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From prison, Mumia has continued to write about the struggles of the poor and oppressed. Along with regular political commentaries, he has previously published the books “Live from Death Row,” “Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience,” and “All Things Censored.”
Mumia’s latest book, “We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party,” is a far-reaching history of African Americans in the U.S. It is well written, thought-provoking and inspiring. As a former Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, Mumia offers invaluable in sights into Black history and exudes an inexhaustible revolutionary spirit for continued struggle.
“We Want Freedom” covers not only the era that precipitated the building of the Black Panther Party, its evolution, development and eventual split and disbanding, but also the origins of African people arriving in the United States. Their struggles are documented from the slave ships crossing the Atlantic, up to the turbulent era of the 1960s that inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to start the Black Panther Party for Self Defense while students at Merritt College in Oakland, California.
In the first two chapters, Mumia describes some of the earliest Black movements in the U.S., which strove to resist oppression. The seizure of slave ships in the early 1700s by Africans taken captive against their will, who set sail to return to freedom in Africa, is not something widely known in the U.S.
The stories of widespread rebellions in the colonial slavocracies from Jamaica to Guadelupe, to South Carolina and even as far north as New Jersey, demonstrate an unyielding determination to be free by the earliest African Americans. Mumia includes the story of some 65,000 Africans who joined the British against the American colonists in the Revolutionary War. They joined “not because of any craven loyalty to the Crown, nor any disloyalty to the colonies, but rather because of the age-old impetus of self-interest.” After the Revolutionary War, when it became clear that the newly declared “victors” had no intention of living up to the words in the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution, slaves continued to rebel.
Mumia tells of African slaves and Seminole Indians working together to fight off greedy slave owners. They continued to live together thereafter in mutual harmony, and some Africans even became chiefs within the Seminole tribe. Several chapters later, Mumia gives a revealing account of the FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, headed by J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI’s targeting of the BPP was “one of hundreds of such operations occurring across America, designed with an overt political, and indeed racial, objective: to prevent Black unity and to prevent Black self-determination. In essence, the FBI functioned as political and race police-agents for the preservation of white supremacy.”
Hoover used the powerful bureaucracy of the FBI and the “vast powers of the predominantly white corporate press to demonize the Black Panther Party in the eyes of America.” He believed that the party was the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and that they taught a “gospel of hate.”
Through the use of declassified government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, personal accounts, and Senate testimony from the Church Committee hearings, Mumia discusses a wide range of causes attacked by COINTELPRO. The FBI-facilitated murder of BPP leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police, smear campaigns against socialists and communists and the use of infiltrators to get inside the BPP, are some of the many examples Mumia uses to demonstrate that Hoover’s FBI would stop at nothing in its pursuit to destroy anyone working to challenge the status quo.
The nefarious nature of COINTELPRO is well summed up by one of the FBI’s own agents, [M. Wesley Swearingen]: “We in the FBI were the ones who violated the Constitution. When we started bag jobs on a black religious organization, I knew we were out of control, but I could not stop it because no one would have believed me-not even Hoover’s most severe critics. If I had said anything, Hoover would have had me prosecuted for violating local burglary laws.”
The Black Panther Party
In his chapter entitled “The Black Panther Party,” Mumia chronicles the daily lives of the Panthers, which consisted primarily of community service activities coupled with the selling of their newspaper on the streets. They wanted to deliver their message to the people. Two of the most popular of those programs were the Police-alert Patrols and the Free Breakfast for Children Programs.
The Police-alert Patrols were an early effort by the Panthers to demonstrate their dedication to defending the Black community against “the cops, the most hated and feared figures imposed upon the community.” While on patrol, the BPP closely watched police behavior and offered advice to Black citizens about their legal rights. They were armed with guns, tape recorders, cameras and law books.
The Patrols had an equalizing effect on the relations with police and the BPP and quickly earned respect and admiration in the community. This program’s intention was unfortunately distorted by the State and the corporate media. The media portrayed the BPP members as an outlaw militia determined to take control of urban streets, wholly ignoring that the Patrols were practical means of self-defense against State-sponsored violence.
With the Free Breakfast Program, the BPP served meals to local children from oppressed neighborhoods. The program had a far-reaching effect on both the party members and the local communities served. For the members, many of whom were just out of high school and had little experience with children, the daily interaction gave them a “real example of what they were working for … [their] people’s future.”
The Breakfast Program additionally built solidarity with the communities served. Father Earl Neal of Oakland’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church became an ardent supporter of the BPP due to his experience with the Breakfast Program. He later made comparisons between the party and the church: “Black preachers need to stop preaching about a kingdom in the hereafter. … We must deal with concrete conditions and survival in this life! The BPP… has merely put into operation the survival program the Church should have been doing anyway.”
Women in the Panthers
In his chapter entitled “A Woman’s Party,” Mumia talks of the central role of women in the BPP. He notes that popular understanding of the role of women has suffered a great deal due to incomplete and biased histories by bourgeois scholars.
