--In the photo below, Johanna Fernandez of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home speaks to a crowd of Mumia supporters outside of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner's office on March 3, 2021. Photo by Jamal Journal staff photographer Joe Piette (more photos here.)
Where: In front of D.A. Larry Krasner’s Office, 3 Penn Square
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL'S LABORED BREATHING PROMPTS PRESS CONFERENCE AT D.A.’s OFFICE, CALL FOR END TO INHUMANE IMPRISONMENT OF ILL AND ELDERLY
Mumia Abu-Jamal—an innocent husband, father, grandfather, imprisoned radio journalist, "voice of the voiceless," political prisoner, award-winning author of more than 13 books, 66 years old with liver damage and high blood pressure—is experiencing chest pressure, labored breathing, and a marked change in the distinctive tenor of his voice.
After political pressure through phone calls to officials, Mumia was tested for COVID and its antibodies. The prison reports that both were negative. However, officials are not always truthful about Mumia’s health condition. We remain very concerned about causes of his current symptoms, which need immediate medical evaluation. We await direct communication from Mumia to further update his supporters.
Independent physician with decades of work in prison advocacy, Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, noted “Prisons are the physical manifestation of Racism. We have a simple cost-effective public health intervention in the face of COVID in prisons- release our elderly prisoners. Data shows they do not pose a public safety risk. Free Mumia! Free all elderly prisoners now!” Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, urges the release of " older detainees and those who are sick.” (https://bit.ly/3kFNWDc)
(PHOTOS: Above and below, Mike Africa Jr. speaks at UC Santa Cruz in support of COLA.)
Student Power and Mental Liberation: Mumia’s Journey to Higher Ed from Inside
Written by The UC Santa Cruz Mumia Abu-Jamal Solidarity Collective
In 2019, Mumia Abu-Jamal was accepted into the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Ph.D. student with the History of Consciousness department. He continues the radical lineage of Black revolutionaries like Huey P. Newton, whose 1981 thesis is touted as a History of Consciousness accomplishment, and Dr. Angela Y. Davis, a professor emeritus of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies.
Mumia, however, has found many obstacles in engaging with his coursework and has continuously been restricted access to lecture notes, the ability to attend lectures and discussions, and materials. He has been institutionally abandoned since being accepted into the program. Much of the labor of supporting Mumia has come from other students and organizers part of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home, like Johanna Fernandez, associate professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York, who played a key role in helping Mumia get into the program in 2019. Mark Taylor, Professor of Theology at Princeton University also helped facilitate the application process.
The department may be progressive in what it teaches, but has in many ways untethered itself from a practice of radical and abolitionist politics by failing to give attention, structural institutional support and aid to Mumia Abu-Jamal as he studies from his currently incarcerated position. We have requested and are ready to demand a subsidized graduate student assistantship that will function as Mumia’s eyes and ears on campus and purchase his books in advance of the start of the semester. We also expect the department and the University to initiate a conversation with the PA Department of Corrections to make sure that Mumia is given access to the technology he needs to connect to the classroom.
UC Santa Cruz celebrates itself as the “authority on questioning authority,” while simultaneously brutally repressing student and worker struggles. Since Mumia’s acceptance, we have seen a graduate student movement, demanding a cost of living adjustment (COLA), and several service worker’s strikes. These have been met with intense policing and surveillance. After a conversation with UC Santa Cruz students and Professor Fernandez, Mumia shared a statement of solidarity where he compared the COLA movement to the communist sharecroppers movement in Alabama during the 1930s. Referencing Robin D.G Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe, Mumia says “what unites these two periods is the presence of state violence against people truly trying to live better lives, in [the graduate students’] case, trying to pay rent.”
In a similar show of support, Mike Africa Jr spoke at the COLA picket line in Santa Cruz, saying, “It is a crime for any system to give people a wage that is not liveable… if you can’t live off the wages that they give, it is time to find a new way. It is time to find a new way and it is time to withdraw your support from that system.”
In the same way that the courts continuously expose their corruption at each step of Mumia’s case, the colonial, neoliberal and racist institutional nature of UC Santa Cruz is also exposed. If our demands that the institution meet Mumia’s needs continue to go unmet, perhaps this is another moment to “withdraw [our] support” and “find a new way.” Formerly and currently incarcerated people seeking knowledge in their cells, at universities, and in their communities teach us how to struggle for, as Mumia recently said, “mental liberation and student liberation.” Mumia simply asks to study, just as any other student.
