Negotiating the twists and turns through rural routes and former coal mining towns, brings me closer to the State Correctional Institute, SCI Mahanoy, 301 Greyline Dr. Frackville Pennsylvania, USA.
We are driving to the place where the American government has tried to bury its most persistent critic.
Professor Joy James and I are visiting scholar and writer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
As Mumia Abu Jamal reflects in his most recent essay:
“Empires rise and empires fall. A century ago, Britain boasted that the sun would never set on the British Empire. A few world wars later, and after decolonization struggles, it is an empire no more… What of the American empire? Is it immune to the lessons of history?”
“Beneath the Mountain Mumia’s new book reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide.” Professor Joy James
Before I describe our visit, first let me share with you insights into the measure of the man.
It is both appropriate and prescient that as a teenager in the mid-1960s Wesley Cook took a Kenyan first name “Mumia” and an Arabic last name “Abu-Jamal.” He formally changed his name decades ago. Yet, the Philadelphia courts, genuflecting to the Fraternal Order of Police, acquiesced and actually changed the record to his birth name. His court records pop up only when you type in Wesley Cook.
A recognition of one’s humanity requires a persona have the ability to define oneself and to act with self-determination.
As a professional journalist in Philadelphia in the early 80’s one radio station demanded Mumia Abu-Jamal deliver his reports as “William Wellington Cole.” The name has a nice ring to it, but also it was imposed, offensive, and preppy.
Mumia was offered a prime time WHYY TV reporters’ job that came with two conditions: he would have to change his name and cut his dreadlocks. He has said that those requests, in and of themselves, were not what made him turn the station down. It was what was surely to be the next required compromise, the refusal to air certain voices, the censorship of his reporting, that would be the real price for taking the job.
Let me share with you a little bit more about the young Wesley Cook. As a sharp young junior high school student he was asked to go on a field trip to Washington DC. He met and shook hands with President Lyndon Johnson during a reception at the White House. Wesley had to promise his teachers not to “embarrass” them by asking questions of Johnson. That was probably the last time Mumia, the intrepid journalist, did not politely and inquisitively grill a pundit given an opportunity.
Mumia has a twin brother: Wayne. A fraternal twin. Not identical. Wayne was career army and after that a southern prison guard. I have my own fraternal twin sister, and like Wayne, she is completely dissimilar in personality and life choices. But because we shared everything, clothes, beds, food, attention and several other siblings there is a warmth and deep familiarity. I share this to expand and make real a humanity the state tries to keep hidden.
Today, Mumia Abu-Jamal reaches across the prison walls to us, through his radio work, his brilliant conversations with Marc Lamont Hill The Classroom and the Cell, and his book length writing. He is finishing his Ph.D. on Frantz Fanon in 2025. He is the author of 14 books, the most recent with Jennifer Black, Beneath the Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader. As we drive into the prison complex, I slow way down. There are cameras everywhere, and I have been admonished to crawl thru, not zip thru, the parking lot. The beige and light green concrete block reception building looks like the entrance to a hospital or brand-new school. Just off to the side, layers upon layers of razor wire top the chain-link fences. Two or three deep stacked one behind the other, these are initial vestiges of the brutality that gives one pause. Is it to keep folks out or to keep folks in? I wonder. What is so valuable that they do not want folks to make it inside? Is it the human connection? That currency of humanity.
Waving in the bitter wind from the roof are three flags, USA, DOC, and a Black MIA post-Vietnam era missing in action flag. This last flag strives to conjure a false narrative of a heroic past, some 60 years in the rear-view mirror; evoking a common heroism, for the maximum-security prison built on top of coal mountain. I hear the guard’s union has brought in a two-tier wage structure – grandfathering the older guard’s richer terms and bringing in the new ones with less. No wonder they are having a hard time getting folks to skip Walmart’s signup bonus. Loudspeakers implore guards to extend their shifts and sign up for overtime. Time and a half often is not sufficient to keep enough guards locked inside this brutal human storage facility. Beyond the heavy concrete block entryway, the antiseptic linoleum lobby, is the visiting desk, metal detector and hand ion scanner. A guard stamps invisible ink on the top of my right hand, just in case I contemplate doing a clothes and body swap with Mumia. Next, the buzz and the pulling back of the 150 lb. heavy metal doors. The narrow, long, concrete block, slightly downhill, walkway, is enclosed but bitterly cold. Past another set of metal detectors, used only for the guards, then through observation-booth-operated electronic doors, heavy but rolling. You cannot see the guards as they release the doors from behind two-way glass or cameras. Deeper inside the prison is the visiting room.
As we settle down to talk, Mumia revels in seeded bread, the fresh lettuce, the pomegranate aioli and a turkey wrap. The vending machine fare, often Mediterranean salads, and today nutritious sandwiches are a far cry from the spare, devoid of freshness, Amark packaged “meals” that are served cold in his cell from a prison tray.
I know these healthier food options are only there because of the campaigns the people waged to bring them in – because they were missing for the last 40 years. Mumia discusses Jefferson’s slave holding, Fanon, and how we must move through these times. He discusses the work before him, the completion of his Ph.D. thesis.
We are here to make connections. To honor the humanity of the people who live here inside SCI Mahanoy, to check on Mumia’s improving health, and work to map out the path to freedom.
Noelle Hanrahan, Esq. P.I.
Legal Director & Founder, Prison Radio
When We Love, We Win
When We Survive, We Win
When We Fight, We Win
**P.S.** Voices like Mumia’s remind us that resistance is necessary, and change is possible. Your gift this Giving Tuesday helps us amplify these voices and build a future rooted in justice. Together, we fight. Together, we win.