Mumia Abu-Jamal facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Abu-Jamal c. 1980
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Wesley Cook
April 24, 1954 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
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| Occupation | Activist, journalist |
| Criminal status | Incarcerated |
| Spouse(s) |
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| Children | 8 |
| Conviction(s) | First degree murder |
| Criminal penalty | Death; commuted to life imprisonment without parole |
Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook; April 24, 1954) is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death row, he has written and commented on the criminal justice system in the United States. After numerous appeals, his death penalty sentence was overturned by a federal court. In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year.
Beginning at the age of 14 in 1968, Abu-Jamal became involved with the Black Panther Party and was a member until October 1970, leaving the party at age 16. After leaving, he completed his high school education, and later became a radio reporter. He eventually served as president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists (1978–1980). He supported MOVE, a Philadelphia-based organization, and covered the 1978 confrontation in which one police officer was killed. The MOVE Nine were the members who were arrested and convicted of murder in that case.
Since 1982, the murder trial of Abu-Jamal has been seriously criticized for constitutional failings; some have claimed that he is innocent, and many opposed his death sentence. The Faulkner family, politicians, and other groups involved with law enforcement, state and city governments argue that Abu-Jamal's trial was fair, his guilt beyond question, and his death sentence justified.
When his death sentence was overturned by a federal court in 2001, he was described as "perhaps the world's best-known death-row inmate" by The New York Times. During his imprisonment, Abu-Jamal has published books and commentaries on social and political issues; his first book was Live from Death Row (1995).
Contents
Early life and activism
He was born Wesley Cook in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. He has a younger brother named William. They attended local public schools.
In 1968, a high school teacher, a Kenyan instructing a class on African cultures, encouraged the students to take African or Arabic names for classroom use; he gave Cook the name "Mumia". According to Abu-Jamal, "Mumia" means "Prince" and was the name of a Kenyan anti-colonial African nationalist who fought against the British before Kenyan independence.
Involvement with the Black Panthers
Abu-Jamal joined the Black Panther Party as a teenager. He helped form the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party with Defense Captain Reggie Schell, and other Panthers. He was appointed as the chapter's "Lieutenant of Information," responsible for writing information and news communications. He dropped out of Benjamin Franklin High School and began living at the branch's headquarters.
He spent late 1969 in New York City and early 1970 in Oakland, living and working with BPP colleagues in those cities; the party had been founded in Oakland. He was a party member from May 1969 until October 1970. During this period, he was subject to illegal surveillance as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program, with which the Philadelphia police cooperated. The FBI was working to infiltrate black radical groups and to disrupt them by creating internal dissension.
Return to education
After leaving the Panthers, Abu-Jamal returned as a student to his former high school. He was suspended for distributing literature calling for "black revolutionary student power". He led unsuccessful protests to change the school name to Malcolm X High.
After attaining his GED, Abu-Jamal studied briefly at Goddard College in rural Vermont. He returned to Philadelphia.
Marriages and family
Cook adopted the surname Abu-Jamal ("father of Jamal" in Arabic) after the birth of his first child, son Jamal, on July 18, 1971. He married Jamal's mother Biba in 1973, but they did not stay together long. Their daughter, Lateefa, was born shortly after the wedding. The couple divorced.
In 1977 Abu-Jamal married again, to his second wife, Marilyn (known as "Peachie"). Their son, Mazi, was born in early 1978. By 1981, Abu-Jamal had divorced Peachie and had married his third (and last) wife, Wadiya, who died unexpectedly on December 27, 2022.
Radio journalism career
By 1975, Abu-Jamal was working in radio newscasting, first at Temple University's WRTI and then at commercial enterprises. In 1975, he was employed at radio station WHAT, and he became host of a weekly feature program at WCAU-FM in 1978. He also worked for brief periods at radio station WPEN.
