For a measly $100 a week, I hustled, worked, time over over-time, newscasts and anything else … FOR WHAT? So News Director Charles Harmon could come up to me, and tell me he needed “someone more flexible”? Have you found it yet? Out of the countless many who have come and gone through that newsroom, has someone more flexible been found? Has someone more committed, more able, been found? It was wrong, then, for Harmon to fire me, a bullshit, empty, reason he knew, you knew and I still know is still wrong! But, this time, the wrong will not be borne in silence.
I will not grin and bear it and wait for a better offer. I will not produce work meant for Black minds and Black ears for a white radio station. I will struggle and battle until this one wrong has been righted. As for my image, like all life forms, it will change, for nothing in life stays the same. But I will not go under the blade for a paycheck from you!
I will be judged on my work, my record among my people, my commitment to the rightness of the struggle of the African to find dignity wherever he walks, not on the smallness of others and their lack of sight. It is ironic, is it not, that a Black man should block another Black man from performing works in the interest of Black people? It is a statement of our times, and a statement of a mentality that must be erased if we are ever to survive!
“He came unto his own, and his own received him not …”
– Mumia Abu-Jamal, President, Association of Black Journalists
This Article First Appeared in The Black Truth News Volume 2 Issue 1 December 2010