Live From Death Row, by Mumia Abu-Jamal

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Part Three: Musings, Memories, and Prophecies

Musings on Malcolm

Thanks to the efforts of premier filmmaker Spike Lee, the name Malcolm X is once again on millions of lips. Based largely on the Autobiography of Malcolm X, penned by the late Alex Haley, the film tells the epic tale of a man who was indeed larger than life.

This is not, and cannot be, a film review, for I have never seen the film, for reasons that should be obvious. Rather, it is a musing on the life that gave both Haley and Spike grist for their mills.

Few black men lived a life as full of glory and tragedy as did he; Martin Luther King, Jr., did; and to a lesser extent so did Marcus Garvey, as well as the late Black Panther cofounder Dr. Huey P. Newton. As were King and Newton, Malcolm X was assassinated, but perhaps the similarity ends there. For as America lionized, lauded, and elevated King (more for his non-violent philosophy than for his person), it ignored and ignominized Malcolm (as it did Dr. Newton, a Malcolmite, as were most Panthers), whose obituaries dwelt on the dark side, ignoring the brilliance of his life, a force that still smoulders in black hearts thirty years after his assassination in New York City.

The system used the main nonviolent themes of Martin Luther King's life to present a strategy designed to protect its own interests -- imagine the most violent nation on earth, the heir of Indian and African genocide, the only nation ever to drop an atomic bomb on a civilian population, the world's biggest arms dealer, the country that napalmed over ten million people in Vietnam (to "save" it from communism), the world's biggest jailer, waving the corpse of King, calling for nonviolence!

The Black Panther Party considered itself the Sons of Malcolm (at least many male Panthers did) for the sons he never had (Malcolm and his wife, Dr. Betty Shabazz, had a passel of stunning daughters), and inherited one of their central tenets, black self-defense, from his teachings.

While the eloquent, soaring oratory of Dr. King touched, moved, and motivated the southern black church, middle and upper classes, and white liberal predominantly Jewish intelligentsia, his message did not find root in the black working class and urban north, a fact noted by his brilliant, devoted aide-de-camp the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who noted in his autobiography that in Chicago King met glacial white hatred, black indifference, and near disaster.

Northern-bred blacks preferred a more defiant, confrontational, and militant message than turn the other cheek, and Malcolm X provided it in clear, uncompromising terms. His message of black self-defense and African-American self-determination struck both Muslim and non-Muslim alike as logical and reasonable, given the decidedly unchristian behavior displayed by America to the black, brown, red, and yellow world.

The media, as Malcolm predicted, would attempt to homogenize, whiten, and distort his message. How many have read of him, in a recent newspaper, described as a "civil rights" leader -- a term he loathed! Stories tell of his "softening" toward whites after his sojourn to Mecca, conveniently ignoring that Malcolm continued to revile white Americans, still in the grips of a racist system that crushes black life -- still! Post-Mecca Malik found among white-skinned Arabs and European converts to Islam a oneness that he found lacking in Americans. So deeply entrenched was racism in American whites that Malcolm/Malik sensed the intrinsic difference in how the two peoples saw and described themselves. Arabs, calling themselves white, referred simply to skin tone; Americans meant something altogether different: "You know what he means when he says 'I'm white,' he means he's boss!" Malcolm thundered.

Malcolm, and the man who returned from Mecca, Hajji Malik Shabazz, both were scourges of American racism who saw it as an evil against humanity and the God that formed them. He stood for -- and died for -- human rights of self-defense and a people's self-determination, not for "civil rights," which, as the Supreme Court has indeed shown, changes from day to day, case to case, administration to administration.

December 1992

***

Deadly deja vu

After fifty-one days of remarkable religious resistance, the U.S. government eliminated over eighty members of the Branch Davidian sect near Waco, Texas. The sect, an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, had been held up at their Mount Carmel headquarters after an armed and botched Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) raid, which left four government agents and an undetermined number of Davidians dead from a brief but fierce firefight. Throughout the fifty-one-day standoff, the government sought daily to demonize the Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh, as a pedophile, a false prophet, and a psychopath.

The U.S. government, its agents' egos aburst after fifty-one days with no "progress" (i.e., surrender), pursued a dangerous campaign of destruction of the front of the buildings in preparation for "CS/tear gas insertion" and, after the thorough distribution of this airborne irritant, apparently caused a firestorm that consumed more than eighty men, women, and babies at the scene. Even before the fire had finished burning, the White House issued a statement determining suicide as the cause of death of the eighty-plus people -- before a moment's investigation!

There's an old Chinese saying: "No investigation -- no right to speak." And under such an adage, the White House should have been silent, at least until a full, fair, impartial investigation was conducted.

The only source suggesting the Branch Davidians killed themselves was the FBI itself, hardly an impartial source. The firestorm in Waco, Texas, which snuffed out an estimated eighty-six lives, shares eerily reminiscent precedents with the police bombing of MOVE people on May 13, 1985, in Philadelphia. Both scenes of carnage were preceded by government/media demonization campaigns that portrayed the people under government siege as insane for daring to resist the state. By contrast, the government (i.e., the police) is always seen as reasonable. In Philadelphia, where the contrasts were even sharper because of race, class, and politics, the intentional mass murder of MOVE men, women, and children was justified by the government. MOVE, they reasoned, were "terrorists" -- bad niggers.

The Koreshians were "fanatics" who were suspected of physical and sexual abuse of children -- thus psychologically expendable. Only after such social equations are made can the state drop bombs (as was done to MOVE) or punch holes in people's homes (as in Waco) and be reported in the media as "reasonable." Predictably, in both instances, in the hours (or minutes) following the assaults, the government justified the results as "suicide," thereby taking itself off the hook.

The initial ATF assault on Mount Carmel, purportedly for a minor weapons violation, leading up to an infernal clash of egos that launched tanks and tons of gas into the Koreshian home, was an act of colossal government arrogance and impatience. The flames and carnage of both Philadelphia and Waco merge at the strike ignited by a government that perceives itself more as a master than as a servant of the people.

April 1993

***

Rodney wasn't the only one

The internationally televised aggravated assault of black Los Angeles motorist Rodney King by police struck millions as a nasty revelation of the ugly underbelly of how white cops and black civilians interact in the dark streets of America. Many apologists for the police decried the King video as an aberration from the norm, and tended to justify it based on the purported threats posed by that particular "defendant" (a variation of the so-called "big nigga" defense).

At least one reputable study, however, reveals that the brutal Rodney King/LAPD encounter was just one of many across America, painting a vivid portrayal of a nationwide pattern of violent assaults by white cops against national minorities. The study, a two-year survey of both national and regional newspapers, found, in the words of study conductor Joseph Feagin, a University of Florida sociology professor, that "Rodney King's beating is not an isolated incident."

Feagin and fellow University of Florida (UF) researcher Kim Lersch utilized the NEXUS computer system to search publications from January 1990 to May 1992 to uncover 130 reports of police brutality. If one accepts the obvious, that not all such incidents are ever even reported, much less published, then it occurred at least four times a month, or once a week, during the report period. The Feagin study showed that African-Americans or Latinos were victims of the brutality in 97 percent of such cases, and white cops were centrally involved in over 93 percent of the beatings.

"We've found," said Lersch, "that the cases typically involved groups of White police officers assaulting a Black or Latino" (In These Times, May 3, 1993). Indeed, Lersch noted, the data revealed a national pattern that could best be termed "routine." The UF study researchers attempted to check their results against a presumably reliable source, that is, the U.S. Department of Justice.

In March 1991,when King's brutal video beating was fueling international outrage, then U.S. attorney general Richard Thornburgh ordered a Justice Department survey for the previous six-year period. Although it was completed over a year ago, it has never been released, not even to these UF researchers.

The nationally broadcast television show Justice Files recently released an astonishing report revealing that in a ten-year period, from 1981 to 1991, more than seventy-nine thousand cases of police brutality, coast to coast, occurred. If accurate, these numbers mean more than seventy-nine hundred assaults by police a year in America. A civilian is brutalized by police, on average, more than 658 times a month, more than 164 times a week!

The police, tools of white state capitalist power, are a force creating chaos in the community, not peace. They have created more crime, more disruption, more loss of property, life, and peace than any group of criminals in the nation.

Because of the police gang in America riots are inevitable, and blame may be laid at the feet of those claiming to be "peace officers" who brutalize the people they are sworn to serve.

