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Live From Death Row, Part 1
A lifetime may pass without an individual having been personally addressed by government. For millions, government is a remote venture conducted by quasi representatives in their name, with their silence oft times taken as acquiescence. Never is an individual as personally involved with government as when faced by the power of a court when their freedoms and very lives are at stake, at the tender mercies of the state. And rarely, has the case been clearer, than when a Black man actually sued in the United States court for his freedom from slavery.
The case? Dred Scott vs. Sanford, 1857. Perhaps, you’ve heard of the case, but have you ever read it? It is an eye opening piece of African and American history running over 100 pages with the opinion of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a bony stoop slave owner from Maryland who wrote, “The question is simply this, can a Negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States? And as such, become entitled to all the rights and privileges and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?
The plea applies to that class of persons only whose ancestors were Negroes of the African race, and imported into this country and sold and held, as slaves. We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included under the word citizens in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for, and secures to, citizens of the United States.
On the contrary, they were at that time, considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority and had no rights or privileges, but such as those who held the power in the government might choose to grant them. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race. Either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. |And, that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Dred Scott vs. Sanford, US Supreme Court.
In these words uttered by one of America’s most brilliant jurists, the face of US racist oppression was made plain. The plaintiff, the slave, Dred Scott, who sued for his freedom in US courts and that of his wife, Harriet and his daughters Eliza and Lizzie, fourteen and seven respectively, found a court of law, but not of justice which rejected his claim, saying, since he wasn’t a citizen, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, including the right to sue, didn’t apply. One hundred and thirty-six years after Scott and still we find courts of law, but not of justice. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do contact Equal Justice USA at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live from Death Row, Part 2
My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I’m a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and an African American. I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUHY, and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I’m a writer and a public radio commentator. I’ve been a resident on Pennsylvania’s death row for eleven years. Tune in to hear my regular reports. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station.
Thanks to the efforts of premier filmmaker, Spike Lee, the name Malcolm X is once again on millions of lips. Traced 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 commentary is not and cannot be a film review, for I’ve 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 co-founder, Dr. Huey P. Newton. As with King and Newton, Malcolm X shared assassination. But perhaps there the similarity ends. For as America lionized, lauded and elevated King, more for his nonviolent philosophy than for his person, it ignored and ignominized Malcolm. As it did similarly with 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 smolders 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 10 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 in the Urban North, a fact noted by his brilliant, devoted aide de camp, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who in his autobiography, noted how King coming to Chicago, Illinois, met glacial White hatred, Black indifference and near disaster.
Northern bred Blacks preferred a more defiant, confrontational and militant message than turned the other cheek and Malcolm X provided it in clear, uncompromising terms. And his message of Black self-defense and Afro-American self determination struck both Muslim and non-Muslim alike as logical and reasonable, given the decidedly un-Christian behavior displayed by America to the Black, Brown, Red and Yellow world. The media, as Malcolm predicted, would attempt to homogenize and white 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 towards 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 thought. Malcolm and the man who returned from Mecca, Haji 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 a Supreme Court has indeed shown, changes from day to day, case to case, administration to administration. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism, and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice USA at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live from Death Row, Part 3
“30 to 100 years, no more! Free move now! Open up the door!,” a marchers chant. To hear news accounts their numbers weren’t impressive, with less than 50 marchers participating in a May 13, 1993 march calling for the freedom of move political prisoners.
In this respect, local and regionally published reports were accurate, if not explanatory, of the significance of the event. To be sure, it was reported that the march also marked the eighth anniversary of the police bombing and mass murder of eleven MOVE members from moves home on Osage Avenue. And also the first anniversary of the day MOVE’s Communications Minister Ramona Africa, was released from prison after seven years as a political prisoner. So, that was accurate. In their endless fascination with numbers, the media counted numbers, researched dates, took a few pictures and considered their story told.
As ever with MOVE, that is seldom, if ever, the case. Who were the people marching? “We’re fired up, still on the move!”, a march chant. Their voices were light, heavy, thin and thunderous. Theirs were the voices of MOVE men, MOVE women, and MOVE children, the young sons and daughters of revolution. Tall with lithe, lean forms or tiny bundles of baby fat, all uncosmetic.
