Interview with Mumia Allen Hougland
Pennsylvania's new "control unit" prison, the State Correctional Institution at Waynesburg (SCI Greene), hides in rural hills just fifteen miles from the West Virginia border. Its low earth-toned block walls blend into the grassy clearing where it furtively crouches, surrounded by multiple layers of green metal fences ringed with double-edged razor wire.
Once inside, video producer Thomas Filmyer and I follow a genial female administrator through the stark bright corridors, passing through a series of sliding metal security doors to a cubicle where we will spend 90 minutes with Mumia Abu-Jamal.
As we enter the little cinderblock room, the official places herself outside; the door remains open during the interview Mumia is already seated, wearing a blue cotton shirt and steel handcuffs, long dreadlocks hanging over his shoulders. Appearing healthy and relaxed, he seems eager to begin talking. His deep voice echoes as it filters through narrow strips of screen at the ends of the thick Plexiglas barrier that separates him from us.
AH: Can you tell us who you are, in your own words?
MAJ: My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm in my early forties. I've been on death row since July of 1982 -- in fact, I've been on several death rows in Pennsylvania, in the United States of America. Despite my penal status I'm a writer, a journalist, a columnist, and a professional revolutionary.
AH: And you grew up in Philadelphia?
MAJ: I spent much of my youth in Philadelphia. As part of my membership in the Black Panther Party, I also spent time in other cities, working in other chapters of that organization. The bulk of my most formative years were spent in North Philly, in the heart of North Philadelphia.
AH: How would you describe your childhood there?
MAJ: Average -- absolutely unremarkable. Except, one would have to admit, for my exposure to the Black Panther Party, there's nothing remarkable about my childhood that distinguishes me from millions of other young kids of my generation. I grew up in a poor neighborhood, in what's commonly called the "peejays" or the projects, and spent most of my educational years in Philadelphia, in elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools. What makes it really unremarkable is the context of the times we're talking about -- the late sixties and early seventies, which was the explosion era of the black liberation movement. So there were many people of my generation who were active in the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, and other organizations that were overtly active at that time.
AH: You were born with a different name -- not Mumia Abu-Jamal, but Wesley Cook, right?
MAJ: Yes.
AH: When and why did you change your name?
MAJ: It was a change that took place over a transition of years -- not one day it was one name, and another day the next. Again, in the context of the times, in the years when the black liberation movement was growing and attracting the adherence of people who believed in that movement, many of us took African names. One of my teachers in a black high school in Philadelphia was actually a Kenyan who had come to teach Swahili. And it was his practice in his Swahili class to give names to students that were African. So that was my name: Mumia.
AH: And then the Abu-Jamal?
MAJ: Well, I'm actually named after my first son. It means "father of Jamal," and my first son is named Jamal. It's kind of a mix, in that my first name is Swahili, and my middle and last names are Arabic.
AH: How did your involvement with the Panthers go, and how did it not go, and how did it come to an end?
MAJ: I remember -- and of course we're talking about decades ago now -- but I remember it was probably one of the most exciting and liberational times of my life. Of course, for most people, their teen years are a time of freedom. Mine were a time of ultra, super freedom. It was a tremendous learning experience. The very fact that I, even from this place, am a journalist who writes and communicates with thousands and thousands of people every week -- its embryo can be found in the fact that I worked as a Panther in what's called the Ministry of Information. That means I worked filing reports to the national Black Panther Party journal called Black Panther -- Black Community News Service based in San Francisco and Oakland, California. But we also had regional papers that came out, like throw-aways or give-aways. I worked for the Ministry of Information in Philadelphia, in New York, and in other cities. So I was trained as a revolutionary journalist, trained to present the positions of the Black Panther Party from that revolutionary -- black revolutionary -- perspective.
I should add that many times, people will talk about that experience of mine, not from a position of knowledge, but from a position of opinion, and say, "well, that wasn't 'mainstream' journalism" or "when did you get into 'mainstream' journalism?" Of course, I hold that that experience was one of mainstream journalism. What does mainstream journalism mean if it does not mean that someone writes, edits, does graphic arts -- because in the Party we learned to do everything -- for a newspaper that is read by over 250,000 people a week? How many papers have a circulation that expansive? It was an international circulation. We covered international news, we made international news. Because at one point, at the Party's highest point -- before COINTELPRO ripped it asunder -- came the establishment of the Party's international office in North Africa, in Algiers. It was called the Inter-communal Section, under the former Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver. In essence, it was African-America's first international embassy -- an independent embassy of revolutionary African-America, where people allover the world could come and talk without the intercession of the United States Government.
