Column: Black World
December 1998
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!
Editor's note: This month I am turning over "Black World" to the following
speech Gene Ford gave on Mumia Abu-Jamal and today's prison movement on
Nov. 11 at the headquarters of the new Black Panther organization, New
Panther Vanguard Movement, in South Central Los Angeles.-Lou Turner
by Gene Ford
While the movement within the prison walls has been ongoing outside the
public eye, today, all hell seems ready to bust loose. After being on death
row in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania for 15 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal's date with
death is fast approaching. On Oct. 30, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
denied Mumia's final state appeal for a new trial. Pennsylvania Governor
Tom Ridge is expected to sign a death warrant any day. All further appeals
seemed to be stopped by the state from above as if they are "God."
From a youth in the 1970s, when at 15 years old he started a chapter of
the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, to his relationship in the MOVE
organization to his radio program aired to the masses and titled by the
people "Voice of this voiceless," Mumia's political activity spoke out
against police ruthlessness within the Black community.
Mumia's activity marked him for death. His crime is not the shooting of a
police officer but his defiant spirit, which aroused people with its
ideology of freedom. He did not compromise his love for the oppressed. This
is what the state condemned him for.
His spirit of freedom cannot be denied and can be seen in two books written
by him, LIVE FROM DEATH ROW and DEATH BLOSSOMS. In the preface to DEATH
BLOSSOMS, Julia Wright, states that this book is "the narrative of an
escape from prison into the liberated territory of the mind, pacing not of
the cage, but of the psyche, jogging not in the pen, but in the open space
Mumia calls 'reaching beyond,' We are privileged that he takes us with him
on a liberating tour of his own freedom. Resolutely on a move within his
own spiritual quest."
Mumia makes us understand that free men and women can imprison and arrest
their own revolution just as "inmates can set free a boundless revolution
of the mind." Mumia, if you read his writings, is clearly against all forms
of murder of man or beast, and, I would say, in favor of self-preservation
as the highest law.
His outspoken voice against the death penalty is clearly not a selfish act,
but the act of a realist in the ongoing battle against capitalism, and for
the self- destruction of a state which murders by law.
America today is Germany around 1933, when Hitler's state was on the rise.
Who among us will speak against this vile image of a man? Who spoke out
when Hitler attacked the Jews, the intellectual, the Christian priest, the
homosexual, the trade unionist, and on and on and on?
Those who spoke out were few and far between... until they came for me. By
then all voices of reason were silent. No force of freedom could be heard,
only the force of the state-machine's tanks, bombs and death.
Smoke can be seen on the horizon. In our day "justice" is a lethal
injection, an eye for an eye. Today "justice" is Bosnia, Rwanda's ethnic
conflict in Africa, home-grown American racism, the death penalty. Is this
justice? No! Especially for freedom fighters, the innocent executed because
of their ideas.
There must be an urgent campaign in the Black community to free Mumia "by
any means necessary." Organize protests, write letters, make phone calls,
to stop his execution.
Free Mumia now!
Or a little bit of all of us dies with him.
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