Unfolded Hands: Class Suicide and the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of Mary Ann Shadd

Abstract

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Barbara Christian. On an afternoon in April 2000, one of the more remarkable convocation ceremo­nies of this year, or any year for that matter, took place at Antioch University’s graduation proceedings. The ceremony was noteworthy both for its choice of commencement speaker, Mumia Abu-Jamal (the former Black Panther Minister of Information currently sitting on death row in a US prison), and for the latter’s call to commit “class suicide” as the explicit theme of his address. Abu-Jamal states that this topic is in response to the graduating class’s “proposed query about an individual’s impact on the world” (Abu-Jamal and Kissinger 3). He names several figures (Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Ella Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Y. Davis) who should appear on any “logical” list of people we admire for having impacted our world. Abu-Jamal then locates the common and decisive characteristic of these figures neither in race nor in their shared commit­ment to leftist politics.