May 1993

***

L.A. outlaw

The federal trial of four Los Angeles cops, forced by the public orgy of rebellion and rage that had rocked the city a year before, in response to acquittals stemming from the brutal Rodney King beating, ended in a jury compromise -- two guilty, two acquitted. Observers may be dispirited by the fact that two cops who brutalized, traumatized, and pummeled King were acquitted, but the trial itself raises some serious and disturbing questions. While no one could call the writer a cop lover, it is my firm opinion that the federal retrial of the four L.A. cops involved in King's legalized brutality constituted a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids double jeopardy. The Fifth Amendment provides, in part, that "nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb .... "

For millions of African-Americans, Chicanos, and a host of Americans, the acquittals of the L.A. cop four in the Simi Valley state assault trial was an outrage that solidified the conviction that there can be no justice in the courts of this system for black people. Although not a reason for the L.A. rebellion, it certainly was a psychic straw that broke the camel's back.

The Simi Valley "trial," like the King beating itself, was both an obscenity and a commonality, for neither all-white pro-police juries nor state-sanctioned brutality are rarities to those who live in U.S. tombs as opposed to reading about them. The point is, the federal LAPD/King civil rights trial was a political prosecution, spurred by international embarrassment stemming from the raging flames of L.A., without which no prosecution would have occurred.

It also reveals how the system, under the pressure of an outraged people, will betray the trusts of their own agents, so one need not ask how they will treat or do treat one not their own, especially when there is public pressure to support it.

The same system that denied the four L.A. cops their alleged constitutional rights denies the rights of the poor and politically powerless daily with impunity, and will further utilize the Koon case to deny others. To be silent while the state violates its own alleged constitutional law to prosecute someone we hate is but to invite silence when the state violates its own laws to prosecute the state's enemies and opponents.

This we cannot do.

We must deny the state that power.

The national ACLU is of the opinion that the second, federal prosecution violated the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a position that seems sound. I believe that the convictions will later be reversed on that basis by an appellate court.

It is ironic that many of those who did not oppose the federal civil prosecutions feel it inappropriate for the federal system to review state convictions under habeas corpus statutes. All this second, federal civil rights violation case has done is provide the system with camouflage, to give the appearance of justice.

The illusion is never the real.

April 1993

***

Absence of power

A woman working to feed the homeless gets involved in a confrontation with transit cops down in a major metropolitan subway. She is accosted, manhandled, thrown to the ground, and held under restraint. Another woman has her window shattered by highway patrol when she doesn't move her car fast enough or open her window on command. She is seized, handcuffed, and arrested.

What makes these cases remarkable is the identity of the women described here. The first, in addition to being a political leader in her own right, is the wife of a U.S. congressman. The second, a prominent professional, is the wife of a state representative. Both women are African- American.

Although the charges against these women were later dropped, the very fact that they were treated so crudely, despite their prominence and influence, makes one wonder how people without such influence are treated by agents of the state.

The two events just described occurred in Philadelphia in 1993. The first involved Philadelphia city councilwoman Mrs. Jannie Blackwell, wife of freshman U.S. representative (D) Lucian Blackwell. The second involved a leading black Philadelphia lawyer, Mrs. Renee Hughes, past president of the prestigious Barristers Association (local affiliate of the National Bar Association) and wife of state representative Vincent Hughes (D-170th District). That both cases were administratively "resolved" is of less importance than that the incidents occurred at all. Indeed, such incidents are daily occurrences in the lives of black men and women in America, regardless of class, rank, status, or station in life.

That cops can treat people so shabbily, the very people who literally pay their salaries and set their operating budgets, gives a grim glimmer of life at the social, economic, political bottom, where people have no influence, no clout, no voice.

These cases reveal the cold contempt white cops have for black men and women, even if those women are in positions of state power and are presumed to be in control. In truth, any control is illusory, and as totally evanescent as power itself. Police are out of control. Black politicians are out of power. When these events occur, we can only conclude that if such events can happen to them, what of us?

If people can watch the massacre of MOVE people on May 13, 1985, as police firebombed MOVE headquarters, and the ATF/FBI ramming and destruction of the Koreshians of Waco, Texas, in April 1993, and still claim the police are under control, then nothing said here will convince them.

The police are agents of white ruling-class, capitalist will -- period. Neither black managers nor black politicians can change that reality. The people themselves must organize for their own defense, or it won't get done.

April 1993

***

Clinton guillotines Guinier

Brilliant, able, scholarly, and provocative, University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier had all the necessary attributes to bring a dark luster to the foundering Clinton administration. Professor Guinier was an authentic FOB/H (Friend of Bill/Hillary) who went to Yale Law School with the "First Family," and her nomination to the post of assistant attorney general for civil rights was hailed as a bold step forward. But a concerted anti-Guinier campaign, orchestrated by a bipartisan conservative hit squad, gathered into a witch-hunt designed to destroy her chances and painted this prominent professor as a "radical," with ideas "out of the mainstream."

Faced with undercover, anonymous opposition by the Senate Judiciary Committee, fanned by attacks in the conservative press, President Bill Clinton sacrificed his friend of half his life to the wolves and, in an act as startling as it was unprecedented, withdrew her nomination while denigrating her scholarship, thereby denying her the opportunity to appear before the Senate to state her case. To appease a right wing that had never supported him, Clinton gave the ax to Professor Guinier.

Clinton's withdrawal of the Guinier nomination stunned his most ardent supporters, especially African-Americans and women, who seemed hurt most by his apparent political clumsiness. This fiasco didn't occur in a vacuum but was a piece of Clinton strategy that might be termed "playing to the cheap seats." Whenever Clinton slips in the polls, his quick fix has consisted of a subtle but unmistakable appeal to the lowest common denominator in American politics -- race.

When then candidate Clinton was embroiled in the Gennifer Flowers controversy, his response was a midcampaign flight to Little Rock, Arkansas, to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man on death row. When he began to sink in the polls, his political instincts led him to denounce rapper Sista Souljah, an affront to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had invited them both to speak at a Rainbow Conference.

In the first instance, he sought to divert attention from a gnawing sex scandal by demonstrating his toughness on crime. In the second, he sought to demonstrate independence from the black wing of the Democratic party. From the hiring of a Reaganite ideologue (conservative writer David Gergen) to the abandonment of Professor Guinier, the central theme was ever insult or injury to blacks, his most loyal constituency, in order to attract white so-called centrist support.

Is it mere coincidence that prior to the dumping of Guinier, Clinton's ratings were the lowest ever? The shameful sacking of Professor Guinier to appease a faction that will never accept him anyway shows that a New Democrat is no different from an Old Republican.

June 1993

***

Another side of Glory

Thanks to an old party comrade, I have had an opportunity to finally read David Hilliard's This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Little, Brown, 1993). It is an interesting and tragic telling of Hilliard's life -- his hardscrabble Alabaman origins, his heady elevation to chief of staff of the Black Panther Party, and his plunge into drugged defeat and dejection. It tells David's story, blemishes and all, too well. What it does not tell is the story of the Black Panther Party. In truth, there was never one party but over forty-five of them, branches and chapters with their own characters and local idiosyncrasies, scattered across the United States, with one branch in Algiers, North Africa, all united into a whole woven by a revolutionary ideal.

Because this is a review of sorts, I hereby announce my own biases: I am a former Panther, so I offer no pretense of objectivity. I knew many of the people discussed in the book on both coasts, those living and dead, because I worked, lived in, or visited several chapters across the country as a Panther assigned to the party's Ministry of Information. I remember many beautiful and wonderful brothers and sisters who gave their all, their very lives, in defense of the party, but about them the book is largely silent. If one were to read Glory only, could one conclude their heroic sacrifices were, because ignored, in vain?

It tells the story of National Headquarters in Berkeley, California, or the early Oakland chapter, quite well, but by 1970 the party was a national organization, which, except for brief references to the conflicts between New York and Oakland, isn't made clear here. Each chapter reflected deep regionalisms, from California (L.A. and Oakland), which had a wealth of country southern guys and gals (Huey, David, and Geronimo were country boys, from the Deep South), to New York, where branches had Hispanic members, a faster, more up-tempo, urban pace (David even remarks on his dismay over New York "style"), to Chicago, a wicked mix of them both.

