Alice Walker once said of Mummia
abu-Jamal that "He reminds me of Nelson Mandela.".
Mumia Abu-Jamal was the victim of a frame-up 37 years ago on charges of
killing a cop. He is one of the last
Black Panther prisoners and having caught Hepatitis C in prison, he now has
cirrhosis of the liver. He was only cured of Hep C after a legal fight because
the prison authorities did not want to spend the money on a cure. One assumes
that given the nature of the US medical system the only cure for cirrhosis, a
liver transplant, is out of the question.
Mumia’s long and determined fight against a system that for many years
kept him on death row is a testament to his political will and consciousness.
It is to be hoped that the decision to give him the chance of appeal won’t be
appealed by the current Pennsylvanian authorities who pose as being more
progressive.
Tony Greenstein
A Court decision in Philadelphia will allow Mumia
Abu-Jamal to reargue his case. Mumia has spent 37 years in prison after being
falsely convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981.
Mumia
Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and renowned writer and activist of 64 years,
who has spent 37 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, has been
allowed to reargue his case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. A judge in
Philadelphia delivered the decision on December 27 on the grounds that the
Chief Justice at the time of sentencing, Ronald Castille, refused to recuse
himself from the case despite his earlier role as a district attorney during
Abu-Jamal’s appeal.
Activists
across the world celebrated the decision by the court that could mean that
freedom for the 64 year old revolutionary is within reach.
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| Let is not be thought that the poison of Rupert Murdoch is only confined to the Sun - here the radio equivalent Fox News demonstrates its faux outrage at the idea that an innocent person might be granted an appeal |
Abu-Jamal
was arrested in 1981 on charges of killing a white police officer, Daniel
Faulkner. In 1982, he was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that was
filled with violations and irregularities, including witnesses changing their
testimonies several times, court clerks stating that they wanted to convict him
and concrete proof of evidence tampering, among others.
The sentence
was condemned by activists and human rights organizations across the globe and
since then, there has been a fierce campaign demanding his release. In 2011,
after strong pressure and campaigns, Mumia was sentenced to life without parole
and was moved off the death row.
After he was
moved off death row, Mumia talked to Democracy Now in a rare live interview in
2013 about what it felt like: “Well, I
could, but I’d be lying, because I call this “slow death row.” “Life” in
Pennsylvania means life. Pennsylvania has one of the largest “life” populations
of any State in the United States. It has the distinction of having the
absolute highest number of juvenile lifers of any state in the United
States—indeed, of any jurisdiction in the world. So, that should give you some
sense.”
A couple
years ago, activists had to fight a sustained struggle in order for Mumia to
have access to proper health care when his life was at risk. After Mumia fell
ill in prison, it was discovered that he was suffering from hepatitis C. The
Pennsylvania prison system refused to treat Mumia or the other 7,000 prisoners
suffering from hepatitis C, as the treatment cost would be around $100,000. His
legal team filed a suit and won and guaranteed treatment for Mumia, a decision
which not only affected him but set a precedent for other incarcerated people
to have access to treatment.
Though these
victories are important, the objective for activists has always been and will
always be Mumia’s complete freedom, (and that of all political prisoners).
The latest
verdict represents a new possibility in the struggle for Mumia’s freedom. In
the appeal, Mumia’s defense team may have the opportunity to present all of the
violations that have occurred throughout the legal process, information that
unequivocally points to bias by the judiciary to seal his sentence. However,
like all of the victories that have been achieved thus far in Mumia’s case, and
in the cases of many other political prisoners, a victory in the courtroom now
will only be possible if if there is accompaniment and solidarity from
activists and movements across the world.
