Prison Radio
Mike Africa Jr.

And every year, prisoners and civilians run and exercise together to talk about how we’re going to abolish the prison system here in America. There is much resistance. There is much resistance from prisoners. Prisoners write letters to support other organizations. There are many, many people, especially prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, and I know the MOVE members wrote letters and articles to expose the injustices of prison and the prison system. And also to talk about the injustices that are happening outside of prison too. When you think about the Keystone Pipeline in America, where oil is being drilled out of the ground and contaminating the water where the natives specifically live. And the prisoners write to talk about those issues and expose the injustice to try to put an end to it.

Mumia talks about everything, every injustice that exists from issues with attacks against journalists, attacks against women, attacks against blacks, attacks against animals. Mumia is always talking about fighting to stop injustice, and because of his activism, he has been a target as well. This past December 9th, um, Mumia Abu-Jamal was—40 years, 40 years anniversary of him being arrested and put in prison and put on death row. Because of Mumia’s position and his unrelenting fight to talk about change and progress, he has been heavily targeted, but because of the love from his family and from his supporters, we continue to fight for his release and fight for his safety.

Currently right now, Mumia is in prison and has a PCRA, which stands for post conviction relief appeal, where we are trying to get him a new hearing to prove that he is innocent and to prove that he should not be in prison. Excellent work of the lawyers to put the PCRA together and get it into court is—so the PCRA is in, and one of the hurdles that there we’re struggling with this is that not only is the mass incarceration a big problem, but the court systems are corrupt as well. And we’ve seen too many issues in court with the politicians and the prosecutors. The prosecutors are guilty of prosecutorial misconduct. They’re guilty of intimidating witnesses. [inaudible] guilty of paying witnesses to lie about what they said or what they said they saw. And a lot of this is what happened in Mumia’s case, so there’s a lot of misconduct, and we’re hoping [inaudible] we’ll be successful through the PCRA process and through people out there on the streets mobilizing and working together to spread love and show the truth, the true meaning of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Some of the other issues that we’ve had with this process of Mumia is that at the same time we are pushing for freedom, there are people in the DAs office that are conflicted because they are not sure about the case, specifically Larry Krasner. Larry Krasner has been conflicted because he’s been around a lot of people who believe that Mumia is guilty and he has been influenced to think that as well. Larry Krasner has done some amazing things and wonderful things, and we want to encourage him to continue to do those things, to create change because many people have been released because of Larry Krasner, righting a lot of wrongs and the country and the city, and we want Larry Krasner to continue to do those things. We encourage him and we applaud him for what he’s done. And we want to make sure what we want him to know that he has our support and continuing to do the right thing.

It’s important for people to understand that while we’re working on this campaign and while they’re trying to [inaudible], Mumia’s health is not very well. Mumia is 67 years old. He’ll be 68 in April. And because of his preexisting health issues, he’s not going to live. We expect him to live no more than just a few years, five to seven years possibly. And of course, that’s based on the life expectancy from his physicians, but if he can be released from prison, he can live much longer. We need a lot of support to make this, to get Mumia out of prison. His health—he’s had open heart surgery already. He has had hepatitis C. He suffers from extreme eczema. He’s had COVID-19. He still has underlying effects. His health situation is not good. And he’s strong, and how he feels is that he’s strong. But I’ve known Mumia for 30 years, and I know that he’s a different person than he was when he was younger and not only from when he was younger, but also within the last two or three years, his health has rapidly declined. So we need to get me out of prison because of that. We do not want Mumia to die in prison like many other prisoners do.

And how we expected to do this, we want people to understand that we’re not violent people. We believe in self-defense, but we are not violent. But we also understand that this campaign is called “Love Not Phear.” We created a campaign to spread love and challenge fear. Everybody in America knows that the government is corrupt. Everybody knows that the police are violent and they kill people for no reason. And everybody, the famous people, the Will Smith, the Kevin Hart, all of the different celebrities that come from the city of Philadelphia, they know that there’s corruption, that there’s racism. And one of the reasons they don’t speak out more is because they’re fearful. They’re fearful of the punishment from the police. And we have to challenge that fear. The people, the citizens, when you protest in the city of Philadelphia, one of the things you’re met with is police presence. The police arrive so that they can intimidate people and to stop the protest.

But we have to challenge that fear. We have to allow people to protest against injustice, and we have to keep on moving, and love is what is what we’re leading with. So we have to spread love and challenge fear. If people can go to the website www.lovenotphear.com, fear is similar to the way you spell Philadelphia with Ph-, lovenotphear.com, check out our Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages @lovenotphear, help us free Mumia!