Bringing the Fight to Free Mumia to a New Generation

In 1999, many thousands marched in the streets of Philly and San Francisco chanting, “brick by brick, wall by wall, we’re gonna free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” And I was one of those protesting, having been radicalized by his case as a college student. Many of us were. We listened to his truth-telling commentaries, we read his book Live from Death Row, and we listened to Rage Against the Machine scream out in the song, “Voice of the Voiceless”: “My panther, my brother, we are at war until you’re free.” His case exposed many of my generation to the complete lack of justice in the racist capitalist courts.

Yet today it is rare to find a young activist who knows who Mumia is. This will not do. We must bring the fight to free Mumia and the lessons of this struggle to this generation of youth who face increased state repression. The fight for his freedom is connected to the fight against racist cop terror and black oppression, a key foundation of American capitalism. Today, black people are a key target in Trump’s America.

So who is Mumia: he is a prize-winning journalist, and was a Black Panther Party (BPP) spokesman in his youth. He was a supporter of the MOVE organization and defiant opponent of racist state terror. And he was railroaded to death row in 1982 at the hands of Philadelphia’s notorious cop and court frame-up machine on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

You can better understand the state frame-up and persecution of Mumia by understanding what was happening in the lead-up to and during the early 1980s. Reagan was elected president in 1980 riding a wave of conservative backlash to the civil rights movement. The crushing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike was a defining moment for what was in store for labor struggle and conditions for the black, brown and white working masses. But a lot of working people supported Reagan and the entire country had shifted to the right. Reagan’s election was also the green light for KKK and Nazi fascists to emerge from their holes. In this period, the decimation of jobs, together with Reagan’s austerity measures and “war on crime,” brought intensified ghettoization and an increase in gangs, drugs and racist police terror and occupation.

Now Philly itself was a bastion of racist reaction. The city’s capitalist rulers consciously pushed racial divisions to pit white workers against black workers, and of course this continues today. Ethnic and racial hostilities in Philly were made even worse with the gutting of its heavy industry. In this context, the racist bonapartism of the Philly Police Department got even worse as the cops were deployed to keep the lid on this pressure cooker of discontent. And the cops were also corrupt as hell.

The police and FBI had Mumia in their sights since his Black Panther youth and continued their vendetta as he became known as “the voice of the voiceless.” He was a known radio journalist for eight years before his frame-up and Philadelphia Magazine listed him in 1981 as a man to watch because of his “eloquent, often passionate, and always insightful interviews.” He was also known for covering the story of MOVE and had become a supporter of the group, defending them against the state’s targeting them as black radicals. Since MOVE’s founding in 1972, the mostly black, back-to-nature organization was hounded by the government. This was under Democrat Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s notoriously racist mayor and former police chief.

In 1978, the MOVE 9 were framed up on bogus conspiracy and murder charges stemming from the killing of an officer who died in the cops’ own crossfire during a murderous police assault on their home. Despite evidence of their innocence, the MOVE 9 were sentenced to 30 to 100 years behind bars. For years, they were continually denied parole for refusing to confess to a crime they did not commit. Imprisoned MOVE members were also among the first recipients of the Partisan Defense Committee’s class-war prisoner stipend program. This sinister vendetta against black radicals extended to MOVE supporters like Mumia Abu-Jamal, who stood alone among journalists in defense of MOVE.

Philadelphia was notorious for its killer cops. Foremost among them were those in the Stakeout unit, an urban death squad made up largely of veteran military sharpshooters. This squad was established by Rizzo and, together with the department’s “red squad,” spearheaded the brutal repression of the Panthers and other black militants in the city. Later, when the police turned their attention to MOVE, Stakeout cops again played a forward role, from the vicious beating of Delbert Africa to the shooting in the Osage Avenue alley seven years later.

The worst attack on MOVE came in 1985, when their Osage Avenue home was bombed by the FBI and the cops under black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode. Yes, a bomb was literally dropped on their home. It was the culmination of a daylong police siege, during which over 10,000 rounds of ammunition had been pumped into the house and the Fire Department was under orders to “let the fire burn.” The operation to “evict” those inside MOVE’s home began with the proclamation: “Attention, MOVE. This is America!” In the ensuing inferno, eleven people were incinerated, including five children, and hundreds were left homeless as an entire city block in the black working-class neighborhood was reduced to ashes. None of the perpetrators ever faced charges, while Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor, was arrested and served every day of a seven-year prison sentence.