Hilliard aptly notes that Jesse Jackson borrowed from the oratory and flair of assassinated Illinois deputy chairman Fred Hampton, a masterful revolutionary organizer murdered by the government when they peeped his potential.

While Hilliard glorifies ex-prisoners who became Panthers, he largely ignores ex-Panthers who became prisoners, as well as political prisoners and POWs who have been down for decades. Hilliard is most interesting when he tells of his encounters with former Black Panther Party defense minister Dr. Huey P. Newton, an enigma worn by flesh.

Brilliant, mercurial, confident, insecure, blessed, cursed, loved, loathed -- all were facets of Huey P. Newton. A self-professed homie of Huey, Hilliard doesn't examine why he, or the rest of the Peralta Street crew, couldn't pull Huey up from the pit into which he'd fallen, why none of our academia didn't utilize his brilliance at say, Howard University or Tuskegee or some other historically black college. How can a man of Huey's caliber be allowed to die in such ignominy, such squalor, such degradation?

One looks in vain for a political/radical or revolutionary perspective that survives in Hilliard's book, and in its stead one finds the author promoting the ten steps to sobriety from Alcoholics Anonymous rather than the socially dynamic ten-point Black Panther Party program, which still cries out for implementation almost thirty years later. People flee to drink or drugs to escape the torturous conditions that daily plague and devalue black life in this world. The very conditions that gave rise to the party in the 1960s -- brutal cops, racist courts, ineffective education, joblessness, and the like -- still plague our people to this day. A few black, largely powerless politicians pose no solutions. We still have far to go.

July 1993

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What, to a prisoner, is the Fourth of July?

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed: And its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence. [To the slave] your shouts of liberty and equality [are] hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

-- Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

July 4, 1993, saw ANC president Dr. Nelson R. Mandela in Philadelphia quoting the Honorable Frederick Douglass's speech as he accepted the Liberty Medal, along with South African state president F.W de Klerk. If the joint presence of Mandela and de Klerk were not enough to stir controversy, then the award presenters, Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell and U.S. president Clinton, certainly stoked controversy among radicals. Hundreds of black Philadelphians, while certainly admirers of Dr. Mandela, took umbrage at de Klerk's presence.

Although the awarders are known as "We the People -- Philadelphia," the actual everyday people of Philadelphia had little say in choosing the Liberty Medal awardees, and less say in rejecting the widely unpopular honoree de Klerk. The choice of Liberty Medalists was made not by the people but by corporate Philadelphia -- big business.

Why? Why were the people, many of whom had worked for more than twenty years against apartheid (and for Mandela's release), frozen out, their protests against de Klerk all but ignored? When, or if, the African majority takes power in South Africa, U.S. big business wants friends there. If one reads the names of corporate sponsors of the award, it sounds like roll call of the Chamber of Commerce: Unisys Corp., Pennsylvania Bell, and the like.

Mandela, who has not voted in a government election in seventy-four years, and de Klerk, president by way of an election counting only minority, non black votes, has only the hope of liberty, no more.

The white minority in South Africa has done its level best to stifle African liberty for three hundred years.

The African majority, even after the awards, still isn't free.

July 1993

***

A house is not a home

She sits in utter stillness. Her coffee-brown features as if set in obsidian; as if a mask. Barely perceptible, the tears threaten to overflow that dark, proud, maternal face, a face held still by rage.

A warm spring day in North Philadelphia saw her on her way home, after her tiring duties as a housekeeper in a West Mount Airy home. On arrival, she was stopped by police, who told her she could not enter her home of twenty-three years, and that it would be torn down as part of a city program against drug dens. "My house ain't no drug den!" the fifty-nine-year-old grandmother argued. "This is my home!" The cops, strangers to this part of town, could care less.

Mrs. Helen Anthony left the scene, to contact her grown children. Two hours later, she returned to an eerie scene straight out of the Twilight Zone. Her home was no more.

A pile of bricks stood amid hills of red dust and twisted debris; a lone wall standing jagged, a man's suit flapping on a hook, flapping like a flag of surrender, after a war waged by bulldozers and ambitious politicians. Mrs. Anthony received no warning before the jaws of the baleful backhoe bit into the bricks of her life, tearing asunder the gatherings and memories of a life well lived. She was served no notice that the City of Brotherly Love intended to grind her home of twenty-three years into dust because they didn't like her neighbors; they just showed up one day, armed with television cameras and political ambitions, and did it. Gone.

When reporters asked politicos about the black grandmother whose home was demolished, they responded with characteristic arrogance: "Well, the law of eminent domain gives us the right to tear down any house we wanna," they said. When coverage turned negative, out came the olive branch:

"We'll reimburse her."

"Oops, honest mistake!"

"... compensation .... "

Left unquestioned is the wisdom of a policy of mass destruction planned over a brunch of Brie and croissants executed for the six o'clock news, with no regard for the lives and well-being of the people involved.

In a city with an estimated thirty thousand homeless people, why does the government embark on a blitzkrieg of bulldozing and demolishing homes, even abandoned ones? Mrs. Anthony, offered a home in compensation by red-faced city officials, is less than enthused. "The way the city treated her," opined her daughter Geraldine Johnson, "she does not want to live in Philadelphia."

Her treatment at the hands of those who call themselves "civil servants" points to the underlying indifference with which black lives, property, and aspirations are treated by the political elite. One would be hard pressed to find this degree of destructive nonchalance in a neighborhood where a white grandmother lived.

Another chapter in the tragicomedy called "The Drug War."

April 1992

***

The lost generation?

Recent published reports have lamented the fact that African-American youth are remarkably resistant and virtually unresponsive to traditional, big-name public relations and big-time sports figures when they use the major media to attempt to communicate with younger blacks. The study found deep and profound alienation among youth, and a fundamental streak of fatalism about the promise of tomorrow -- a sense that "tomorrow may not come, so let's live today."

The youth, while they view large blocks of TV, perceive it from the position of outsiders, knowing that the dramas, comedies, and news programs are not designed for their consumption. Only the urbo-tech musical form known as rap touches them, for it is born of urban youth consciousness and speaks to them, in their idiom, about lives lived on the margins. It is this profound disassociation that forced some nouveau middle-class blacks to lament the youth as "the lost generation."

But are they really "lost," and, if so, to whom?

The Martinican black revolutionary Frantz Fanon once opined that every generation must find its destiny and fulfill it or betray it.

No Fate
-- Terminator 2: Judgment Day, directed by James Cameron

In my father's generation, southern-born of the late 1890s, their destiny was to move their families north, to lands with the promise of a better life away from our hateful homelands in Dixie. The dreams of that generation, sparked by visions of new homes, better education, new cars, and prosperity, were, in relative terms, realized by some, but northbound African-Americans were never able to outrun the stigma of racism.

By the time the 1950s and 1960s generation came of age, during the Nixon-Reagan-Bush eras, race once again defined the limits of black aspirations, and with the shifting of manufacturing jobs back down south and abroad, so went dreams of relative prosperity. The children of this generation -- born into sobering poverty amid shimmering opulence, their minds weaned on Falcon Crestian TV excess while locked in want, watching while sinister politicians spit on their very existence -- are the hip-hop/rap generation.

Locked out of the legal means of material survival, looked down upon by predatory politicians and police, left with the least relevant educational opportunities, talked at with contempt and not talked to with love -- is there any question why such youth are alienated? Why the surprise?

They look at the lives they live and see not "civil rights progress" but a drumbeat of civil repression by a state at war with their dreams. Why the surprise?

This is not the lost generation. They are the children of the L.A. rebellion, the children of the MOVE bombing, the children of the Black Panthers, and the grandchildren of Malcolm; far from lost, they are probably the most aware generation since Nat Turner's; they are not so much lost as they are mislaid, discarded by this increasingly racist system that undermines their inherent worth.

They are all potential revolutionaries, with the historic power to transform our dull realities.

If they are lost, find them.

June 1992

***

Blues for Huey

The blaring trumpet of African exile Hugh Masakela screams out of the speaker, at the door of the storefront on North Philly's Columbia Avenue, soaring, plummeting, slicing a sharp, clear cut through the thick, muggy, midsummer midday mist, playing "Blues for Huey." The author sits, hypnotized by the horn, stiffened into a stupor by the Masakela sound, brassy, acute, clean, powerful, full of the melancholy sounds of tears, pain, and soggy lust crafted in dusty Soweto shabeens, laced with the newfound militance of black U.S. youth, Africa and Afro-America, reunited in Masakela's righteous horn, reignited into one fire.

