We, Black women, are mothers in more ways than one.

We are the mothers or mothers-to-be of our Black daughters and sons.

We nurture our warriors with the hope and the love that is at the root of all resistance.

We are the mothers of the lynched ones – and of all those who died in the struggle but still live in our hearts.

It is to us that their spirits return because there were so often no bodies, no graves, no mourning.

We are the mothers of the Revolution.

I remember a story told by my father, Richard Wright, in “Uncle Tom’s Children” where a Black mother goes to retrieve the body of the son the white supremacists are about to lynch. She meekly carries a sheet outwardly intended as a shroud but secretly hiding a pistol. She is able to shoot down one of her son’s torturers before being slain with her son.

I remember Maimie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, who moved mountains to have her 14 year old son’s lynched remains returned from the oblivion of an unmarked Mississippi grave to Chicago. There she decreed an open coffin for the whole world to see. The child’s innocence and his mother’s love gave birth to the civil rights movement.

I remember Sister Yuri Kochiyama, mother of six, cradling Malcolm X’s agony after he was shot down, ten years after Emmett Till’s lynching, in the Audubon Ballroom.

Yuri’s scribbled notes on the events that night already presciently pointed to Raymond Woods’ implication.

I will always recall going with Yuri and Pam Africa to visit Mumia.

The voice of Chairman Fred Hampton Jr is still scarred by the staccato tempo of the bullets he heard in his mother’s womb.

And how can we forget George Floyd placing himself in his mother’s hands as he takes his last breath.

Mumia’s 39-year long struggle for justice behind bars speaks to the mothers we are.

He is our brother, father, grandfather but most of all he is our revolutionary native son because time froze his freedom prematurely at the age of 27 when he was brutally framed and nearly killed by the most corrupt police force in the country.

What will we Black mothers do for our native son ?

We, Black women, are legion.

Training prosecutors in Pennsylvania were taught to exclude us from their juries because we are said to be prone to anger.

We are demonized, deleted, shunned, raped – so yes we are angry.

Our anger is rooted in our deep capacity to love.

We ,who love Mumia and all he stands for, we who are legion, will know how to seize the time and stand for him as COVID-19 and congestive heart failure put his life at serious risk again in carceral isolation.

As Sister Assata said : “It is too late for Malcolm but we can still save Mumia.”

Let’s bring Mumia Home!

The only treatment now is Freedom!

Let all our elders and political prisoners go!

Message from Julia Wright to the Million Woman March Movement for International Women’s Rights Day

March 6th 2021