I recommend the documentary Let the Fire Burn to learn more about what happened. We in the Spartacist League tried to sear this atrocity into the memory of the working class. As we wrote in our front-page article, “Philly Inferno: Racist Murder!”: “The Osage Avenue massacre was supposed to be a message to anybody who gets ‘out of line’ in Reagan’s America—blacks will get the Philly treatment, labor will get the PATCO treatment, and everyone, not least the Marxists, will get the ‘terrorist’ treatment” (WV No. 380, 31 May 1985).

What I’m trying to show here is the context in which Mumia was targeted and framed up. What happened to Mumia was a key part of what was happening to black fighters that dared defy the new neoliberal reactionary period. Either you got with the liberal program and became one with the system, or you would be jailed and worse.

I’m not going to go into all the mountains of evidence that show Mumia is innocent and really expose the frame-up. But I’ll give some examples of the racism that saturated his trial and appeals, proving that Mumia, like Dred Scott in 1857, has no rights that a court is bound to respect. There was the blatant racism of the late “hanging judge” Albert Sabo, himself a member of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.). Sabo presided over Mumia’s 1982 trial and again at his post-conviction (PCRA) hearings in the 1990s. There’s an affidavit of a court reporter who said at the time of the trial she overheard Sabo say, “I’m going to help them fry the n----r.”

The prosecutor also engaged in blatant racist jury-rigging at the trial. Excluding black jurors was an official policy of the Philly D.A.’s office and this was the practice throughout the ’80s. The prosecution also made the outrageous closing argument that the jury should err on the side of convicting Mumia because he would have “appeal after appeal.” This argument blatantly erased the reasonable doubt standard, telling the jury that in case of doubt they should convict Mumia.

Mumia was also sentenced to death row explicitly for his political views as prosecutors painted a lying portrait of Mumia as a committed “cop killer” from the time he was a 15-year-old BPP spokesman. Mumia was given an execution date in 1995 and there were mass mobilizations with many unions signing on against the death penalty and to save Mumia, so a stay of execution was granted. Again in 1999 another execution date was set, and once again as I mentioned at the beginning, there were mass mobilizations of thousands in the streets. Mumia was the most renowned death row prisoner, not just here but around the world. In 2001, a judge threw out his death penalty sentence while upholding his frame-up conviction. This was fought by the Philly D.A., and it wasn’t until 2011 that they dropped trying to legally lynch him and condemned him to life without parole—“slow motion death row,” as Mumia calls it.

Over the decades the courts have ignored the overwhelming evidence that Mumia is an innocent man and the victim of a massive frame-up. They have refused to hear the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Daniel Faulkner. Court after court has shredded legal precedents and well-settled rules and created new “Mumia rules” to deny his appeals and keep him buried in prison.

Much of the movement for Mumia was devoted to opposing the death penalty and being for a new trial, which many a liberal could and did advocate in the 1990s. And when the executioner’s threat was no longer present, the liberals in the movement did what they always do, they abandoned Mumia. Because, for liberals, the fight for Mumia was one of moral injustice, a racist “aberration.” They looked to legal means to address it, so when legal means went as far as they could, the liberals were gone. While we were for pursuing all legal means, our strategy was a class-struggle one.

But the other thing to understand vis-à-vis what happened to the movement to free Mumia was what was happening from the 1990s to the late 2000s. You had a change in the ’90s from Reagan’s neoliberalism with a cold, mean face to neoliberal policy with a progressive, nice face. This was captured by Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton, who, while campaigning for president in 1992, flew back to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector. Clinton also signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which greatly curtailed habeas corpus rights for death row inmates, including Mumia.

As Marxists, we stand for the abolition of the death penalty in principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not give the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. The lynching of American black men—by racist mobs and by the courts—is deeply entrenched in this country’s history. In the U.S., capital punishment is the lynch rope made legal, with black people making up over 40 percent of the death row population. Today, while there are fewer people being sentenced to death row, the racial disparity has actually increased. From 1976 to 1986, 51 percent of the people sentenced to death in Texas were people of color; as of five years ago that percentage grew to 75 percent. In California, the percentage increased from 52 percent to 78 percent; in Oklahoma, it more than doubled from 28 percent to 80 percent.

This period of the 1990s and 2000s was really one of relative stability for U.S. imperialism, the hegemonic world power. Ever since the overturn of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, when bourgeois ideologues declared the “death of communism” and the “end of history,” liberalism has been the dominant ruling-class ideology. And it was liberal principles that were used to trample on the national rights of oppressed countries, deindustrialize the West, import cheap labor and open markets to imperialist capital and goods. What did the left do in this period? It basically bought into all this and it did not build opposition to all the liberal triumphalism.