Afeni Shakur, the mother of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, was appointed to a leadership position as a section leader for the Party. She mentioned that the BPP was the first place she had ever met men “who didn’t abuse women, and who loved women because they were women and because they were people.”
Tarika Lewis was the first woman to join the Party. She says the organization treated her as an equal and demanded the same of her as it did of male members, from the handling of small arms to intensive political education classes. Lewis made rapid advances in rank and was eventually promoted to teaching political classes.
Safiya A. Bukhari, a college student from a well-to-do and conservative family, became radicalized through first-hand experience, initially with the BPP’s Breakfast Program, and then when she was arrested for defending a Panther’s right to sell the BPP’s newspaper. Bukhari was active in building the New York City Free Mumia Coalition until her death in 2003.
Viewed in relation to the larger society in general, the party was far ahead of its time. Women were involved in every level of the party, from the rank-and-file positions all the way up to the Central Committee.
 Millions around the world have demonstrated for Mumia’s freedom. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
It is no wonder that the author of such a powerful book on Black liberation would have been framed up by Philadelphia police 23 years ago.
Mumia was initially imprisoned due to his activism against the corruption and racism of Philadelphia’s power structure. Prior to 1981, Mumia was known as a leading broadcast journalist and political activist as well as Philadelphia’s “voice of the voiceless.” He was an open critic of the Philadelphia Police Department, particularly while under the administration of racist Mayor Frank Rizzo in the 1970s. Mumia’s open criticism of the city’s power structures eventually cost him his broadcast job. So, to support his family he took a job as a night shift cab driver.
In the early morning hours of December 9, 1981, Mumia was working the night shift when he passed the scene of a traffic stop conducted by Philadelphia cop Daniel Faulkner. When Mumia realized that the individual stopped was his brother, Billy Cook, and that he was being beaten by Faulkner, he pulled over his cab and intervened. Gunshots rang out and both Mumia and Faulkner were critically wounded. Faulkner died shortly thereafter and Mumia was arrested and brought to a hospital for surgery due to a gunshot wound to the chest.
When Mumia’s case was brought to trial, he was already at a severe disadvantage. The State threw everything it had behind the effort to convict Mumia.
The judge assigned to the case was Albert Sabo who had 31 death penalty convictions under his belt-more than any other judge in the U.S.-and was heard to have said during the proceedings, “Yeah, I’m gonna help ’em fry the n****r.”
In addition, prosecuting Philadelphia District Attorney Ronald Castille deliberately worked to exclude Black jurors from hearing Mumia’s case. Years later, Castille was promoted to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he presided as a judge over Mumia defense appeals. Despite Castille’s blatant conflict of interest in Mumia’s case, he refused to recuse himself from hearing the appeal.
At trial, when Mumia expressed his constitutionally guaranteed right to represent himself, Sabo excluded him from many of the major proceedings.
The testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses was just as prejudicial. Chief witness for the prosecution Cynthia White’s testimony was repudiated when she admitted that she was not present at the crime scene, did not see Mumia, and was intimidated into implicating Mumia by police threats.
In 1982, Veronica Jones, a prostitute vulnerable to police intimidation, incriminated Mumia as the killer. However, in 1995 she declared her original testimony a lie. It was the result of police intimidation.
Despite these many uncertainties, Mumia was convicted and sentenced to death on July 3, 1982.
The fight for freedom continues
There have been many new developments in Mumia’s case in recent months and years.
On December 18, 2001, Federal District Court Judge William Yohn overturned Mumia’s death sentence from his 1982 trial, finding that Judge Sabo’s instructions to the jury were flawed. Yohn nonetheless upheld the murder conviction.
On June 29, 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit lifted its stay in regard to consideration of any material in Mumia’s case. The court had been awaiting a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Beard v. Banks, which could have resulted in the reinstatement of the death penalty against Mumia.
Mumia’s attorney Robert Bryan said that the decision “does not affect Mumia’s case and the death penalty does not apply.” However, the Pennsylvania prosecutors claim that the decision affirms the state’s order to execute Mumia and that he must remain on death row. (Socialism and Liberation Magazine, New Dangers for Mumia Abu-Jamal, August 2004)
On October 19, 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued an order denying a motion by the defense for a stay of the appeals proceedings in order to litigate newly discovered facts and issues. The Court has not yet ruled on this issue.
Mumia’s unjust trial, conviction and death sentence and his writings produced in prison have raised international awareness of his plight. He has served as a voice for countless other death row inmates. Despite efforts to suppress his message, his efforts to raise social consciousness are succeeding.
“We Want Freedom” is a welcome contribution to the history of Black liberation struggles in the U.S. It will infuse progressive activists and revolutionaries with a sense of reverence for struggles of the past and the necessary confidence to carry out struggles in the future. The book also raises the issue of its author’s case at a time when mass involvement in the fight to free Mumia must increase.
According to Mumia’s attorney Robert Bryan, “Mumia’s voice against injustice is now stronger. It is heard and read throughout the world. … We are confident that Pennsylvania’s effort to execute Mumia will fail. We are confident that we will win his freedom.”
“We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party,” by Mumia Abu-Jamal. South End Press, 2004.