The best
known of all incarcerated black radicals speaks out in a two-year email
correspondence with Ed Pilkington on the ‘continuum’ of the Black
Panthers to Black Lives Matter
Mon 30 Jul 2018
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| Former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Photograph: April Saul/Philadelphia Inquirer |
The letter was dated 30 August 2016. Written in black ink in spidery,
meticulous handwriting, it proclaimed at the top of the page: “On a Move!”, the
mantra of the Move group of black liberationists from Philadelphia who clashed
violently with the city’s police force 40 years ago, sending nine of them to
prison for decades.
The author was Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is the closest thing that exists
today to an imprisoned Black Panther celebrity. He joined the Black Panther party in the 1960s when he was just 14, and later became a prominent
advocate for the Move organization.
For the past 36 years he has been incarcerated in Pennsylvania prisons,
including two decades spent on death row, having been convicted of murdering a
police officer at a Philadelphia street corner in 1981. His case has
reverberated around the world, inspiring admiration and opprobrium in equal
measure, in what has become a global cause-celebre.
As such, he could be regarded as the figurehead of the cadre of
imprisoned African-American militants who are still behind bars today.
Collectively they amount to the unfinished business of the 1970s black
liberation struggle, as they languish still in prison in some cases almost half
a century after they went in.
By the Guardian’s count, there are 19 of them, two women included. That
headcount is very slowly being diminished, as the debate around whether they
have earned their freedom grows more intense with every passing year.
Last week one of Abu-Jamal’s peers, Robert Seth Hayes, was released from
a New York maximum security prison on parole having served 45 years for the
murder of a city transit officer.
I had sent that initial letter to Abu-Jamal to ask his views about
Albert Woodfox, a former Black Panther from Louisiana who had been held in
solitary confinement in a 6ft by 9ft concrete box for 43 years until his release a few months earlier.
In my opening letter to Abu-Jamal, I’d mentioned that the warden of
Angola penitentiary in the 1990s, Burl Cain, had tried to justify keeping
Woodfox in total isolation for four decades because of the prisoner’s
commitment to “Black Pantherism”.
Abu-Jamal, 64, found that expression very diverting, judging by his
response. Until Woodfox’s “illegal and
unjust imprisonment,” he wrote back, “I
had never heard nor read of the so-called crime of ‘Black Pantherism’! Leave it
to the prisoncrats of Angola to actually coin the term!”
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| A supporter of inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal outside City Hall in Philadelphia, in 2006. Photograph: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images |
Then Abu-Jamal did something that was to become familiar to me over the
ensuing months. He took that one comment of a Louisiana prison warden and
riffed off it to create an entire social theory of modern American society.
“As we see
from the obscene and unprecedented mass incarceration of Black people,” he wrote, “‘Black Pantherism’ is but a synonym for
Blackness itself. For in a society deeply imbued with white supremacy,
Blackness is itself a crime.”
Abu-Jamal spent 20 years on death row and during that time concerns
about the fairness of his death sentence drew international attention. Amnesty
International took up his cause, the New York Times crowned him the “world’s best known death-row
inmate” and a Paris street was named after him. Among the movie stars,
writers and intellectuals who protested on his behalf were Paul Newman, Alice
Walker, Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky.
As impressive as the high-profile support he attracted over the years
was the vitriol he inspired in detractors. Philadelphia police unions worked
tirelessly to keep him on death row and since he was moved to the general
prison population in 2012 they have continued to work equally tirelessly to
prevent him going free.
Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the police officer
Abu-Jamal was convicted of murdering, has been equally consistent. Earlier this
year she wrote a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which she said the real political
prisoners in this story were her family. “We
committed no crime, yet we received life sentences with no possibility of
parole or reprieve.”
In April, when Abu-Jamal’s case came up before a Philadelphia judge in a
legal dispute over the handling of his appeals, Maureen Faulkner appeared on the steps of the court and proclaimed to local TV cameras: “Mumia Abu-Jamal will not – not ever – be
free, and I will make sure of that.”
My initial letter to Abu-Jamal in August 2016 developed into a
correspondence that continues two years later. Over time it mushroomed into a
larger project in which I reached out to several of his peers – black radicals
incarcerated like him for decades – in an attempt to understand how they came
to be given such lengthy sentences and how they cope with their enduring
punishment today.