And I say "without the intercession of the United States Government" because it is only fair, it is only honest, it is only accurate to point out that the function of the United States Government at that time and before and since has been to retard, destroy, disrupt, and tear asunder the black liberation and black nationalist movements of that period. That's proven by FBI files that have been released after the fact. How many people who celebrate the memory of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. know that the FBI hounded him relentlessly, tapped his phones and hotel rooms, worked through snitches, with the full blessings of the United States Government at the highest levels -- I mean in the White House? How many people know that's true of A. Philip Randolph, the African-American labor leader who helped create the march on Washington back in the early sixties? Or Marcus Garvey? Or Malcolm X? The list can go on and on. There's also Adam Clayton Powell, who was a Congressman from Harlem. Here he was, a Congressman, and he was under complete and total surveillance by the government of which he was a member. The late J. Edgar Hoover made it very clear that the function of the FBI was to prevent the rise of a black Messiah: anyone who could unite black America into one cohesive force.
AH: Where did he say that?
MAJ: He said that in his COINTELPRO papers, in his files. That's in the FBI files. If anyone finds that what I'm saying is in the least incredible, I would invite them to read a book written by a professor of political science named Kenneth O'Reilly. The book is called Black Americans: The FBI Files [Carroll & Graf, 1994].
AH: And so you felt the need for black revolution?
MAJ: Absolutely.
AH: What do you mean by that exactly, when you say "black revolution?"
MAJ: The word revolution means transformation; it means change. When one considers from any objective perspective the condition of African-American people in this country -- if you didn't find the need to change that condition for the better, then your interest was to keep things as they were, to preserve the status quo. If you look at the condition of African-Americans today, we're at the bottom of every social indicator -- in terms of educational attainment, in terms of work income, in terms of our life expectancy, in terms of our health. Every indicator of social well-being and status. Why are we at the bottom of those lists? I would say that it isn't a reality that could be isolated in 1970. It is a reality that continues to this day. Revolution is a necessity. Change is necessary -- to change a situation that is deadly to us.
AH: I have two quotes I want to read you. One of them from Frederick Douglass, saying: "Power concedes nothing without a demand." And the other, which you are quoted as having once said: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." I'd like you to talk about those two statements.
MAJ: Frederick Douglass may have said that over a hundred and fifty years ago, but that truth is certainly evident today, and will be evident for as long as men live. "Power concedes nothing without a demand." To the extent that African-Americans have moved out of de facto segregation and slavery in this country -- that didn't happen because one day America woke up and said, "I think we should give African-Americans their voting rights; we should stop discrimination against them in jobs and housing and so forth." No, it didn't happen like that. It happened because of the actions, the strategies, and the pains and the deaths, finally, of people like Dr. Martin Luther King, like Malcolm X, like Dr. Huey P. Newton -- people from a wide range of philosophical and ideological positions, people who made those demands on power. Had there not been a Malcolm X, there would not have been the effectiveness of a Dr. Martin Luther King, because both of them, in their different roles, communicated to the power structure: "We'd better go this way, or this way there'll be a consequence."
To the latter quotation, which -- I should say -- is from Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party -- that was something that was used in my case, as a justification to give me the death penalty. In the case Dawson vs. Delaware, in which the prosecutor introduced the defendant's Aryan Brotherhood membership, the U.S. Supreme Court found that violated his First Amendment right of association. Well, in the penalty phase of my trial, the prosecution introduced my membership of over a decade before, as a teenager, in the Black Panther Party. To a predominantly white jury, some of whom were relatives of police officers -- come on! What about the membership of the judge in the Fraternal Order of Police? That's irrelevant? When we raised that he said "Well, I was only a member for a few years." Well damn, I was only a member of the Black Panther Party for a few years. There's not even the appearance of balance here.