"Blues for Huey" blared from Philadelphia's Panther office.

That awesome instrumental came, unbidden, into my consciousness when the news burst that Huey P. Newton, the once minister of defense of the Black Panther Party, was found shot to death in an Oakland street. It hit like a Masakela solo -- in the gut -- in the heart! It's amazing that Huey was almost fifty; it's almost more amazing that Huey's tragedy, and ours, could be met by the innocent query of millions of black teens and preteens: "Huey who?"

I had to reach back some twenty summers to summon up "Blues for Huey," that bittersweet set that may or may not have been in homage to Newton.

Some songs mark an era, and this energetic tune does that for me.

Always a small fry in the Panther organization, I met the defense minister only once, when he came to Philadelphia and I was assigned to bodyguard duties. I doubted he knew my name, but I loved him. Huey -- self-taught, brilliant, taciturn, strong-willed -- molded the righteous indignation and rage of an oppressed people into a national, militant, revolutionary nationalist organization. His courageous spirit touched the downtrodden, black America's so-called lumpenproletariat classes, and energized them into a balled fist of angry resistance, prompting FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's observation that the party posed "the most serious threat" to America's internal security. Huey woke up the historically ignored strata of black life and put them in the service of the people via free breakfast programs and free clothing programs, and organized units of community self-defense.

To the U.S. ruling class, this stirring of black life into liberational activity proved too much -- enter the dogs of deception. The government unleashed the FBI, whose function, in Hoover's words, was to "frustrate every effort ... to consolidate ... forces or to recruit new or youthful members" by the party, which at its apex had chapters in forty-five U.S. cities.

Government efforts at disruption were swift and deadly. Setups with regional police became routine, sparked by America's historic phobia about "niggers with guns," and in the aftermath, some thirty-eight Panthers were shot down by racist cops. Party ranks were riddled with FBI-paid agents provocateurs and informants. Paranoia swelled as cop raids grew in frequency and intensity, beggaring the party through bails and legal fees.

By the mid-1970s, the party, split by government disruption and internal strife, suffering from a sharp membership decline, faded from the world's stage. Huey, a supreme commander without a command, a visionary with no outlet for his vision, a revolutionary bereft of a revolutionary party, retrogressed into the fascination of the street hustlers of his Oakland youth; the pimps, the players, the "illegitimate capitalists" (as he called them) called him. It was, to be sure, a fatal attraction.

Huey was, it must be said, no godling, no saint. He was, however, intensely human, curious, acutely brilliant, a lover of all the world's children, an implacable foe of all the world's oppressors. He rapped philosophy with the late Chinese premier Chou En-lai; he met Mao; he supped with North Korea's Kim Il Sung; he was a guest of Castro.

Huey Percy Newton, by his will and great heart, marked his age with militance, making a noble contribution to the black liberation struggle. That he could die at the hands of a crack fiend is sobering testament to how low he, and we, have fallen. The best memorial to such a one is to purge our communities of the poison that plagued, and finally plugged, a truly remarkable man; and to use the highlights of his memory to spark a renewal in revolutionary consciousness.

August 1989

***

Philly daze: an impressionistic memoir

If Wallace would dare to run for president in Philadelphia, we, four black North Philly teens, would dare to protest -- in his white honky face, if need be. So we did, Eddie, Alvin, Dave, and I. We began by boarding the Broad Street subway and riding to the end. Four Afros amid a sea of blonds, brunettes, and redheads, entering the citadel of urban white racist sentiment to confront the Alabaman.

We must've been insane. We strolled into the stadium, four lanky dark string beans in a pot full of white, steaming limas. The band played "Dixie." We shouted, "Black power, Ungowa, black power!" They shouted, "Wallace for president! White power!" and "Send those niggers back to Africa!" We shouted, "Black power, Ungowa!" (Don't ask what "Ungowa" means. We didn't know. All we knew was that it had a helluva ring to it.) "Black power!" They hissed and booed. We stood up in our seats and proudly gave the black power salute. In answer, we received dubious gifts of spittle from those seated above. Patriots tore American flags from their standards and hurled the bare sticks at us. Wallace, wrapped in roars of approval, waxed eloquent. "When I become president, these dirty, unwashed radicals will have to move to the Sovee-yet Union! You know, all throughout this campaign these radicals have been demonstrating against George Corley Wallace. Well, I hope they have the guts to lay down in front of my car. I'll drive right over 'em!" The crowd went wild.

Helmeted cops came and told us we must leave. We protested but were escorted out (perhaps a little relieved). Outside, Eddie, Alvin, Dave, and I saw a few other blacks from Temple University and a group of young whites, also thrown out of the rally. We gathered at the bus station to get on the "C" for North Philly. But before we could board, we were attacked by several white men. One of them had a lead and leather slapjack. Outarmed and outnumbered, we fought back, but four teens were no match for eight to ten grown men.

I was grabbed by two of them, one kicking my skull while the other kicked me in the balls. Then I looked up and saw the two-toned, gold-trimmed pant leg of a Philly cop. Without thinking, and reacting from years of brainwashing, I yelled, "Help, police!" The cop saw me on the ground being beaten to a pulp, marched over briskly -- and kicked me in the face. I have been thankful to that faceless cop ever since, for he kicked me straight into the Black Panther Party.

Summer in North Philly is a little like paradise to a young dude. It's so hot that sweat runs like rain in the Amazon. The air is thick with energy so real that you can smell heartbeats. The heat hangs like a haze, a loving, sticky sweet hug of Motha Nature on black flesh.

Defense captain Reg narrows his eyes in a paternal smile. "Hey, lieutenant -- it's too hot to work, come on and let's get a taste." The two leave the dim Panther storefront and cross Columbia Avenue to Webb's Bar. Johnny Webb, a man born to work with people, serves up a toothy grin and welcomes the two Panthers into his cool dark den; he wipes the glossy bartop and serves up the drinks. The captain takes a shot, and the younger Panther orders a Bitter Dog, a Philly refinement on the West Coast's Bitter Mothafucka -- both composed of red wine and citrus; grapefruit in the MF, lemon in the dog. It's cool and tangy going down, and both the captain and the information lieutenant cool out in their own way. James Brown serves up southern shout from the jukebox, and Mumia screws up enough courage to ask a sister to dance. It's the Bitter Dog dancing, cause the lieutenant can't, his awkwardness causing the whole house to rock with laughter, both at his unique style (if it can be called that) and at his beat-up, scuffed-up, toes-bent-up-to-look-like-Arabian-slippers boots (which don't help much).

Jintz, a dark, lovely sister from California, laughs almost to burst. Mumia, his ears throbbin' from James Brown ("Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud"), and wanting a breath of fresh air, sticks his head out the front door -- and sees two white men dressed in army jackets kicking in the front door of the Panther office across the street. The buzz from the Bitter Dog evaporates. "Reg! Yo, Reg! Somebody breakin ina office!" The young lieutenant turns back to the street and focuses on a .38 special close enough to touch. "Freeze, nigger! If you fuckin' blink, I'll blow your black goddamn head off your shoulders!"

Red strobes sweep the summer night. Mumia freezes, and the Bitter Dog transforms itself into cold sweat. The man holding the gun smiles -- sort of. His teeth are bared, but his eyes are like blue glaciers. His face and neck glow in a red flash. "This is it," the young Panther lieutenant thinks. The .38 is so close that he can smell gun oil. Across the street, white men are throwing files and papers into the street.

There I was in the 1970s, a bored, slightly petit bourgeois, burnt-out ex-Black Panther who distrusted organizations and still simmered in a stew of generational rebellion. I felt all dressed up with no place to go. The Panthers, to whom I had loaned my life, were sputtering in an internecine, bicoastal, and bloody feud, East Coast against the West Coast: those aligned with the then minister of information Eldridge Cleaver on the East against those siding with once minister of defense Huey P. Newton on the West. Cleaver was an idol to me; Newton, whom I had once served as a bodyguard, a hero. The prospect of us fighting one another sickened me. "I didn't join the BPP to get in a goddamn gang war!" I thought angrily to myself. "Shit! I could've stayed in North Philly for this dumb shit!"

