflection of the reality of what it means to be doing a life sentence in places like Pennsylvania, that was never my preferred term. I use it now, because I think it brings light and deep reflection to words that people really don’t understand.

Why do I say that? Because, you know, when you ask average people walking down the street or going to the grocery or, you know, just walking to a park, what does a life sentence mean to them, they’ll say, you know, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, because they don’t know, right? They’re not lawyers, they are not legislators, they are not jailhouse lawyers. But my preferred term in my own head when people ask me, or when I’m on the phone with someone, I would describe it as “slow death row.”

I think that incarcerates and freezes our thinking, because you don’t just say “life,” because this is the absence of life, you know. “Slow death row” is life in a cage forever. It is often life in the coldest conditions, the most brutal conditions in America forever, right, where no tomorrow is functionally different from any yesterday. And the only thing that is common between yesterday, today and tomorrow is repression.

You know, my mind takes me so many places, that, you know, I wanna go sometimes where my mind takes me, because that might be a nice place to think and, you know, to relax and contemplate things. But when I talk about repression, I’m talking about being locked in a cell for hours and hours and hours a day. And I’m not talking about solitary, I’m talking about regular “population” in prison, it’s being locked into a cell hours and hours and hours and hours, and being subjected to just random nonsense by some rule maker in Harrisburg or in Mechanicsburg or Camp Hill or even on the block you might be housed in, right?

State officials lie with impunity

What really is kind of galling is the ability of state officials to lie with impunity.

I remember putting in a grievance about them denying the right to walk around the block. And I used several cases that I had found, where they had said in those cases that people could walk around the block, because somebody had sued, because he got infracted for doing push-ups in the day room and their response was, well the day room isn’t a place for working out, you can always walk around. And then they just lied about it, right.

When you talk about a restraint chair, I’m reminded of a young man I called “Reds,” that was his nickname. He was tall, he had light brown hair, and he had asthma. He’d got into an argument in the yard, and he was taken to the infirmary area, put into a restraint chair, cuffed to it, and they unloaded, unloaded big jars of, what do they call it, pepper spray — it is really its name, because it is based on Cayenne pepper — in this guy’s face.

And a nurse was sitting there watching, right, there were at least three or four C.O.s [Correction Officers] doing this. The man is in a restraint chair in hand cuffs, but because he was saying things that they did not want him to say, they unloaded on him with pepper spray until he stopped breathing. Did I mention that he had asthma? What do you think pepper spray does to people who have asthma? Well, it killed him.

So guess how many of those guards and other people went to jail? Goose egg, zero, none. When you’re fired, and you get your jobs back, they got a vacation, really, they probably got backpay, but they still got a lucrative job, and none of them got imprisoned for killing a man with asthma who was handcuffed with pepper spray, so he could not breathe.

A moment of opportunity

I think that the moment is rich with opportunity. Why do I say that? Because we are seeing things that generations have never seen before. We have never seen this kind of aggregation of mass wealth for a tiny percentage of people. We have never seen corporations fighting for supremacy to decide who would take over the world as technical giant of AI — artificial intelligence.

We are seeing how corporations working though their puppets and politicians are taking land from people and making data centers which are costing enormous amounts of water — not to slake the thirst of human beings or even to slake the thirst of animals or even to sit as lakes or ponds or rivers, but water is being used to cool the heat caused when computers work, right? That’s what this thing is.

If ever there was a time to revolt, if ever there was a time to resist, if ever there was a time for people to organize as broadly and wildly and widely as possible — this is that time! Because afterwards may prove to be too late. This is the moment, and people need to kind of realize that, you know? I know that is challenging. I’d be terrified, but what is coming will be more challenging and more terrifying, because this is the moment of consolidation of capital in ways that have never been articulated or even conceived, because this is for all the chips.

To my friends Mike Stark, Kenny Collins, Stanley Howard, Marlene Martin and Elisabeth T., part of Life After Death Row — Thank you for putting on this production and this exercise in truth and democracy with the people.

Love, not fear — this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.