I think it only fair at this point to respond to the quote as I did then, when it was raised: how did Americans (or people who call themselves Americans) -- how did they acquire political power here in this country, if not through a gun? How did they prevail over the forces of the Crown, of Britain, in the so-called Revolutionary War, if not through the power and force of arms? How did they prevail over the native peoples of this country in the so-called Indian Wars, if not through force of arms? So one does not have to say this is a communist sentiment or a radical sentiment. It is a sentiment that arises from history, and is undeniable. It's very curious how people will talk about how proud they are to be an American, and ignore the very roots of what being American came from. If Americans did not fight with all the tools at their command -- including guns -- against the British, we'd all be speaking with a British accent and saying "God save the Queen."
AH: Mumia, about your later journalism work. Your work was guided by, you said, "the principle that we are oppressed black human beings first." As a result of the work you did in Philadelphia and in the U.S. in general in the seventies, you became known as "the voice of the voiceless," especially as regards the group MOVE. Can you talk about your later journalism work, and also tell us who MOVE is?
MAJ: Sure, that would be my honor. MOVE is a family of revolutionaries, of naturalist revolutionaries, founded in Philadelphia in the late sixties/early seventies, who oppose all that this system represents. For years in Philadelphia, there's been continual and unrelenting conflict between the MOVE organization and the city -- that is, the police, the judiciary, and the political arm of the system. They have fought it bitterly. We reporters have a herd mentality. Reporters tend to do what other reporters do -- it's almost like herd instinct. The "herd" in Philadelphia was describing MOVE in frankly animalistic or sub-human terms. I remember an editorial that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer that used, I think, precisely those terms: it said they were "sub-human." Wow! That was an editorial that just expressed a tone that was reflected in the coverage. Based on what I had read in the newspapers, I could not say that MOVE were my favorite people -- probably the opposite was the truth.
But I found something out that was very interesting when I began covering MOVE as part of my work as a reporter for a radio station that's now known as WWDB, WHAT at that time: I found out they were human beings. That doesn't sound like an earth-shattering revelation now, but it was then, because the complete dehumanization of them was almost total in terms of how local and regional media projected this group -- as though they were literally beyond the pale. What I found were idealistic, committed, strong, unshakable men and women who had a deep spirit-level aversion to everything this system represents. To them, this system was a death system involved in a deathly war. To them, everything this system radiated was poison -- from its technological waste to its destruction of the earth, to its destruction of the air and water, to its destruction of the very genetic pool of human life and animal life and all life. MOVE opposed all this bitterly and unrelentingly, without compromise.
I remember the first time I heard about MOVE -- perhaps it was a television report -- in the early seventies. Some of the MOVE people had gotten busted, and the gist of the television broadcast was: "These nuts, these crazy people, were protesting outside the zoo for no reason." Of course they didn't explain what MOVE's position was. Well, what you found later, when you got closer and began examining the reality, was that according to the teachings of MOVE's founder, John Africa, all life -- all life -- is sacred and has worth, and should not be exploited for money and profit. MOVE people were busted because they were protesting the reality of the zoo, which they called a "prison" for animal life. Today you have groups like Earth First and so forth, across the world, who embrace many of those same positions that were once called bizarre. MOVE did it twenty years ago. What I found was a remarkable and incredible family that continues to thrive, to grow, to grow stronger, to build, and to touch bases with people. I mean, if someone told me twenty years ago that there would be MOVE support groups in London and Paris, I'd have said: "Get out of here, you're out of your mind!" Today that's a reality.
AH: Do you consider MOVE founder John Africa to be your spiritual leader?
MAJ: Yes, absolutely, without question.
AH: When you talk about faith, your faith -- because you do bring up faith -- what do you mean?