The Panthers had established bona fide, shonuff diplomatic relations with progressive and revolutionary states and movements across the globe -- the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Congo-Brazzaville, the African National Congress, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Cuba, and the like. The government of Algeria granted land for the Black Panther Party International Section, the first embassy of the African-American people of North America.

By 1974 the state's militia had slaughtered more than thirty militants and jailed many more; had seeded branch offices with informers and agents provocateurs; had tapped phones, covered mail, destroyed party property. Then there was an on-TV feud between Eldridge and Huey (set up by an obliging white newsman) that had resulted in two deaths. Blood for blood. East for West. Panthers croaking Panthers. I knew both men. Frustrated, angry, I drifted away from a party that had drifted away from its moorings in the people. Bitterly, I told myself that I would never join another organization. I would support, send money, write agitprop. But join? Nothin' happening. No suh! Unh unh! Not me! Then I met MOVE.

Philly, like its northern cousin New York, is a talk radio town. The pace, the political life, the sheer size of such cities makes them good breeding grounds for talk radio. Retirees, night shift workers, the unemployed, part-timers, and crackpots, all contribute to the potpourri of talk radio.

Back in the mid-1970s, a veteran announcer and all-round broadcaster named Wynn Moore began talk in Philly in a big way, virtually overnight transforming a jazz outlet into an organ for wordmongers. Tall, meaty, with piercing eyes, a pointed Vandyke, and a bass voice that rolled around the basement -- that was Wynn Moore. As program director for WWDB-FM, he assembled a madcap corps of talk jocks, insurance salesmen, students, and news readers. I was one of them. He juggled us, shook us up until we fizzed, then turned us loose on the Delaware Valley. Ratings grew. Opinions flew like hatchets in a Chinese restaurant. Right-wing hosts had to abide left-wing listeners, and vice versa.

Everything that was anything and everybody that was anybody passed through DB's doors and hit the microphones. Politicians, writers, activists, sports stars, psychics, economists, and assorted loons -- you name them, all were welcome on DB's airwaves. Almost all, anyway. One day I aired a brief cut from an interview with MOVE members demonstrating at the offices of the Philadelphia Tribune, a newspaper written for black Philadelphians. From the day I was first hired at DB I had sought audio from live sources by going to demos, news conferences, events, and incidents. Anyplace, anywhere, anytime for a sound bite: that was me. Except for world news, I never used the wires. For me, a day without audio was like a day without sunshine. And I loved sunshine (still do).

My MOVE cut was brief, and not particularly offensive, unless you happened to be an employee of the Philadelphia Tribune. So after the hourly newscast, I was surprised to hear a familiar voice roaring at me: "Mumia, as long as you're working here, I don't want to ever hear that MOVE shit on my radio station!" Before I could answer, Wynn turned and stalked out of the newsroom. I was shaken. I waited until the day had ended, and the red had left his face, before asking the obvious. He let out with a sigh that was half a blast of anger, and explained.

"A few years ago I was program director of a station up in Chester. Just like now, I also hosted a show. I had the bright idea to invite these MOVE nuts to my studio for an interview. It was a disaster! They took over the show -- wouldn't answer a question, and I couldn't get a goddamned word in edgewise. They were ranting on, pa pa pa pa pa. They wouldn't let me moderate my own show. I couldn't speak on my own show. That was it for me. I swore then, never again." I looked at Wynn, a man I respected as brutally honest and one of the best teachers of my craft. I swallowed my own not inconsiderable pride (it was, after all, my freedom I was concerned about and not MOVE's) and followed his edict. I never aired another MOVE story while I was at his station.

Being news director of WHAT-AM meant doing the morning shift, training new talent, organizing features for the newscasts, and hosting a weekend show. I reveled in it and worked with youthful enthusiasm and energy. In 1975, the Reverend Jesse Jackson brought his show to town, and black Christian Philly erupted in a storm of support for the "country preacher."

Philadelphia PUSH (People United to Serve/ Save Humanity) hosted a national convention at the downtown Sheraton Hotel, and hundreds lined up to get in and hear Jackson. Not only would the event be broadcast live over WHAT, it would be simulcast over a network of black stations all across America. And hosting it would be -- Mumia Abu-Jamal!

I was excited and eager but tried to play it off as no big thing. I worked with the engineers to get the equipment and the airtime right, and in spite of my nervousness, I knew I could handle it -- and did. All went well as I interwove commentary and interviews, gospel singers and live audiences, with the words of Jesse himself. I was as high as a Georgia pine. The second day I arrived before airtime to get set up and found a small picket line in front of the Sheraton. They wore blue denim. Their hair was long, nappy, and uncombed. They were MOVE.

Delbert Africa was on the bullhorn giving Jesse hell. MOVE folks carried signs that read "THIS DUMB ASS NIGGA IS BEGGING FAVORS FROM THE SAME SYSTEM THAT OPPRESSES HIM!" Always hungry for a sound bite, I unslung my trusty tape recorder and approached Delbert. "If Jesse Jackson has gotta solution, why ain't he givin' it to everybody instead a selling it at $25 a seat? What about poor folks from North Philly, why they gotta spend they last dolla, if they got it, to hear this nigga? John Africa teaches us that the truth is free, like the air we breathe. It ain't to be sold." Del went on, as MOVE folks, when they get going, tend to do. I got my sound bite and more, then took the elevator up to the Jackson suite, where I found the Reverend surrounded by mostly black plainclothes cops who were working as his bodyguards.

I found him, as always, game for an interview, and asked him what he thought of the demonstration out front. The Reverend looked at me like I was speaking Javanese and wrinkled his handsome features into a sneer. "I have an agenda for black people in America, young man," he said. "An A-GEN-DA! Who cares about a bunch of dirty, unwashed niggas who don't comb their hair?" Like a fool, I'd turned my Sony off. I turned it on and asked for more. This time Jesse answered, "No comment," and the police (in and out of uniform) around the room smiled.

After I heard Jesse's sincere but off-the-record sentiments, I did my broadcast from the PUSH convention that morning somewhat lacklusterly. As I left the hotel I walked back into the demo, but this time Delbert was haranguing not the air but two large black men whom I recognized from the suite upstairs. They were telling Delbert Africa to take his bullhorn and his demonstration away from the hotel. Delbert was explaining to them about freedom of speech (which is a human, not a constitutional, right for MOVE). There's plenty of freedom of speech on the next block, they said, and then they made the mistake of putting their hands on Delbert. Fists flew, a bullhorn arced, and blood spurted. Sensing news, I flicked on my Sony and dove in, dodging punches.

Within minutes the civil affairs squad was on the scene. Jesse's bodyguards were taken away to be treated for cuts and bruises, while Delbert and the other MOVE men were taken away in handcuffs. I grimaced at the obvious injustice of the whole setup, and at the apathy of the crowd that had gathered. But I had my story. That night I played it as my lead. The grunts, curses, shouts, shrieks, and yells (I always said MOVE was great sound) were the next best thing to being there.

After the broadcast my boss came into the newsroom, looking serious. I knew what he was going to say.

"Mumia, management wants to pull the tape of that demonstration and fight."

"Bernie, I can't do that. When I went to work for you, I promised to do my best to deliver the news truthfully. And you promised to back me up."

"I understand that, Mumia. But this station is cosponsoring the PUSH event. We're simulcasting across the country. We have a responsibility to see that the thing is a success."

"I agree. But let me say this. Wasn't what happened and what I aired the truth? And don't our listeners at WHAT deserve the truth?"

Bernie looked at me sideways with a half smile -- a half "you smart little bastard" smile. Then a full smile broke from his lips.

"You're right, Mumia. I'll stand up to management on your side. You did a good job."

I was never prouder of that man, or of my chosen career. He could have fired me. And I thought of Jesse's haunting words: "Who cares about a bunch of dirty, unwashed niggas who don't comb their hair?"

I did.

Black radio acts as an unofficial feeder system to white radio and TV careers. It's a farm club, where talents are tested, whitenized, and then packaged for general market consumption. When I left Moore's station, I was on this track. You could hear me on the Mutual Black Network, NPR, and the Associated Press. I fancied myself an independent reporter, and I was more independent than most. I never took a story off the wires if I could write it myself.

Proud of my independence, I covered every story, even MOVE. They were no more popular with black reporters than with white; maybe less. Their nappy-headed, aggressive, naturalistic style conflicted with the greased down, "good nigga" image the media was looking for, and most black reporters steered clear of them. I tried to be objective. Not that I went out of my way to chase them down. Not that I had to.

