Black Activist Mumia Abu-Jamal

This paper is a discussion of black activist, author, and self-described political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of Live from Death Row. Abu-Jamal, who is awaiting execution for a crime he insists he did not commit, has written scathingly about racism in America and the particular racism of the death penalty. Abu-Jamal's writings convey the deep-rooted rage of many blacks in America who believe that justice is not color-blind but instead discriminates against black men, especially when their victims are white. Abu-Jamal is a powerful writer, though his writings are targeted to an almost exclusively black audience and his interest seems focused principally on inspiring his audience to political action. His fury, and the perspective that he represents, is almost diametrically opposed to the moderate, mainstream voices of civil rights activism most closely associated with the late Martin Luther King Jr. His writings are worth studying for the understanding they give of the ways that civil rights has failed many blacks in America and the suggestion that racism continues to be a powerful social issue.

Mumia Abu-Jamal was born on April 24, 1954, in Philadelphia. He began his career of political activism young: at age 14 he was arrested and beaten for protesting a George Wallace presidential rally in his home town. He credits the policeman who joined his attackers with reinforcing his commitment to activism: "I have been thankful to that faceless cop ever since, for he

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ath row . . . [while they make up] just under 11 percent of America's [population]" (Abu-Jamal xvii); a more recent Time article places these figures at 41 percent and 12 percent, respectively (Pooley 34). He also repeatedly cites the argument in the landmark case, McClesky v. Kemp, in 1987, in which statistics show "killers of white people were four times as likely to get the death penalty as killers of nonwhites" (Pooley 34), an argument against the inherent discrimination represented by the death penalty that was rejected by a majority of the Supreme Court, since, in Justice Powell's words, "McClesky's claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system" (Abu-Jamal 13). That the death penalty is an expression of the underlying racism of the criminal justice system in America is Abu-Jamal's central point. He has a good argument, and his eloquence can make his single-mindedness moving, but he can at the same time be infuriatingly antagonistic: Every day in America, the trek continues, a black march to death row . . . The five states with the largest death rows have larger percentages of blacks on death row than in their statewide black populations

Category: Government - B