MAJ: Faith simply means belief. People can put all kinds of tags and clothing on it and call it whatever they want to call it. But what you believe in, what has resonance for you, in your deepest self -- that's truly your faith. To some people that's money. To many, I guess, millions in America -- they will talk about "In God We Trust," but guess what -- they really trust money. Their faith, their real self, revolves around currency, money, wealth, status -- those kinds of things. I found in the teachings of John Africa a truth that was undeniable, that was powerful, that was naked, that was raw. And it talked about this system in a way that I wish I had the guts to talk about it and I wish I had the clarity to talk about it. MOVE members talked about it uncompromisingly, and not just talked about it, but lived it every day. In America we talk about religion. If you're Christian, you talk about Sunday. That's your religion: Sunday you go to church, Monday you do your thing. And the next Sunday you go back to church, and the next Monday you do your thing again. If you're Jewish, then Saturday is your Sabbath, and you go to temple and you say your prayers. If you're Muslim, then Friday is your day Juma'at. And what all of these religions really suggest in these days and times is a kind of compartmentalization of faith -- "this is your holy day." To MOVE, all days are holy days, because all life is holy. When you're out fighting for your brothers and sisters, you're practicing your religion. Faith means what you truly, absolutely believe. If you ask a MOVE person, "What is your religion?" he'll say "life."
AH: What would you say to the critics of MOVE and to people in the neighborhoods where they lived who have said that they were a disruption, a nuisance; that they were dirty, that they were noisy, that they were constantly proselytizing to the neighborhood and violating their neighbors' right to live in peace?
MAJ: I would say this -- and assume for the sake of argument that all of those criticisms were absolutely true: How noisy is a bomb? How disruptive is the destruction of sixty-one houses by fire? How alienating is massacre and mass murder? Because that's what the city gave people who said: "These MOVE nuts are a pain in our ass."
AH: Of course we're talking about the bombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia in 1985.
MAJ: Yes. On May 13, 1985, the city of Philadelphia literally shot tens of thousands of rounds into that house on Osage Avenue, and dropped a bomb, and let the fire burn for ten or twelve hours. And it consumed sixty-one houses, at last count. Was that disruptive of their neighborhood rights? Was that disruptive of life itself? Was that disturbing? I think that many people found themselves suckered by a political and police system that used neighborhood conflict and intensified it into urban war and almost Armageddon. I've lived in several parts of that city and in other cities. I've had neighbors who were pains in the ass -- I've had people play their music, and no matter what you said, you couldn't get them to turn it down, not unless you wanted to go down there and get into a fistfight or something. In many neighborhoods, in southwest Philadelphia today, you can't stick your head out the door without hearing submachine gun fire. Is that disruptive? Is the neighborhood alarmed when some drug-addicted punk pulls out an Uzi and shoots at a competitor? You got crack dealing, you got prostitution -- you have all the ills of society. But you know what you don't have? You don't have the government come down as if in a war as they did on May 13, 1985. You don't have that. Unless you have MOVE rebels and revolutionaries in their homes ...
AH: Mumia, about the death penalty -- with which you're well acquainted -- you have said that, "where the death penalty is concerned, law follows politics." And we have seen a change, an evolution -- if you want to call it that -- in death penalty law over the last twenty or twenty-five years.
MAJ: It might best be called a "devolution."
AH: Yes -- from the U.S. Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, which declared the death penalty unconstitutional as it was being applied at that time, 1972; through Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, which declared the death penalty would be constitutional if "guided discretion" were used in sentencing, requiring "objective standards" to be followed. Since then there has been a new tide of capital punishment in this country, with over three thousand condemned now. And the current Supreme Court seems inclined to curb the rights of appeal of the condemned. This is happening at the same time that other industrialized nations have all backed away from capital punishment. Can you talk about why you think it is that this country has devoted itself so wholeheartedly to executions at this point in time?
MAJ: I think the impetus for that reality arises from the same source from which arises the impetus for the unprecedented levels of incarceration of African-Americans, as compared with other sectors of the American population. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening in the United States of America. If you look at another North American society that is very, very similar in its history, you find a completely different reality. The society I'm speaking of, of course, is Canada. We share the same temporal space, the same continent, for the most part (except for Quebec) the same language, the same general Anglo-oriented legal traditions. Yet there you find no capital punishment. There you find a completely different perspective when one talks about the penal system -- the so-called correctional system. There it's almost unheard of for a man to be sentenced to more than twenty years in prison -- it has to be a mass ax-murder type of situation. And when you look at Canada and you examine it, and you look at the United States and you examine it, the elements that differ between those two societies cohere, I think, around the issue of race, around the issue of this country's history as a slave society, who relegated an entire people to a sub-human status.