So you can see a problem: you can’t both tail liberalism and its world order and at the same time effectively struggle to free the victims of this order, which Mumia was. You can’t imbibe in the hope of Obama and that we’re gradually eliminating racism, that we’re 90 percent of the way there (a cruel joke today). You can’t promote that and also fight for Mumia, whose decades-long incarceration serves as a stark testimony to the fact that that’s a lie.

Many of the years that Mumia has languished in a jail cell have been during this period of relative stabilization for the ruling class. But the U.S. imperialists also sowed the seeds of their own crisis, which we are seeing now. They have caused a crisis by hollowing out their industry over the past decades, but there needs to be industry to maintain the U.S. as the dominant power. Today Trump is setting U.S. imperialism on a war footing both abroad, attacking Venezuela and abducting Maduro, and at home, as ICE brutally rampages through the streets of America. He is reversing globalization, breaking with liberal values and institutions and moving to confront China. This is what Trump represents and this is why today the liberal status quo is being destroyed and replaced by rightward reaction. Like in the 1980s, there has also been a rightward shift in society. Many working people got fed up with worsening living conditions and decades full of the liberals’ lying promises and just utter betrayal of the fight for black equality and for immigrant rights.

The fight to free Mumia and all the victims of this racist injustice system can’t be based on moral appeals, it must be based on the understanding that the oppression of black people is a tool to keep the whole working class down. White workers and immigrant workers have every interest in fighting it as key to fighting their own exploitation at the hands of the same enemy. The Panthers had many liberal advocates who abandoned them. All the liberal Democrats who once took a knee won’t even talk about black lives; it’s too “divisive” now.

To effectively fight back against the current attacks by Trump, you have to break with the liberals that caused the reaction we see now. Endless talk about diversity and multiculturalism and multiracial unity while at the same time pitting one group against the other for a slice of the ever-shrinking pie has only caused resentment and reaction. There are lessons to learn from the past decades: that you can’t fight racist oppression of black people, immigrants and Latinos, or attacks on the working class by relying on liberal forces. It will lead to defeat every time.

At the same time, the reality is that Mumia doesn’t have any obvious legal options left. But he is not broken and he still fights to use his writing to advance the black struggle and the struggles of working people and all the victims of U.S. imperialism. Jon Piper and I saw Mumia a few months ago. Given that his case politicized me, it was really an honor to finally meet him. But it was also very painful to see him still locked up. He is working on a dissertation for his PhD on Frantz Fanon and we talked about the importance of the anti-colonial struggle today. I had told him about a recent trip we did to Puerto Rico, where there was a sizeable independence march for the first time in many years and there were posters for a play about Fanon all over the streets of San Juan. We talked about the world, about Trump and the turn to reaction. He said things were at a turning point and we agreed that the situation was likely going to get worse before it got better.

Mumia also did an interview this summer with Rolling Stone magazine. The interviewer asked about how under Trump “assumed bedrock principles like due process, a trial, a jury of our peers, appear to be casualties of his justice department.” And Mumia replied:

So it’s at this time that we need to do what we can to keep Mumia’s fight for freedom alive and connected to the active struggles against ICE, against mass incarceration, against police brutality and to open all police archives, against segregation and for black equality. Of course, seeing thousands in the streets of Minneapolis yesterday mobilize in bitter cold against ICE is inspiring, but if these struggles are tied to the liberal forces that caused this crisis to begin with, it will not succeed. This is the key lesson of the movement to free Mumia, which we have seen play out throughout the past few decades: when the left looks to an alliance with liberals to save us, we all will go down.

The only thing that will save us is integrated class struggle and to have as our guiding purpose for black, brown and labor power to run this country. Many leftists make it seem as though the union leaders, who haven’t waged any struggle for years as workers and the oppressed have been wrecked, are now gonna lead a national general strike. Let’s get real, what we are facing is going to get worse. And we actually need to win the working class and oppressed to this struggle.

I’ll end with this point from Assata Shakur, another black freedom fighter who only got out of the state’s clutches by successfully fleeing to Cuba, where she recently died. After her death, many liberals heaped fake praise on her. But you know she told the truth, she said: “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

That understanding is what must guide the new generation of fighters against racist capitalist injustice. Free Mumia!