At a time when America is still grappling with the racial
legacy of slavery and segregation, when
the issue of police brutality has welled up
again through Black Lives Matter, when
at least one in four black males born today can expect to end up in prison, and when
inequality shows no sign of
abating for African Americans, there is
renewed interest in the perspective of the Black Panthers. Just ask Beyoncé, who injected a Black Panther homage into the 2016 Super Bowl.
Black Pantherism’ is but a synonym for Blackness itself. For in a
society deeply imbued with white supremacy, Blackness is itself a crime
And so Abu-Jamal and I began to correspond. We would contact each other
through a closed email network set up by the Pennsylvania prison system.
With each email I would try and probe a little deeper, trying to get
under the skin of what it was to be a black radical for whom, in some sense,
time had stood still through long years of incarceration. Sometimes he would
answer in short staccato emails, as though his mind were elsewhere; sometimes
he would be thoughtful and expansive.
Sometimes he didn’t reply for weeks. It’s remarkable how busy a man locked
up around the clock can be. “I’ve been meaning to write to you,” he said in
November 2017, “but my projects (I just finished my booklet last nite) have
eaten my time – oops, I’m about to get on the phone…”
In our exchanges he reflected on how he had become involved as a teenage
boy in the black resistance struggle of the late 1960s, and why decades later
so many black militants remain behind bars. He talked also about how his
militancy as a former Panther relates to the critical movements of today, notably
Black Lives Matter, which controversially he called a “continuum” of the Black
Panthers.
Early on, I asked him why he thought the judicial system had borne down
on him singularly harshly by giving him the death penalty. He replied in an
email on 23 September 2016: “I think we posed an existential challenge to the
very legitimacy of the System – and it unleashed unprecedented fury from the
State. That’s why they used any means, even illegal, to extinguish what they
saw as a Threat.”
He added: “The State reserves its
harshest treatment for those it sees as revolutionaries.”
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| Construction workers at a rally in 2001 near the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calling for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution. Photograph: Tom Mihalek/AFP/Getty Images |
Mumia Abu-Jamal was born Wesley Cook and brought up in a low-income
African American neighborhood of Philadelphia. He was given the name Mumia by a
high school teacher as part of a class on African culture and he later changed
his last name to Abu-Jamal (“father of Jamal”) when his son was born in 1971.
In 1968, when he was 14, a friend introduced him to a copy of the Black
Panther party’s newspaper, and he was instantly transfixed. “A sister gave me a copy of The Black
Panther newspaper and I was dazzled,” he wrote to me in an email. “I made up my mind to become one of them.”
Three years of head-spinning activity ensued as a Black Panther in Philadelphia.
The party, though relatively small in numbers, quickly began to make an impact
with its revolutionary talk, its audacious opposition to police brutality in
black neighborhoods, and its social programs that quickly expanded to include
food and clothing banks for low-income communities and even Black Panther
elementary schools.
The city at that time, he told me, was a place of “intoxicating freedom, and gripping fear. The freedom? To be active in
a part of a vast Black Freedom Movement was Living, Breathing, Being Freedom.
We spoke and acted in the world in ways our parents never dreamed possible.”
The fear? “Every Panther knew, in
her/his heart, that the State was willing to kill a Panther in his/her bed.”
He was alluding to the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in a
police raid on a Panther house in Chicago in December 1969. Hampton was shot
and killed while asleep in bed. A subsequent federal
investigation into the killing found that in
the shoot-out the Panthers had fired one bullet, while the police fired up to
99.
“I was one of several Panthers
sent to Chicago,” Abu-Jamal wrote in an email. “We entered the apartment. We saw the bullet
holes which raked the walls. We saw the mattress, swollen with Fred’s blood. I
was 15.”