From 1979 to 1981, he worked at National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate WHYY. The management asked him to resign, saying that he did not maintain a sufficiently objective approach in his presentation of news. As a radio journalist, Abu-Jamal was renowned for identifying with and covering the MOVE anarcho-primitivist commune in West Philadelphia's Powelton Village neighborhood. He reported on the 1979–80 trial of the "MOVE Nine", who were convicted of the murder of police officer James Ramp. Abu-Jamal had several high-profile interviews, including with Julius Erving, Bob Marley, and Alex Haley. He was elected president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.
Before joining MOVE, Abu-Jamal reported on the organization. When he joined MOVE, he said it was because of his love of the people in the organization. Thinking back on it later, he said he "was probably enraged as well".
In December 1981, Abu-Jamal was working as a taxicab driver in Philadelphia two nights a week to supplement his income. He had been working part-time as a reporter for WDAS, then an African-American-oriented and minority-owned radio station.
Murder of officer Faulkner
At 3:55 am on December 9, 1981, in Philadelphia, close to the intersection at 13th and Locust Streets, Philadelphia Police Department officer Daniel Faulkner conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle belonging to and driven by William Cook, Abu-Jamal's younger brother. Faulkner and Cook became engaged in a physical confrontation. Driving his cab in the vicinity, Abu-Jamal observed the altercation, parked, and ran across the street toward Cook's car. Faulkner was shot twice and died at the scene.
Abu-Jamal was initially sentenced to death, but his death penalty was later commuted to life imprisonment without parole.
Life as a prisoner
In 1991, Abu-Jamal published an essay in the Yale Law Journal, on the death penalty and his death row experience. In May 1994, Abu-Jamal was engaged by NPR's All Things Considered program to deliver a series of monthly three-minute commentaries on crime and punishment. The broadcast plans and commercial arrangement were canceled following condemnations from, among others, the Fraternal Order of Police and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole. Abu-Jamal sued NPR for not airing his work, but a federal judge dismissed the suit. His commentaries later were published in May 1995 as part of his first book, Live from Death Row.
In 1996, he completed a B.A. degree via correspondence classes at Goddard College, which he had attended for a time as a young man. He has been invited as commencement speaker by a number of colleges, and has participated via recordings. In 1999, Abu-Jamal was invited to record a keynote address for the graduating class at Evergreen State College in Washington State. The event was protested by some. In 2000, he recorded a commencement address for Antioch College. The now defunct New College of California School of Law presented him with an honorary degree "for his struggle to resist the death penalty."
On October 5, 2014, he gave the commencement speech at Goddard College, via playback of a recording. As before, the choice of Abu-Jamal was controversial. Ten days later the Pennsylvania legislature had passed an addition to the Crime Victims Act called "Revictimization Relief." The new provision is intended to prevent actions that cause "a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish" to those who have previously been victimized by crime. It was signed by Republican governor Tom Corbett five days later. Commentators suggest that the bill was directed to control Abu-Jamal's journalism, book publication, and public speaking, and that it would be challenged on the grounds of free speech.
With occasional interruptions due to prison disciplinary actions, Abu-Jamal has for many years been a regular commentator on an online broadcast, sponsored by Prison Radio. He also is published as a regular columnist for Junge Welt, a Marxist newspaper in Germany. For almost a decade, Abu-Jamal taught introductory courses in Georgist economics by correspondence to other prisoners around the world.
In addition, he has written and published several books: Live From Death Row (1995), a diary of life on Pennsylvania's death row; All Things Censored (2000), a collection of essays examining issues of crime and punishment; Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience (2003), in which he explores religious themes; and We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (2004), a history of the Black Panthers that draws on his own experience and research, and discusses the federal government's program known as COINTELPRO, to disrupt black activist organizations.
In 1995, Abu-Jamal was punished with solitary confinement for engaging in entrepreneurship contrary to prison regulations. Subsequent to the airing of the 1996 HBO documentary Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case For Reasonable Doubt?, which included footage from visitation interviews conducted with him, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections banned outsiders from using any recording equipment in state prisons.