In the infamous Dred Scott opinion of 1857, U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooks Taney said: "A Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." In that seminal case, the Supreme Court denied a petition of a slave for his freedom. He said: "I live in a free state, where there is no slavery, and therefore my slave status should be invalidated as a matter of law." The overwhelming majority of the United States Supreme Court, of Justice Taney's court said: "Uh-uh, you're wrong." What they said was:
When the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written, Africans were perceived as three-fifths of a person. When one speaks of 'we the people,' we were certainly not speaking of you. And therefore we cannot now give you the rights and appurtenances that apply to 'we the people.' The Constitution has no relevance to you and your kind, or to your descendants should they ever become free.
That's in the words of the Dred Scott opinion. And that spirit continues to resonate throughout American law.
People who are sticklers would say: "Well, the Fourteenth Amendment surely overruled that case." But if you look at that case and you examine its precedent, you will find that to this day, that case has yet to be judicially overruled. And where humans actually come in contact with their government is not in the voting booth -- I mean, that's an empty formality for many -- but it's in the courtroom. That's where most people literally meet their government. And it's in that courtroom where people find whether the rights they're told about truly exist. or don't exist. And for all intents and purposes, if one is poor, if one is African-American, if one lacks influence and power, then you come into that courtroom without the hope that you will walk out a free man. That is the undeniable reality in America.
The death penalty is unique in American law, in that if you really examine the process, you'll come away with a lot of curious ideas about how it works in reality, as opposed to how it's supposed to work in theory. I'll tell you why. In capital case law, unlike any other law, from the very beginning, under the case Wainright v. Whit, a juror can be excluded if he or she has any opinion against capital punishment. So therefore you have what's called a pro-prosecution jury -- from the beginning -- who must swear that they can give the death penalty before they hear one word of evidence. Studies have shown this jury is prone to convict, that it is pro-prosecution and anti-defendant in the extreme, compared to any other jury in American jurisprudence. That's how you begin the process.
Isn't it also odd that at this stage of the process, where you're under the threat of having not just your liberty but your life stolen by the State, you're equipped with the worst counsel the system provides -- court-appointed counsel, with no financial resources. Often, while they may have good hearts, they have the least training, because capital case law is distinct from any other kind of law. In Philadelphia, if a person is charged with a capital offense, he gets a court appointed lawyer. At the time of my trial, the fee for the lawyer was only $2,500. Out of that, he was supposed to provide investigators, ballisticians, forensic experts, psychologists, whatever. He was a sole practitioner -- he had no investigator, no paralegal -- he had a secretary and himself. We had absolutely no resources. We had nothing. I didn't have to be a wild-eyed, raving, Black Panther or MOVE maniac to say: "Fuck, I'll represent myself." If all he could do was get a motion denied, I could do that. But the court denied me my constitutional right to represent myself. They insisted this guy take over my defense, first as backup counsel and later as lead counsel. I didn't want him as lead counsel -- or backup counsel, for that matter.
AH: Do you think he really cared?
MAJ: I think that he cared at the beginning, but our relationship as client and counsel really deteriorated -- when he was put in the position of backup counsel, all that went out the window. Because he testified under oath that for four or five weeks he sat on his hands. He later got up at a hearing and said: "I was ineffective." And the District Attorney said: "No, you weren't ineffective. You were a great lawyer -- it was just that your client was really difficult, right!" And he said: "No, I was ineffective. I didn't do what I should have done. I should have done this, I didn't do that." And he's asked why he didn't do it and he says: "I didn't think of it" or "I forgot" or "I was too busy." Damn, isn't that ineffective? Can you say I had effective representation? And now you have the judge saying this guy was a great lawyer, that he had extensive law enforcement experience, that he had handled twenty-seven capital cases. That's a lie. Literally, my case was the first case he'd handled in private practice -- he had just left a public interest law firm.