The death of Hampton was just one of several bloody shootouts that
erupted as confrontations between law enforcement and the Panthers became more
frequent. Many years later it was revealed that the FBI had put several
prominent members of the movement – the teenage Abu-Jamal included – under a
vast web of surveillance.
The State reserves its harshest treatment for those it sees as
revolutionaries
The FBI’s director J Edgar Hoover had come to see the Panthers, with
their links to revolutionary parties around the world and growing popularity in
black inner cities, as a major threat to national security. He instructed his
agents to redirect the secret domestic surveillance operation, known as
“Cointelpro”, specifically onto black radicals.
Abu-Jamal recalled the naivety that existed within the Panther party
about the governmental forces targeted at them.
“We didn’t
know about Cointelpro. When people raised questions, we’d laugh at them and
tell them: ‘Stop being paranoid!’ The very idea the government would read your
mail, or listen to your phone calls, was crazy! We never believed we were important
enough.”
The FBI certainly did think them important enough. It made sure the
party was thoroughly infiltrated with informers, leaders were rounded up and
imprisoned, internal dissent fomented. By 1970 open warfare had started to
break out between west coast and east coast factions of the party, leading to
threats, expulsions and internecine violence.
An exodus of Panthers began, among them Abu-Jamal who quit the party
towards the end of 1970. From then, he turned his hand to journalism, becoming
a prominent reporter on Philadelphia race relations as well as a vocal
supporter of Move.
It was not until 1982 that the Black Panther party formally disbanded.
By then Abu-Jamal was already in captivity and facing murder charges relating
to the death of Officer Faulkner.
The events of the early hours of 9 December 1981 have been the subject
of reams of analysis and conjecture over the past almost four decades. Faulkner
carried out a traffic stop at an intersection in Philadelphia, pulling over
William Cook, Abu-Jamal’s younger brother.
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| Demonstrators supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal in Los Angeles, California, in 2000. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images |
Abu-Jamal at that time was working as a taxi driver to supplement his
journalism income. He happened to be driving past when he spotted the
altercation between Faulkner and his brother.
A shootout occurred. Faulkner died at the scene from gunshot wounds.
Abu-Jamal was shot once in the stomach. In June 1982 he was put on trial, found
guilty and sentenced to death.
Since then he has consistently professed his innocence of the charges
leveled against him, though he has declined to discuss what actually did happen
that night. I wrote to Abu-Jamal in June asking him whether he’d talk to me
about Faulkner’s death. I said: “So what
did happen? What do you recollect of the incident? Who shot Officer Faulkner?”
Earlier this month he replied to me. He began the email by saying that
he’d just returned from the eye doctor who in order to inspect his inner eye
had dilated his pupils. “My vision is so
impaired that I can’t read the newspaper so this won’t be long, I haffa be
quite brief.”
He did address his case, in general terms. “The question arises, how can you getta fair result with an unjust,
unfair process? Due process. A judge who wuzza life member of the FOP
[Fraternal Order of Police] said at one of my hearings: ‘Justice is just an
emotional feeling’.”
Abu-Jamal did not address in the email my questions about the specifics
of his own case.
While doubts persist about the nature of the crime, what is not in doubt
is that Abu-Jamal’s prosecution, as he remarked, was riddled with flaws.
Amnesty International investigated it in 2000 and concluded that though they
could not pronounce on his guilt or innocence, “numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum
international standards”.
A long struggle to fend off execution followed, sending reverberations
around the globe. Twice he had a death warrant issued that would have sent him
to the death chamber; twice it was averted in the courts.
Every Panther knew, in her/his heart, that the State was willing to kill
a Panther in his/her bed
It took two decades of almost constant appeals to overturn his
death sentence in a federal court. Since moving
off death row, he has more privileges but he’s less in the limelight now, less
of an international figure, as he alluded to when I asked him how much mail he
receives. “I probably get 6-10 pieces a
day or 30 to 50 pieces a week (which is nothing like I used to get).”