The move children march militantly from West Philadelphia, the site of the old MOVE headquarters at 33rd and Powelton Avenue, site of the August 8, 1978 MOVE confrontation, to Philadelphia City Hall, which they circled twice in the rain. The children, many who were themselves, although babies, veterans from the August 8th confrontation, are a sight to behold. Strong limbed, clear eyes like dark stars, teeth like shimmering pearls, radiant and beautiful.
Numbers did not disturb them, as they demonstrated for their parents, their brothers and sisters. For they were comfortable among themselves, and excited about their activity. These remarkable children called “The Seeds of Wisdom,” by John Africa, are born in revolution, in resistance, in anti systematic natural law. Their young brothers and sisters were murdered by the government on May 13th 1985. Their older brothers and sisters were also murdered by the government on May 13th, and some were railroaded to nearly a century in prison. At least one child was born in prison.
“Jail Rendell! Set MOVE free!”, march chant. Reporters told that a march occurred and how many participated on that rainy day in May. But, by not showing who marched, they missed the heart of the story. A story of resistance, generation by generation and the living tale of survival. From Death Row., this is Mumia Abu Jamal
For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do contact Equal Justice USA, at (301) 699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio
Live from Death Row, Part 4
The internationally televised police aggravated assault of Black LA motorist Rodney King, 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 upon the purported threats posed by that particular defendant, a variation of the so called “Big N***a Defense.” At least one reputable study, however, reveals 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 minorities.
The study, a two year survey of both national and regional newspapers, found, in the words of study conductor, Joseph Fagan, a University of Florida [UF] sociology professor, that Rodney King’s beating is not an isolated incident. Fagan and fellow UF researcher Kim Lersch utilized the Nexus Computer System in search of 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 even ever reported, much less published, then it occurred at least four times a month or once a week during the report period.
The Fagan Studies show that Afro-Americans or Latinos were victims of the brutality in 97% of such cases where white cops were centrally involved in over 93% of the beatings. “We found,” said Lersch, “that the cases typically involved groups of white police officers assaulting a Black or Latino. Indeed,” Lesrch noted, “the data revealed a national pattern that could best be termed routine.” The UF study researchers, in an attempt to check their results against a presumably reliable source, that is the US Department of Justice, sought their study results. In March 1991, when King’s brutal video beating was fueling international outrage, then US Attorney General, Richard Thornberg, ordered a Justice Department survey for the previous six year period.
Although it’s been completed over a year ago, it has never been released, not even to these UF researchers. The nationally broadcast television show, American Justice, released recently, an astonishing report revealing that in a 10 year period from 1981 to 1991, over 79,000 — That’s right, 79,000 cases of police brutality, coast to coast occurred. 79,000. Those numbers, if accurate, mean over 7,900 assaults by police a year in America. A civilian is brutalized on the average, over 658 times a month by police. Over 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. In America, because of the police gang, 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. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice U.S.A. at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live from Death Row, Part 5
The most repressive regime in America just got more repressive. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections introduced administrative directives 801/802. These new regulations severely restrict information, communication and visitation from very little, to virtually nil. Generally, visits are pared down to one per month, with planned restrictions barring all but personal and legal mail and a ban on all books, save a Bible or Qur’an. It is a broad based attack on the life of the mind. Newspapers are to be exchanged, one for one, ostensibly to discourage hoarding, but in reality, to stem the flow of shared information between prisoners, a vital source of up to date information, especially in light of the fact that few have access to TV and radio.
Provisions of the rules are so extreme that they can be interpreted to deny a man a piece of paper or an ink pen. Smokers are particularly hard hit. Two packs a month are allowed. But most insidious are the provisions governing legal material. They suggest the other regulations are mere smokescreens designed to divert attention from the state’s principal objective; the stripping of jailhouse lawyers, for the legal material sections of the Pennsylvania regulations, govern all prisoners in the hole, whether for disciplinary or administrative reasons.
