By William Boardman -- Reader Supported News
Police Go Nuts Over Mumia Abu-Jamal's Remote Speech in Vermont
How a non-event becomes an "event" that ends in anti-climax
When Mumia Abu-Jamal was the pre-recorded speaker at a Goddard College commencement in Plainfield, Vermont, in 2008, almost no one outside the Goddard community paid any attention. This year, when Goddard announced that students had chosen Mumia to do a return engagement at their graduation, Philadelphia police, politicians, media, and Fox News went crazy with angry rhetoric aimed at curbing free speech.
In the end, this breakdown in civil society resulted in nothing worse than hundreds of police-instigated threats of violence to the Goddard community. For the sake of security, Goddard moved the graduation up three hours, with no public announcement, and the full-house ceremony for 24 students went forward with private security and without incident.
In the week between the announcement and the event, "Mumia Abu-Jamal" the symbol served once again as a triggering Rorschach blot exposing aspects of American character in 2014, reflecting and denying realities decades and centuries past. In a sense what Goddard students provoked with their commencement speaker choice was a weeklong confrontation between the symbolic "Mumia Abu-Jamal" and the actual Mumia Abu-Jamal, without much success in joining them in there single, complex reality.
What does "Mumia Abu-Jamal" actually mean, or should he just be?
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