(Statement by Colin Kaepernick transcribed and recorded by Prison Radio. Listen here.)
When I was invited to speak on behalf of Mumia, one of the first things that came to mind was how long he's been in prison. How many years of his life had been stolen away from him, his community, and his loved ones. He's been incarcerated for 38 years. Mumia has been in prison longer than I've been alive.
When I first spoke with Mumia on the phone, I did very little talking. I just listened. Hearing him speak was a reminder of why we must continue to fight. Earlier this year, The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner issued a statement, noting that prolonged solitary confinement, the precise type often used in the United States, amounts to psychological torture. Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent roughly 30 out of his 38 years in solitary confinement.
In his book Live From Death Row, Mumia wrote that prison is a second by second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours, and hours into days. He has had to endure this second-by-second assault on his soul for 38 years.
He had no record before he was arrested and framed for the death of a Philadelphia police officer. Since 1981, Mumia has maintained his innocence. His story has not changed. Mumia was shot, brutalized, arrested, and chained to a hospital bed. The first police officer assigned to him wrote in a report that the “Negro male made no comment” as cited in Philly Mag. Yet 64 days into the investigation, another officer testified that Mumia had confessed to the killing. Mumia’s story has not changed, but we're talking about the same Philadelphia Police Department whose behavior “shocks the conscience,” according to a 1979 DOJ report. Behaviors like shooting nonviolent suspects, abusing handcuffed prisoners, and tampering with evidence.
It should therefore come as little surprise that, according to Dr. Johanna Fernandez, over one third of the 35 officers involved in Mumia's case, were subsequently convicted of rank corruption, extortion, and tampering with evidence to obtain convictions in unrelated cases. This is the same Philadelphia Police Department where officers ran racial profiling sweeps, like Operation Cold Turkey in March, 1985, targeting Black and Brown folks; and bombed the MOVE house in May of that year, killing 11 people, including five children and destroying 61 homes.
The same Philadelphia police department, whose officers eight days before the 2020 presidential election, shot Walter Wallace Jr. dead in the streets in front of his crying mother. The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police has unrelentingly campaigned for Mumia’s execution. During their August, 1999, national meeting, a spokesperson for the organization stated that they will not rest until Abu-Jamal burns in hell. The former Philadelphia president of the Fraternal Order of Police, Richard Castello, went as far as to say that if you disagree with their views of Mumia, you can join him in the electric chair and that they will make it an electric couch.
The trial judge on Mumia's case in 1981, Albert Sabo was a former member of the Fraternal Order of Police. Court reporter Terry Maurer Carter even heard Judge Sabo telling a colleague “I'm going to help them fry the nigger.”
Found in December, 2018, in an inaccessible storage room of the DA's office, six boxes of documents for Mumia's case reveal previously undisclosed and highly significant evidence showing that Mumia’s trial was tainted by a failure to disclose material evidence in violation of the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. In November, 2019, the Fraternal Order of Police filed a King's Bench Petition asking the court to allow the state attorney general, not the Philadelphia DA's office, to handle the upcoming appeals.
As the FOP president John McNesby said just last year, “Mumia should remain in prison for the rest of his life.” And a King's Bench order provides the legal angle for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to uphold Judge Sabo’s original wish, which was for Mumia ultimately to die in prison.
Today we're living through a moment where it's acceptable to paint “end racism now” in front of the Philadelphia Police Department’s 26th district headquarters, and yet a political prisoner who has since the age of 14 dedicated his life to fighting against racism, continues to be caged and lives his life on a slow death row. We're in the midst of a movement that says Black Lives Matter. And if that's truly the case, then it means that Mumia’s life and legacy must matter. And the causes that he sacrifices life and freedom for must matter as well.
Through all of the torture Mumia has suffered over the past 38 years, his principles have never wavered. These principles have manifested themselves in his writing countless books while incarcerated, in his successful radio show, and the time and energy he has poured into his mentorship of younger incarcerated folks and the continued concern for the people suffering outside of the walls. Even while living in the hells of the prison system, Mumia still fights for our human rights. We must continue to fight for him and his human rights.
Well, Mumia is 66 years old. He is a grandfather. He is an elder with ailments. He is a human being that deserves to be free.