There is solid support from scholars, and statistical analysis, for the notion that jailhouse lawyers are the targets of the new rules. In 1991, one of the most exhaustive studies to date on the targets of the prison disciplinary system was released. That report, titled, “The Myth of Humane Imprisonment,” found there is a statistical hierarchy of who receives the harshest disciplinary sanctions from prison officials. Authored by criminologist Mark S. Hamm, Dr. Corey Weinstein, Therese Coupez, and Francis Friedman, it presents tables reflecting the most frequently disciplined groups of prisoners.
Here’s an example: Jailhouse lawyers constitute 60.8% of the sample; Blacks 48.5%; prisoners with mental handicaps constitute 37.9%; gang members 31%; political prisoners 29.8%; Hispanics 27%; homosexuals 26.6%; whites 22.2%; AIDS patients 19.9%; prisoners with physical handicaps 18.7%; and Asians 5.1%. In accounts supporting the statistical data, the authors wrote, “Respondents observed that guards and administrators had a standard practice of singling out jailhouse lawyers for discipline in retaliation for challenging the status quo.”
While the data supports the widely held notion that Blacks are often targets of severe sanctions, that jailhouse lawyers are the most sanctioned is striking. For jailhouse lawyers, men and women self-trained in law and legal procedure, are among the most studious, in law, at least in the prison and therein lies the rub. The evidence suggests, and the new regulations clearly support the notion, that prison administrators don’t want studious, well read prisoners. Rather, they prefer inmates who are obedient, quiet and dumb. Why else would a prison expressly forbid a person from expanding their learning through correspondence courses or educational programs? It would seem that any institution daring to use the term “corrections” would require all of its charges to participate in educational programs. For how else is one corrected?
Yet, disciplinary prisoners are forbidden from the one resource designed to moderate behavior and enhance self esteem, education. For them, many of whom are illiterate, books are deemed contraband and educational courses are prescribed. In that regard, more than any other, lies the solution to the often bewildering conundrum mislabeled as corrections.
The state raises its narrow institutional interests, that of control by keeping people stupid, over an interest that is intensely human: the right of all beings to grow in wisdom, insight and knowledge for their own sakes, as well as their unique contribution to the fund of human knowledge. This intentional degradation of the soul by the state, which allows a being to degenerate or vegetate yet forbids one from mental expansion, is the most sure indictment available of a system that creates, rather than corrects, the most fundamental evil in existence, that of ignorance. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice USA at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live from Death Row, Part 6
A federal civil rights trial in Philadelphia charging seven former Graterford Prison guards with violating the civil rights of a number of prisoners by severely beating them while they were shackled and cuffed, hand and foot, revealed in glaring fashion, how in prisons there is no law. There are no rights. Despite the guilty pleas and damning testimony of five ex-guards, that they and their colleagues, maliciously beat, kicked, stomped, black-jacked and tasered (that is used a handheld electric shocking device) prisoners who committed no institutional offenses, a civil jury acquitted the seven of virtually all charges. One juror was quoted as saying, “Although it was proven that prisoners were badly beaten, no conspiracy was proven by US prosecutors.”
One prisoner who suffered from AIDS and thus had less internal resources with which to rebound from the horrific physical and psychological trauma he suffered in the beating, has since died. In the month-long trial it was revealed guards thought 19 prisoners, transferred from Camp Hill Prison shortly after rioters and rebels nearly leveled the Central Pennsylvania facility to a pile of smoldering ashes, were part of the rioting crews that ripped the prison apart. In fact, the 19 were non-rioters who were only too glad to be leaving what came to be called “Camp Hell,” and to be coming to the state’s largest and Blackest prison, Graterford. Instead, they were leaving the fire only to get simmered in the frying pan, so to speak. At Graterford, whose massive haunting walls seemed to offer some relief from the raging, literal and psychic infernos of Camp Hill, the 19 men met uniformed hatred and naked brutality as they were beaten, kicked and terrorized by government officials sworn to protect the elusive peace in prisons.