He has slowed down in recent years in other ways too. “I used to read
2-3 books a week. Now? 2 per month. It’s a different environment. I leave the
cell often here: not so on death row.”
As he gets older, health becomes more of an issue. He fought a tough
legal battle after the Pennsylvania department of corrections denied him
treatment for Hepatitis C, winning a federal
court ruling that has set a precedent that
will help thousands of other prisoners across the country defeat the virus.
He complains though that the prison authorities are still denying
treatment to many inmates on grounds they aren’t sick enough. “People are dying
from their denials and delays. Literally. $$$ over life.”
Despite health issues, he keeps closely engaged with political currents.
In March I asked him what he thought were the similarities and contrasts
between the Black Panthers in the 1970s and Black Lives Matter today. I was
curious to see whether he was critical of BLM in an echo of the criticism the
Panthers directed in the 1970s at the civil rights movement – that it’s a
reformist compromise rather than the black power revolution that’s needed.
He replied that in his view the Panthers and BLM are “part of a
continuum. The BPP was born in an age of global revolution. Black Lives Matter
came into being during an era of sociopolitical conservatism, and rightist
ideological ascendance. What is possible is subject to the zeitgeist of the
period.”
He went on: “I am reminded of [Frantz] Fanon’s adage: ‘Every generation
must, out of relative obscurity, find its destiny, and fulfill it or betray
it.’ I think both movements have done so, if only in their own ways.”
He also keenly follows his fellow imprisoned black radicals’ efforts to
gain their freedom, decades after they were arrested. In one email, sent in
May, he commented on the release of Herman Bell, a former Black Panther and
member of its clandestine wing the Black Liberation Army, who had secured his
own parole a couple of months before partly by denouncing his involvement in
the struggle. There was “nothing political” in the double police killing that
he was involved in, Bell told the parole board, “it was murder and horribly
wrong”.
Abu-Jamal told me that in his view Bell’s release was the exception that
proves the rule. “If a man is only truly parole-eligible if he renounces his
political ideas, how could those who aren’t ‘eligible’ because they aren’t
renunciators be seen as anything but political prisoners?”
What I always find interesting is how profoundly different the American systems
of ‘justice’ are from those that exist abroad
There are many who will disagree with the argument that the 19
imprisoned Black Panthers and Move members are political prisoners. For the
police unions and the families of victims, they are “cop killers”, pure and
simple.
Yet no one could accuse Abu-Jamal of being a “renunciator”. Since coming
off death row he has been resentenced and put onto life without parole. That
means that he has no chance of ever persuading a parole board to release him, which
in turn, paradoxically, has given him his own kind of freedom – to speak his
mind.
“Parole is a
political tool,” he wrote. “It’s
especially used against radicals to punish them for their political beliefs. I
think it should be abolished. Period.”
One of the most evocative emails he sent me was composed on New Year’s
Eve last year. Maybe the end of the year had put him in a reflective mood, or
maybe the calendar means nothing to a man who has lived for 37 years in a cell.
In any case, he started riffing again, this time about the US justice
system. He talked about how parole appeared to be a pipe-dream for black
radicals in particular.
He referenced the Move 9 again, the group from his home town of
Philadelphia, six of whom will next week mark the 40th anniversary of their
incarceration. He spoke too of other former Black Panthers who had in recent
years been granted release orders only to have them overturned by the higher
courts.
Then he switched, in his own rather professorial way, to a more personal
point. “What I always find interesting is
how profoundly different the American systems of ‘justice’ are from those that
exist abroad,” he wrote. “Under
Pennsylvania law, life means life, with no parole eligibility for anybody.”
For “anybody”, read Mumia Abu-Jamal. He went on to spell out for my
benefit his probable fate.
Legal scholars and activists in Pennsylvania have a name for it, he
said: “Death by incarceration”.
UPDATE