Well, as a result these lawyers prepare very little -- thanks to such small resources with which to prepare. Isn't it odd that you get that kind of lawyer at that point, appointed by the court! The court decides when that lawyer gets paid, if that lawyer gets paid, and how much that lawyer gets paid. So you have a lawyer who's beholden to the court for his fees. You get the worst possible legal help at the beginning of the process, but months or years later, after you're under a death warrant, you might be appointed three or four high-caliber Harvard-trained lawyers from one of the biggest law firms in the state -- along with paralegals, investigators, psychologists? Does it strike you as an ass-backwards system? Well, that's the system that exists. That has been the lived experience of most men on death row. Is that a fair system? Why can't a man go to trial with the best lawyer if he's faced with death, rather than wait until he's under a death warrant?
AH: Tell us about a typical day here.
MAJ: A typical day begins at 6:25 a.m. A guard enters a "pod" of twenty-four men and announces "yard." "Yard list! Yard list!" If you're up, you can sign up by shouting out your number or your name. By 6:35, the morning meal arrives -- a tray is delivered to your door. By 7:05, "yard" is allowed. "Yard" is a euphemism -- it actually means" cage," because men go out into the cages here, being counted. You can go one, two, three, four at a time. That "yard" or "cage" period lasts for one hour. Then one goes back into his cell, and unless you have a visitor, you don't leave that cell until 7:05 the next morning. It's twenty-three hours lock-in, one hour outside, five days a week. On weekends, it's twenty-four hours lock-in. If you don't have a visitor, if you don't go to the law library -- which is two hours, once or twice a week -- you're in that cell.
AH: And nothing happens?
MAJ: Nothing happens unless you make it happen. Other than that, you're in that cell.
AH: So what do you do to hold up under those conditions?
MAJ: I'm an addicted writer and reader. I try to read everything I can get my paws on. I just finished reading two books by Alice Walker -- The Temple of My Familiar; and her most recent book. I've read Toni Morrison's Jazz. I've also read Strange Justice by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, on the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas. I try to read as much as I can.
AH: How do you deal with the fact that you may be executed?
MAJ: I deal with it day to day. I mean, you can't, obviously, just dwell on that reality. You do the best you can every day to transform that reality into a new reality. Luckily, thanks to my book Live from Death Row, I have lawyers, very good lawyers, working on my case for the first time. So, you do your daily thing to keep well, to keep sane, to keep strong -- to stay human.
AH: Do you feel that you've had an unusual share of bad luck?
MAJ: No, I really don't.
AH: Why have you attracted this fate, if I may put it that way?
MAJ: I think that I have a certain history, and because of my history, I have my share of enemies -- political, governmental. How many people can brag -- and I use that term with a little humor -- about having an FBI file from the time they were fourteen? I have. Phone calls, mail, the whole deal -- I've been tracked by the FBI since I was a child. Dogged by them for my political beliefs, my political expressions, my political associations. If you were to review my FBI file, of course you'd find a lot of nonsense in it because that's what FBI files have in them. But you'd find an attempt by the government, when I was perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, to frame me for two murders in another country. What saved me was my work record -- my hourly work record showed that I not only wasn't in that country, but that I was at work doing what I was supposed to be doing. They also tried to frame me when I went to college in Vermont for a robbery of some sort. And I'm finding this out reading these records years later.
AH: Are these publicly available records?
MAJ: Oh, yeah -- through the Freedom of Information Act. You can contact my lawyers, and I'm sure they can give you summaries or even copies of some of them. We found roughly eight-hundred pages of FBI files -- some blacked out, with whole pages edited out. They wrote letters to people in my name, signed them, sent them -- letters that were complete lies. This is what the government admits to doing. And ultimately, what that record says -- not what I say, but what that record testifies to -- is a history of aggression. Not by me -- you can't look at that record and find any evidence of any crime. But you can find lots of evidence of government crimes against one of their so-called "citizens" because of his political beliefs and associations. Because as a young man I spoke out as part of the Ministry of Information of the Black Panther Party. And I spoke about black liberation. That made me part of their target.
AH: Mumia, some would say you have the best of all possible worlds being in the United States. That you have the right to a representative jury, and you have the prohibition of the use of race as a bias in judicial proceedings. They'd say, go anywhere else in the world and you won't find it as good as you find it here.