Guards who, acting on nothing but assumptions, assaulted over a dozen men on the notion that they were troublemakers. Some, those few who could navigate the treacherous straits and shoals of civil litigation, sued state officials for damages. Others bound up their wounds and blended into the wall while waiting for terms to expire so that they could be “free” again. Several testified in the federal prosecution. One died. But, all found out how fragile the very system that stole their very freedom was when the state committed crimes against them. All found out that words like justice, law, civil rights and yes, crime, have different and elastic meanings, depending upon whose rights were violated, who committed what crimes against whom, and whether one works for the system or against it. For those people, almost a million at last count, who wear the label “prisoner” around their necks, there is no law. There is no justice. There are no rights. From Death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice USA at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live from Death Row, Part 7
“The courts have raised hope, spit disappointment, courted the rich and protected their interest. It is past time for all poor people to release themselves from the deceptive strangulation of society. Realize that society has failed you. For to attempt to ignore this system of deception now, is to deny you the need to protest this failure later. The system has failed you yesterday, failed you today, and have created the conditions for failure tomorrow.” From John Africa, MOVE founder, “The Judge’s Letter.”
America’s presidential race is history, and former President Bush is in his political retirement. The nation’s media is awash in hoopla for the changing of the presidential guard, and few are the voices of dissent or alarm. Many, perhaps tens of millions we are told, voted not so much for Clinton as against Bush. Or, against Bush’s inability to crank up America’s dwindling economy. This, despite the fact that presidents have a tenuous influence on something so enormous as national economy. But by way of a treaty, millions of jobs may be affected for the worse.
That treaty, the so-called NAFTA pact, NAFTA, for the North American Free Trade Agreement, talks about free trade in everything but labor. Big industries and mid-sized corporations in the U.S. are licking their collective lips at the prospect of traveling points south of the border, where labor is cheapest, where environmental laws are nonexistent and where unions are mere memories. President elect Bill Clinton, like his corporate counterpart Bush, both embraced NAFTA like the Holy Grail, and both swore their adherence to business whims. It is the inherent nature of capitalism to maximize the profit margin, even if labor’s return is minimized. A long history of collective bargaining, or unionism in the US provided workers with impressive living standards. Standards, incidentally, that have been in decline for a decade.
Clinton’s election, given his support of NAFTA, ensures that decline will continue for millions. Using the attractive bait of racial hatred, the Reagan-Bush Camp convinced millions of whites to vote for them, and all would be well. It took a decade of union busting, of industrial flight abroad, of economic decay, for workers and expansion for management, for millions of white workers to turn away from the party of, “Willie Horton is hatred,” but to what?
Clinton, using an anti-Bush milieu, ignored Blacks and labor, spit on Sista’ Soldier, jeffed Jesse Jackson, and most sinisterly barbecued Ricky Ray Richter, in an Arkansas death cell, in a not too subtle appeal to white racism for votes. Millions of whites, again, like sheep, voted for him. Just as Bush-Reagan burned workers from their first days in office, Clinton’s adoption of NAFTA guarantees a like result. In 1996, who would dance enough to attract white votes? Perot? Duke? Clinton? And with what? The face changes, the system doesn’t. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice USA at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live From Death Row, Part 8
As the night sky over Mogadishu explodes into blazing light, UN/US Armed Forces clash with Somali irregulars in the Horn of Africa. The East African nation already ravaged by famine and the disintegration of the fallen Barre regime, is now the setting for war. So called “Peacekeeping Forces” of the United Nations shoot live rounds into crowds of demonstrating Somalis, killing and wounding scores of them, and further defaming the dead by calling them “shields” for Somali gunmen.
Curiously, only the “shields”, Somalian women and children for the most part, are hit by gunfire, not gunmen. Curious too, how troops kill unarmed demonstrators, mostly women, as part of a “peacekeeping” mission. The US, although not yet involved in ground activity, has unleashed repeated air attacks on the capital city, making President Clinton’s first use of arms as Commander in Chief, if one excludes the Waco massacre, in East Africa, against a small Somali militia man commanding a minute squad of what appears to be armed, with small arms, children.
In a world where small wars and silent holocausts approach normalcy, where Serb-Muslim intergroup hatred has spawned concentration camps, mass rape and ethnic cleansing of beleaguered Muslims, the United Nations can only drop leaflets and MRE food packages. But that is Europe, where we are told centuries of old hatreds make military intervention ill advised. Where US Air Forces dropped food relief to Bosnia-Herzegovina, they dropped bombs on Mogadishu, East Africa. To send a message to a Somali general, his home, offices and supporters were bombarded by US air fire. Bosnian and Serb cleansers, we can assume, do not need any message. In truth, however, every act, even non-action, has a message.