The change came after I read a 1975 story in the papers. It told of a night raid by cops on a MOVE gathering in West Philly. MOVE men, newly sprung from jail (they were continually in conflict with the establishment), arrived at their home early one morning. As they hugged and kissed wives and babies, a noisy, loving celebration filled the streets.

Citing neighbors' complaints, the cops came, clubs swinging. Several MOVE men were beaten, others arrested. MOVE charged brutality. The cops, of course, denied it. Standard stuff. MOVE even claimed that the cops killed a baby. Cops charged that MOVE was lying. Standard stuff. Lies from the cops. MOVE media overkill. Mumia was no green kid; I was too hip to believe either side.

MOVE called to invite me to a press conference. I refused in a friendly manner, telling their spokeswoman (Louise Africa) that I was too busy. She called me a liar. I erupted in anger. "I ain't got time for this bullshit!" "Well, make time. This ain't no game! Stop lying and tell me why you ain't coming!" I was outraged. I had never heard of a group calling a reporter a liar and abusing him for refusing to come to their press conference. As mad as a bee in a wine bottle, I hung up. And that was that. They had their press conference without Mumia.

Two days later I picked up a copy of the Philadelphia Tribune from a newsstand. The story was about the press conference, but a picture at the bottom of the page told the proverbial thousand words.

A black-and-white grainy photo of a light-skinned black baby boy, his tiny bruised body in a cardboard box, with fruit and yams laid beside him. I recognized him!

I must have looked at it twenty times.

Almost asleep, he looked. Peaceful in death.

I cursed myself. A few times. Quite a few times. I remembered my hot anger. I thought of my son, about Life Africa's age. I wept hot tears of shame. I cursed myself some more. Then I went back to work.

After the death of Life Africa, MOVE became more and more militant. Their confrontations with police became more frequent, their assertions of their own rights and way of life more aggressive.

On May 20, 1977, the assertion became total. MOVE men and women were seen on a wooden platform on the outside of their Powelton Village (West Philly) headquarters, armed and uniformed. Shotguns, semiautomatic weapons, dark khaki uniforms ... armed black folks! Niggas with guns!

The city went wild. Front-page photos, live video -- not since the Panthers strolled the streets of Sacramento had a black organization captured the imagination of the people with simple, unapologetic militance.

"We are tired of being beaten, bones broken, and murdered babies. No longer will this system attack us with impunity. From now on, we will defend ourselves." In answer, the cops set up sniper nests around the neighborhood. Mayor (and ex-police commissioner) Frank Rizzo issued an ultimatum: "Starve 'em out!" The paramilitary option included cordoning off the neighborhood so that nothing came in or out, unless sniffed by cops. Even longstanding homeowners had to show ID to enter their own cordoned-off neighborhood. Tensions mounted. Tempers flared. But, miraculously, no shots were fired.

Meanwhile, MOVE was becoming blacker. White members, plus some Spanish and Asian members, were scared off by the police presence. Most of the blacks stood fast, even under constant surveillance, with silenced rifles pointed at them for months, angry policemen looking through the sights. The siege was one year old when MOVE agreed to allow a cop with a metal detector to sweep through the headquarters. The building was pronounced "clean."

Thus emboldened, Rizzo ordered the siege broken by armed force. On the morning of August 8, 1978, before daybreak, a shot rang out. According to then KYW reporter (now Tribune editor) Paul Bennet, the shot came from across the street, not from MOVE. No matter. The police hatred that had been building up for fifteen months was unleashed in a blitzkrieg of bullets. Reporters and firefighters hit the dirt.

By midday, the silence was back. One cop lay dead. Delbert Africa was beaten and pummeled, punched and kicked, into near unconsciousness. Ten MOVE people were charged with murder. I was at Rizzo's press conference. A WCAU-TV reporter, Bill Baldini, who dared to ask if any of the captives had been beaten, was tongue-lashed by the police commissioner and called a liar (even though WCAU-TV had caught it all on video). Officials lying, though, weren't news in Philly. Still aren't.

While walking to work one day, I passed in front of an idling cop car. I glanced at the driver -- white, with brown hair, and wearing dark shades. He "smiled," put his hand out the car window, and pointed a finger at me, his thumb cocked back like the hammer of a gun: bang-bang-bang -- the finger jerked, as if from recoil, and the cop gave it a cowboyish blast of breath before returning it to an imaginary holster. He and his pal laugh. Car rolls. Whatta joke, I thought, as I sat down to type up an interview with three women known as the Pointer Sisters, post-"salty peanuts" phase. But it was hard to concentrate. There was only one kind of pointing on my mind. And it wasn't those glitzy sisters.

On December 9, 1981, the police attempted to execute me in the street. This trial is a result of their failure to do so. Just as the police tried to kill my brothers and sisters of the family Africa on August the 8th 1978. [1]

I'm sleeping, sort of.

It has the languorous feel of sleep, with none of the rest. Time seems slower, easier, less oppressive. I feel strangely light. I look down and see a man slumped on the curb, his head resting on his chest, his face downcast. "Damn! That's me!" A jolt of recognition ripples through me.

A cop walks up to the man and kicks him in the face. I feel it, but don't feel it. Three cops join the dance, kicking, blackjacking the bloody, handcuffed fallen form. Two grab each arm, pull the man up, and ram him headfirst into a steel utility pole. He falls.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Babygirl?"

"Why are those men beating you like that?"

"It's okay, Babygirl, I'm okay."

"But why, Daddy? Why did they shoot you and why are they hitting and kicking you, Abu?"

"They've been wanting to do this for a long time, Babygirl, but don't worry, Daddy's fine -- see? I don't even feel it!"

The chubby-cheeked child's face softly melts into the features of a broad-nosed, bald, goldtoothed, and grizzled old man, his dark brown skin leathery and nicely wrinkled.

"Boy, you all right?"

"Yeah, Dad, I'm okay."

"I love you, boy."

"And I love you, Daddy."

The "I love you" echoes like feedback, booming like a thousand voices, and faces join the calming cacophony: wife, mother, children, old faces from down south, older faces from -- Africa? Faces, loving, warm, and dark, rushing, racing, roaring past. Consciousness returns to find me cuffed, my breath sweet with the heavy metallic taste of blood, in darkness.

I lie on the paddy wagon floor and am informed by the anonymous crackle on the radio that I am en route to the police administration building a few blocks away.

I feel no pain -- just the omnipresent pressure that makes every bloody breath a labor.

I recall my father's old face with wonder at its clarity, considering his death twenty years before.

I am en route to the Police Administration Building, presumably on the way to die.

_______________

Notes:

1. Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal 555 A.2d 846 (Pa. 1989). Mumia Abu-Jamal's statement to his jury at his sentencing hearing.

[admin]

Afterword

The trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal Leonard I. Weinglass Attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal

In one of the most extraordinary trials in recent history, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a leading African-American broadcast journalist in Philadelphia, aptly dubbed, "the voice of the voiceless," was put on trial in June 1982 and sentenced to death for the murder of a white police officer. The case was tried before the Honorable Albert Sabo, notorious for having put more people on death row than any other sitting judge in the United States. Before ascending to the bench, he served as the undersheriff in Philadelphia for sixteen years. No less distinguished was the tough and experienced prosecutor who had previously obtained the murder conviction of an innocent man. [1] After the defendant in that case had served twelve years for a crime he didn't commit, the district attorney's office successfully petitioned the court for his release based on evidence that indicated that the defendant had not committed the crime, and following an investigation into the original trial evidence and testimony.

The only inexperienced actor in Mumia's case was the court-appointed attorney, who was thrust into the role of defense counsel after Mumia was stripped of his right to represent himself midway through jury selection. The attorney repeatedly sought to be relieved as assisting counsel to Mumia during pretrial hearings.

It would have been impossible for counsel to defend Mumia effectively no matter what his skill and dedication. The court allocated only $150 pretrial to the defense for the investigation of the case despite the fact that the police investigators had conducted more than 125 witness interviews. By trial time, the defense had succeeded in locating just two eyewitnesses, although aware that there were many more. In a desperate last-minute move, Mumia's attorney frantically tried to convince a key eyewitness to come to court by calling on the judge's telephone while the jury sat waiting in the courtroom. The effort failed. While the prosecution presented experts on ballistics and pathology, the defense was prevented from doing so due to the paltry sums allocated by the court for that purpose.