MAJ: On some level, that's probably true. It's certainly true that that is the law as it is written. The question is, not what the law says, but what the law does -- what the law is in application, not in just theoretical formulation. In the very real world -- in the city of Philadelphia, with perhaps a 45% African-American population, many people like myself on death row have had an overwhelmingly white jury determine guilt or innocence, life or death. The U.S. Supreme Court has said countless times: "You can't do that." Well, they did that. They did it in my case, they did it in a number of people's cases. So it appears you can do that, because it happens every day. It happens every day because prosecutors routinely remove African-Americans from juries when they want a white jury, when it's a cross-racial case. So what it says on the books and what it actually means when one walks into the courtroom is often two different things.
In the famous case Batson v. Kentucky (it's relatively recent -- 1986, I believe) the Supreme Court required trial judges to assess a prosecutor's reasons for striking a minority juror, in order to determine whether he intended to discriminate. For years and years and years the late Justice Thurgood Marshall had been fighting for that principle. Justices across the country and lawyers had been fighting for that principle. Well, they won it in terms of that opinion; it's published in law books and sent to and taught in law schools. But what does it mean in the courtroom? It means next to nothing. Because you still have a predominantly white judiciary that protects the power class, that looks at the situation and looks the other way. About fifty miles from here in the city of Pittsburgh, there's a case that's stirring a great deal of controversy, because of a Judge Manning of the Court of Common Pleas of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County. Five witnesses have testified that Justice Manning -- in a nonjudicial setting, but a public setting nonetheless -- spoke to a woman who was a security guard at an airport thusly: "That's what happens when you give a fucking nigger a job." These are white people who claim this guy said that. I don't know if he said it or not but you have five eyewitnesses who swore in statements that this judge of the Court of Common Pleas said it. My point is: What does that translate to when that judge is sitting in office, in his robes, and he has a defendant in front of him who looks like me, and he has to decide what his jury looks like? What does it mean if that judge becomes a Supreme Court justice? And what does it really mean, and what does it matter, what is written in the books -- if what's written in the hearts and minds and souls of people is still, in the words of Justice Taney, that a black man "has no rights that a white man is bound to respect?"
In terms of Batson, the evidence in my case is just so clear, so insurmountable. In the context not so much of what happened at the trial, but what happened at last summer's Petition for Post-Conviction Relief hearings in Philadelphia, where we found out that the Commonwealth agreed that the jury numbers they presented to the Supreme Court on direct appeal were wrong. They said eight African-Americans were removed from my original jury; my lawyer on appeal said eleven were removed. Well, we found two of those persons. We couldn't find the third one, but we found two. So they had to admit, "OK, we were wrong, ten were removed." So it was ten out of fourteen. Now, my math is very poor, but I think it's at least 71% of potential African-Americans that were excluded on the basis of race. There are cases that say if you can show a 56% removal rate, you have a prima facie Batson claim ...
AH: You have said that you "live in the fastest-growing public housing tract in America."
MAJ: I do.
AH: You've described torture, theft, terror, humiliation, degradation, brutality. Do you stand by all that?
MAJ: Absolutely. A lot of people who don't know this reality have perhaps read my book Live from Death Row and reacted to it with complete incredulity. The reality is that my book is a toned-down, stripped, bare-bones, objective version of the reality I'm living on death row, in the hole -- of what I've seen, what I've smelt; the bodies I've seen carried out of here.
If I wrote pure stream of consciousness, no publisher would publish it, and any reader would say it's fiction.
The reality is that this is a world that is, by design, closed. Were it not for a court order and our civil action, this very interview would not have transpired. Six months ago, it would not have been allowed. As we speak, the state of California has announced a moratorium on all interviews with all prisoners throughout the penal system. There's a reason for that. It's to keep people in the dark.
AH: Mumia, thank you for talking with us today.
The prison official signals that our time is up; then a guard comes into Mumia's side of the cubicle and motions for him to follow. Mumia raises his cuffed hands in a kind of salute, his eyes fixed on us, and says in a loud, cheerful voice: "Ona move!" He then turns and goes out. As do all Pennsylvania death row inmates before and after a visit, Mumia will endure a body-cavity strip search before returning to the isolation of his cell. Meanwhile, we banter with the prison administrator as we pack up our gear and walk back through the quiet, lonely corridors. She tells us of her twelve-year-old son, and how she does not want him to ever work in prisons.
Waynesburg, PA February 8, 1996