The so-called ‘International Community,’ actually a minority of the world’s people, have used force in an attempt to humble an African militia leader, who has sought to control his own homeland. That same UN/US force has refused to raise a finger where European militias have virtually razed cities and scattered countless numbers of Muslim families to ethnically cleanse Bosnia-Herzegovina. To my mind, that’s quite a message. It is also illustrative of the way the UN has become the henchman for imperialist power. It doesn’t matter if the generals are Black, qhite, straight or gay, male or female. They serve the interests of the system. Nor, does it matter if the President is Democratic or Republican. They fight to preserve the system.
Is it coincidence that Clinton’s first military strike into the Horn of Africa came days after his lowest poll readings? The American people, if they’ve shown anything in two centuries of existence, have shown a passion for war. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice U.S.A. at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Mumia Abu-Jamal “Live From Death Row, Part 9
Much has been said and written on NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. As the economy lurches into recession after recession, some are selling NAFTA as the be all, end all, a solution to the increasing cycles of bad economic times. Economics, an intimidating, confounding science, if ever there was one, does follow certain principles. Among them, that capital follows the profit margin, always. Always.
The NAFTA backers claim the pact will provide many new jobs because of new business opportunities in Mexico and elsewhere. There may be jobs, but they will pay a bare pittance, and the businesses that remain behind will bludgeon their workers with the threat of relocation to the low paying vistas south of the border. Indeed, it is already happening.
Capital’s trek to below the Rio Grande has created an ocean of maquiladores hugging the US border where goods are produced by Mexican workers paid the barest peso, only to be shipped north for sale to Norte Americanos at regular prices meaning, ultimately, a bigger margin of profit for the manufacturer with less for laborers.
NAFTA means an intensification of this trend. NAFTA means lower wages for workers. NAFTA is a political creation of US and multinational capital, and thus designed to provide corporate interests with a larger pool for production, which Mexico obviously offers with lower wages (ditto), and also with dramatically lessened environmental regulations.
Think of it this way, if you were a business producing widgets and had an opportunity to produce them by non-union, bargain basement, low paid workers with no social security, no worker’s comp, no OSHA, such as it is, no EPA, such as it is, and still could sell your widgets at the same or even higher prices? Would you do it? That’s the question pondered by many a manager, board member and director of US business today. And, in the harsh world of the economy, it is a force greater to capital than gravity itself. NAFTA pulls the plug out of the tub and quickens the economic whoosh down the drain for US labor.
To be sure, Maquiladores represent substantial investments and job opportunities for Mexican workers who are quite willing to work for meager, by US standards, wages provided by US business. But, Mexico’s gain will mean US losses. Even given the far fetched possibility that the US Congress will reject NAFTA, the inexorable southern flow will not end, for no congress, nor any other purely political entity, can or will block the drive of capital for its highest return, a better bottom line. Consider any politician’s stand on NAFTA, and you will know whether he supports the rights of those who labor, or of those who boss and profit from labor. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do, contact Equal Justice U.S.A. at 301-699-0042.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
Live from Death Row, Part 10
In early January, 1992 the Reverend Mohammed I Kenyatta, hobbled by heart disease and painful diabetes, let go of life after only 47 years of an extraordinary spate of service, activism and legal scholarship. Kenyatta, who had the dexterity to be both a political opponent and the personal friend, filled his relatively short life with titles reflecting accurately a caring and brilliant spirit, ordained minister before puberty, civil rights and Black economic development activist, one time mayoral candidate of Philadelphia, law professor and scholar. If you asked him which one he preferred, he’d probably stifle a dimple chuckle and say “None, Mu. Just say Grandpap.” In the 60s and 70s, Mo Kenyatta staged demonstrations at white wealthy inner city churches demanding reparations and neighborhood accountability in scenes which sent shock waves through white Protestant laity and clergy, but which had their impetus more in the biblical example of Jesus flaying the money lenders at the temple than, the zeitgeist of the militant 60s. For Mo had a knack for making his faith merge with a moment. In an article penned several months before his death, Mo wrote of the impact