On the third day of jury selection, the court barred Mumia from further questioning of prospective jurors. Reluctantly, and obviously unprepared, his court-appointed attorney was compelled to take over. Although seventy-seven of the first eighty jurors had heard or read of the case, necessitating a probing inquiry into what opinions, if any, they had formed, the court became impatient with the process, claiming that Mumia's questions intimidated jurors. Some court observers believed that the court's action might more plausibly be attributed to the fact that Mumia's professional training in broadcast journalism was creating too favorable an impression.

Under pressure from the court to expedite the selection process, which at one point included threatening Mumia's lawyer with contempt, a jury was selected that included a man whose best friend was a former Philadelphia police officer on disability after being shot while on duty, as well as an alternate juror whose husband was a Philadelphia police officer. Counsel inexplicably failed to object or even make note of the prosecution's racially skewed use of eleven of fifteen peremptory challenges to remove African-American jurors. He even consented to the judge's summary dismissal, in Mumia's absence, of an African-American juror who had already been selected, replacing her with an older white male, who refused to answer whether he could keep an open mind, saying he didn't think he "could be fair to both sides."

The prosecution presented its case in less than seven days. Mumia was not present during most of it, having been removed from the courtroom for insisting on his right to self-representation, as well as the assistance of John Africa at counsel table. With his life on the line, he argued that he was being defended by a lawyer who was not only unqualified but unwilling to represent him. Nothing was done to assist Mumia in following the proceedings, such as transmission into his holding cell or the provision of a transcript. Not only was this a departure from common practice, but it was particularly damaging since it was Mumia, and not his attorney, who had prepared the case. Without Mumia's presence or assistance, his attorney could only feebly attempt to cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses.

That the police officer had been shot on a public street at 4 A.M. on December 9, 1981, after having stopped Mumia's brother's car was undisputed. That Mumia arrived at the scene moments after the officer had pummeled his brother with his flashlight was also undisputed. Mumia was shot, presumably by the same officer, since the bullet taken from his body matched that of the officer's gun. Mumia remained in critical condition for a period of time following emergency surgery. Nonetheless, his case was rushed to trial within six months without a continuance. After announcing that he would defend himself, Mumia was given just three weeks to prepare his case for trial.

The prosecution's case relied mainly on the testimony of four witnesses who claimed to be at or near the scene of the shootings. The court had refused all requests to have these witnesses attempt an identification of Mumia in a lineup, instead allowing him to be identified as he sat at counsel table or through photographs in his absence. The most damaging witness was a female prostitute who had a record of over thirty-five arrests and was serving a sentence in Massachusetts. She testified that she saw Mumia shoot the officer by running up behind him, shooting him once, and then firing again after he fell to the sidewalk. Previously, she had given a number of differing accounts, most of them contradicted by the other three witnesses. Another prostitute who was working the same area that night testified she was offered the same deal as the prosecution's witness: immunity from arrest by the police in return for her testimony against Mumia.

Of the three remaining witnesses, all male, two said they saw Mumia run to the scene where the police officer was beating Mumia's brother. Both testified that gunfire erupted shortly after Mumia arrived, but neither one saw Mumia shoot the officer. The third witness, a cabdriver who had pulled up behind the police car, was closest to the shooting. He told police that the shooter fled the scene, before more police arrived, by running to where an alleyway intersects the sidewalk some thirty yards away. The shooter was a large, heavy man, over six feet two and weighing more than 225 pounds. Mumia is six feet one and weighed a scant 170 pounds. At trial this witness denied that the shooter ran away, insisting instead that he took just a few steps and then sat down on the curb at the precise point where the police found Mumia, slumped over and bleeding profusely from his wound. The judge kept from the jury the fact that this witness had previously been convicted of throwing a Molotov cocktail into a public school for pay and was then on parole. He might have altered his testimony to curry favor with the prosecution or even out of fear. Another witness, a nearby resident, also reported seeing a man flee the scene in the same direction. She was the witness that defense counsel couldn't produce after contacting her on the judge's telephone midway through trial. A third witness, a prostitute, told the authorities that she also observed one or two men running from the scene, but recanted her story after lengthy questioning by the police. In all, four witnesses situated in four separate locations on the street -- none of whom knew each other or Mumia -- reported seeing the shooter flee, and all had him going in precisely the same direction. It's simply impossible that all four were hallucinating about the very same thing. Nonetheless, no investigation was made to locate or identify the fleeing suspect.

The prosecution's theory was that Mumia first shot the officer, wounding him slightly. When the officer returned fire and hit him, Mumia, angered, stood over the officer, who had since fallen to the sidewalk, and shot him in the face, killing him instantly. None of the witnesses, however, saw it that way. None even saw Mumia get shot. That theory was constructed out of the simple fact that the police found both Mumia and the officer lying within several feet of each other on the sidewalk, both wounded from gunshots. Although Mumia's gun was found at the scene (he had a permit to carry a weapon because he had been robbed as a cabdriver), the prosecution's expert claimed he could not match the bullet recovered from the officer's body to Mumia's gun due to the fragmented nature of the bullet.

To add weight to its somewhat shaky thesis, unconfirmed by the incredible prosecution witnesses, the prosecution produced a security guard who worked at the hospital where Mumia was taken for treatment. She testified that Mumia, an experienced journalist who had covered scores of court cases, openly confessed to everyone within earshot that he had shot the policeman, adding for emphasis, "I hope the motherfucker dies." But the officer who took Mumia into custody and stayed with him stated in his written report that Mumia remained silent throughout the entire time he was with him. His testimony, however, like that of the missing eyewitnesses, was not produced at trial. The officer who reported these events was "on vacation" when he should have been available to be called by the defense. A defense request to continue the case a few days until his return was denied.

Not able to produce the witnesses it needed to rebut the prosecution's case, the defense relied instead on the testimony of sixteen character witnesses. All testified that Mumia could not possibly have committed such a crime because he was known both professionally and socially as a gentle and decent man. When one character witness, the noted author and poet Sonia Sanchez, took the stand, the prosecutor questioned her, over objection, about the irrelevant fact that she had written the foreword to Assata Shakur's (Joanne Chesimard's) book, Assata Speaks. Then, with the court's blessing, he launched into a highly prejudicial and improper line of questioning about Assata's conviction for killing two police officers in New Jersey; inquiring, further, whether Sanchez also politically supported three New York men who had been convicted of killing police. Thus the prosecutor insinuated that Sanchez made a habit of supporting police killers, and that, by implication, Mumia must be one. In so doing, the prosecutor not only committed prosecutorial misconduct but set the stage for what later became an all-out attack on Mumia's politics.

The jury began deliberations at noon on the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend. By then they had been sequestered in a downtown hotel and away from their families for almost three weeks. Not surprisingly, before the day was over they had reached a verdict -- guilty of first-degree murder. However, they were unable to do so without first requesting, following several hours of deliberation, that they be reinstructed on the law of third-degree murder and manslaughter. Evidently, at least some jurors were troubled by the fact that, even if they accepted the prosecution's theory of the case, the element of premeditation was lacking because the officer was not shot fatally until after Mumia himself was shot; and then, presumably, as the result of an unpremeditated reaction. With the jury thus conflicted on the lesser charges of manslaughter and third-degree murder, no one anticipated this same jury would vote the death penalty.

The key to understanding why they did lies in what transpired during that part of the case that followed, referred to as the penalty phase. It is then that both sides present evidence bearing on the-issue of whether a sentence of life without parole or a sentence of death should be imposed. In a clear violation of Mumia's constitutional rights, the prosecution presented evidence of Mumia's background as a member of the Black Panther Party some twelve years earlier and his political beliefs as reported in a newspaper interview when he was just sixteen years old. Beyond doubt Mumia is on death row because of those political beliefs and associations. The ensuing portion of the transcript reads like a grotesque chapter out of the Inquisition.

It began when Mumia rose at counsel table to read a statement to the jury, exercising the time-honored right of allocution that all convicted persons have prior to being sentenced. He was not sworn as a witness and did not take the stand. In his statement he expressed his innocence and eloquently claimed that the proceedings were unfair. Stunned by Mumia's accusations against his handling of the case, the judge ruled that Mumia had made himself a witness and could be cross-examined in front of the jury. The prosecutor only too eagerly rose to the occasion.