of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had just retired from the US Supreme Court, and what that meant to him as a Black man and a Black lawyer in United States. Especially, with regard to the case known as Brown versus Board of Education 1954, declaring racial segregation unconstitutional. Quote, “The Negro people personified in one Mr. Thurgood Marshall had won a major victory in our quest for freedom. No, it did not change very much, very fast. We were still poor. But, the law of the land was we now believed on our side, at last, and we began to believe more in ourselves. Thurgood Marshall, a Black lawyer, the product of a black college, Lincoln University and a Black Law School, Howard University Law School, had won. Thus we had won. Thurgood Marshall amplified our faith in ourselves and in our ability to advocate for ourselves. Thurgood Marshall helped give us hope. Just as crucial to the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s as our faith in ourselves, was our expectation of progressive change. It has often been noted that great social revolutions are born of great expectations.Crushed under the heels of violent, systematic, legally sanctioned repression since the 1870s. And, the collapse of reconstruction, we the ex slaves seem doomed to never be truly free. For most of us, our own solace became religion and the promise of freedom in the great beyond. But Marshall revived the language of the law. He joined the moral righteousness of our cause with the state sanctioned rectitude of the law. Thirty-two times as an NAACP lawyer, he argued before the Supreme Court, the highest tribunal of the land. Twenty-nine amazing times he walked away with victory. Thurgood Marshall taught us hope. I think often of Marshall when pondering what to tell my students about law and why law matters. I remember what America was like before the revolution in law, led by Marshall and his cohorts. And then I know, I must say to my students that law, real law, is, first and foremost, a labor of love”, end quote.Muhammad Kenyatta, 7-22- 91. When a man in the death row cages told me of Marshall’s passing, I thought of his staunch opposition to the death penalty, and of Mo’s touching article noting Marshall’s retirement. Kenyatta was an associate law professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, where he lived with his brilliant wife, Mary, at the time of his death. There are many who remembered him with warm affection, with his engaging manner, his audacious militants, his signal intelligence, his pervasive love, including this writer. It is fitting that Mo fill the space with his reflections of the late great justice. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal. For more information about my case racism and the death penalty and what you can do contact equal justice, USA at 301-699-0042,
Live from Death Row, Part 10
“You were taught that you control nature. Remember how water seems pendant and trapped till the dam breaks and crumbles, and dies like its maker. To blockade life’s plan is cruel, fatal, blind, deadly to those that imprison the force to be free.”, unquote, from John Africa, “The Judges Letter.
Summer 1993 is an awesome spectacle of the royal power of Mother Nature. An earthquake near the northern Japanese islands of Hokkaido and Honshu kills hundreds while devastating property over a wide region. Heavy rain swell the Mighty Mississippi River until it bursts its banks, flooding seven Midwestern states, virtually inundating one state.
While floods ravage the Midwest, southern states experience drought. A heat wave of at least 100 degree temperatures, melts the East Coast, leaving hundreds dead And or debilitated. In Philadelphia alone, almost 100 people died in one week from baking temperatures. Hurricane Andrew hammers, western Mexico.
The Midwestern floods leave 10s of 1000s of people homeless, jobless, and ironically, in the midst of tons of water without drinking water. Earthquakes, floods, heat waves?
We are taught daily that man has harnessed the forces of nature to power global economies and fuel technologies. Few powers to bend nature’s will seem beyond human reach with the construction of quake resistant buildings, man made levees and chilling air conditioning.
Then a week in summer 1993 demonstrates how puny humans are when confronting the fundamental forces of nature. Earthquakes snap steel girders like children snapping popsicle sticks. Floods overrun levees and swallow whole cities. Heat Waves drain power reserves, causing brown outs and blackouts as the demand for power outstrips available stores generated.The summer events seem to demand solutions that work in tandem with, rather than domination of nature.
Most major cities owe their existence to rivers. Paris, New York, Cairo, London, Philadelphia, etc, all live on the banks of great rivers. The raging Mississippi reveals how, in a matter of days, life can be drastically altered by something we take for granted, rain.
Until humankind opts for harmony with nature over domination, oneness over otherness, the seasons of death and destruction will only escalate
From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do contact Equal Justice USA, at 301-690-9042