First, Mumia was asked why he didn't stand for the judge when he entered the courtroom. That irrelevant and prejudicial inquiry was followed in rapid succession by a series of questions about why Mumia didn't accept the court's rulings without rancor, shouted at an appellate judge when his right to control his own case was taken away, and engaged in a hostile exchange with the court during pretrial hearings. As if to answer these questions, the prosecutor read from a twelve-year-old newspaper article about the Black Panther Party that contained, among other things, an interview of Mumia when he was just sixteen years old. [2] With his voice rising, the prosecutor demanded to know whether Mumia had ever said that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Mumia calmly responded that the quote did not originate with him but was a well-known dictum of Chairman Mao Ze-dong of the People's Republic of China. Continuing without letup, the prosecutor asked if Mumia could recall having said, in the same interview, "All power to the people." Again Mumia acknowledged the quote but insisted on the right to read extensively from the news article in order to place his comments in context. The article, which had previously been kept out of evidence by the court for being too prejudicial, included references to the Black Panther Party, the breakfast program, and the party's ongoing dispute with the Philadelphia Police Department.

Having thus portrayed Mumia as a radical black militant to this nearly all-white jury, the prosecutor argued in summation that it was Mumia's political history and disrespect of the system that caused him to kill the policeman. The jury returned a verdict of death, after being allowed to focus on the irrelevant quoted words of a sixteen-year-old, and disregarding the fact that Mumia had grown into manhood without a single conviction on his record, had a family, and the abiding respect and admiration of the community.

The appeal that followed was no less irregular. A year passed before Judge Sabo got around to formally pronouncing the sentence of death. Mumia's first assigned appellate attorney did nothing for an additional year and had to be removed from the case by the appellate court. His replacement counsel required another year to reconstruct events and file the necessary papers. Part of that reconstruction was an affidavit from Mumia's trial attorney testifying to the number of African-Americans who had been removed from the jury. Due to the passage of time, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court disregarded the affidavit, alleging that the attorney's memory had faded in the interim. All relief was denied. Only four justices, the minimum number required, signed the court's opinion. [3] One of the four, Justice McDermott, clearly should have disqualified himself, because he had been involved in a direct and personal court confrontation with Mumia, but didn't. Chief Justice Nix, an African-American, inexplicably removed himself from the case, as did another justice, Justice Larson, also without comment. That justice had been accused of racial bias by the chief and was later prosecuted for a minor drug offense, convicted, and subsequently removed from the bench following impeachment by the Pennsylvania Senate.

The court's opinion, a particularly vituperative fifteen-page document, possibly the result of Justice McDermott's personal encounter with Mumia, rejected all of Mumia's claims respecting constitutional and trial errors. Sanctioned was the prosecutor's racially skewed use of peremptory challenges, the court's deprivation of Mumia's right to defend himself and be present, and the improper cross-examination of both Sonia Sanchez and Mumia. Most remarkably, the prosecutor's argument to the jury that Mumia would have "appeal after appeal and perhaps there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be final," was upheld. That precise argument, undermining the need of the jury to confront the finality of what they were being asked to do, was specifically rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1985. [4] Earlier the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had reversed a state conviction that, ironically, was based on a summation given by the very same prosecutor using the nearly identical argument he made in Mumia's case. [5] The court chose to ignore both these precedents and affirmed Mumia's death sentence.

Mumia fared no better with the U.S. Supreme Court. It refused to even consider his appeal. [6] However, that same year it accepted, and decided favorably, a case in which a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a white racist organization, complained that the prosecution had improperly used the fact of his political association against him in the penalty phase of his trial. Ruling that the First Amendment to the Constitution bars such evidence, the Court reversed his death sentence. [7] Mumia's petition to be joined in this appeal was denied without comment.

Now, more than twelve years after his conviction, Mumia is seeking a new trial in the state courts of Pennsylvania. If denied, he plans to file a habeas corpus petition in the federal courts. However, new restrictions imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court on habeas corpus severely restrict his ability to obtain any relief.

For the first time, his case is being investigated. Evidence has already been found in support of his innocence. However, investigating his case more than a decade after the event has proven both difficult and expensive.

At the time of this writing, a death warrant has not yet been signed by the governor. But because of the November 1994 election of Republican governor Thomas Ridge who ran, in part, on expediting executions, there is danger that in early 1995 an execution date will be set. Mumia is near the top of the list of those awaiting the signing of a warrant, so we are in a race against time to save this innocent and, as the preceding pages attest, eloquent "voice of the voiceless." In the words of Ossie Davis, cochair of the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, "We need Mumia desperately. At a time like this, we cannot afford to let them take such a voice from us without putting up a fight of enormous proportions."

_______________

Notes:

1. Commonwealth v. Connor.

2. Philadelphia Inquirer, January 4, 1970.

3. Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal 521 Pa. 188, 555 A.2d 846 (1989).

4. Caldwell v. Mississippi 472 U.S. 320 (1985).

5. Commonwealth v. Baker 511 Pa. 1, 511 A.2d 777 (1986).

6. Pennsylvania v. Abu-Jamal 498 U.S. 881 (1990).

7. Dawson v. Delaware 503 U.S. 159 (1992).

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About the Author

Mumia Abu-Jamal was born April 24, 1954, in Philadelphia.

At the time of his arrest on December 9, 1981, on charges of murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal was a well-known Philadelphia-based African-American journalist and activist. He was the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Association of Black Journalists. The January 1981 issue of Philadelphia magazine had named him "one of the people to watch in 1981."

During the period of 1970-1981 he was a widely acclaimed and Corporation for Public Broadcasting award-winning journalist, known as "the voice of the voiceless" as a result of his news broadcasts on National Public Radio, Mutual Black Network, and National Black Network, and did daily reports on WUHY (now WHYY) and a number of other stations.

From his youth, Mumia was a political activist. At age fourteen, he was beaten and arrested for protesting a presidential rally for George Wallace. In the fall of 1968, he became a founding member and Lieutenant minister of information of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. During the summer of 1970, Mumia worked at the Black Panther Party newspaper in Oakland, California, returning to Philadelphia shortly before the Philadelphia police raid on all three offices of the Black Panther Party.

While working as a journalist during the 1970s, Mumia published some hard-hitting criticism of the Philadelphia Police Department and the Rizzo administration, which also made him a man for them "to watch." He rejected Rizzo's version of the 1978 siege of the MOVE organization's Powelton Village home by more than six hundred heavily armed officers, and his tireless advocacy resulted in his being fired from his broadcast job. He had to work as a night-shift cabdriver to support his family.

He was driving a cab the night of December 9, 1981, when he was shot and beaten by police and charged with the murder of a police officer. He was put on trial within six months, and on July 3, 1982, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. His appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was denied in March 1989, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused review of his case. A petition for postconviction relief is now being prepared for filing in the state courts.

For thirteen years he has been on death row in Huntingdon prison. He has been a working journalist from death row for over five years -- his commentaries have been printed in dozens of newspapers (at least forty are known) throughout the United States and Europe. In January 1991 his commentary on life on death row and the impact of the McCleskey case was featured in the Yale Law Journal.

In 1994 his scheduled commentaries for National Public Radio's All Things Considered, "Live from Death Row," which described life behind bars in Huntingdon, caused such controversy that they were abruptly canceled, sparking intense debates across the country about censorship and the death penalty.

For more information on racism, the death penalty, and what you can do, contact:

International Concerned Friends & Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 19709
Philadelphia, PA 19143
215-476-8812 phone & fax

Equal Justice USA, A Project of the Quixote Center
P.O. Box 5206
Hyattsville, MD 20782
301-699-0042 phone
301-864-2182 fax

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition
P.O. 650
New York, NY 10009
212-330-8029

Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 163
Amsterdam Ave. #115
New York, NY 10023-5001

Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99
Canal St. Station
New York, NY 10013
212-406-4252

Western PA Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 10174
Pittsburgh, PA 15232-0174

Art & Writings Against Death Penalty
164 Lexington Ave.
Jersey City, NJ 07304
201-435-3244

Freedom Now Network!
2420 24th St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-648-4505

Just Justice
c/o Claude Pujol, UFR d'anglais, 3
Rue des Tanneurs, 37041
Tours Cedex France
33-47-61-69-37 phone

Refuse & Resist!
305 Madison Ave., Suite 1166
New York, NY 10165