In litigation before the U.S. Court of Appeals, in 1998 Abu-Jamal successfully established his right while in prison to write for financial gain. The same litigation also established that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections had illegally opened his mail in an attempt to establish whether he was earning money by his writing.
When, for a brief time in August 1999, Abu-Jamal began delivering his radio commentaries live on the Pacifica Network's Democracy Now! weekday radio newsmagazine, prison staff severed the connecting wires of his telephone from their mounting in mid-performance. He was later allowed to resume his broadcasts, and hundreds of his broadcasts have been aired on Pacifica Radio.
Following the overturning of his death sentence, Abu-Jamal was sentenced to life in prison in December 2011. At the end of January 2012, he was shifted from the isolation of death row into the general prison population at State Correctional Institution – Mahanoy.
In August 2015, his attorneys filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, alleging that he has not received appropriate medical care for his serious health conditions. In April 2021, he tested positive for COVID-19 and was scheduled for heart surgery to relieve blocked coronary arteries.
In 2022, Brown University's John Hay Library acquired Abu-Jamal's personal papers as part of its Voices of Mass Incarceration collecting initiative. According to a Brown University archivist, the Abu-Jamal collection "is the largest and only collection relating to a person who is still incarcerated."
Popular support and opposition
Labor unions, politicians, advocates, educators, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and human rights advocacy organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed concern about the impartiality of the trial of Abu-Jamal. Amnesty International neither takes a position on the guilt or innocence of Abu-Jamal nor classifies him as a political prisoner.
The family of Daniel Faulkner, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, politicians, and the Fraternal Order of Police have continued to support the original trial and sentencing of the journalist. In August 1999, the Fraternal Order of Police called for an economic boycott against all individuals and organizations that support Abu-Jamal. Many such groups operate within the Prison-Industrial Complex, a system which Abu-Jamal has frequently criticized.
Partly based on his own writing, Abu-Jamal and his cause have become widely known internationally, and other groups have classified him as a political prisoner. About 25 cities, including Montreal, Palermo, and Paris, have made him an honorary citizen.
In 2001, he received the sixth biennial Erich Mühsam Prize, named after an anarcho-communist essayist, which recognizes activism in line with that of its namesake. In October 2002, he was made an honorary member of the German political organization Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime.
On April 29, 2006, a newly paved road in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis was named Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal in his honor. In protest of the street-naming, U.S. Congressman Michael Fitzpatrick and Senator Rick Santorum, both members of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, introduced resolutions in both Houses of Congress condemning the decision. The House of Representatives voted 368–31 in favor of Fitzpatrick's resolution. In December 2006, the 25th anniversary of the murder, the executive committee of the Republican Party for the 59th Ward of the City of Philadelphia—covering approximately Germantown, Philadelphia—filed two criminal complaints in the French legal system against the city of Paris and the city of Saint-Denis, accusing the municipalities of "glorifying" Abu-Jamal and alleging the offense "apology or denial of crime" in respect of their actions.
In 2007, the widow of Officer Faulkner co-authored a book with Philadelphia radio journalist Michael Smerconish titled Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Pain, Loss, and Injustice. The book was part memoir of Faulkner's widow, and part discussion in which they chronicled Abu-Jamal's trial and discussed evidence for his conviction. They also discussed support for the death penalty.
In early 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Debo Adegbile, a former lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. He had worked on Abu-Jamal's case, and his nomination was rejected by the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan basis because of that.
On April 10, 2015, Marylin Zuniga, a teacher at Forest Street Elementary School in Orange, New Jersey, was suspended without pay after asking her students to write cards to Abu-Jamal, who was ill in prison due to complications from diabetes, without approval from the school or parents. Some parents and police leaders denounced her actions. Conversely, some community members, parents, teachers, and professors expressed support for Zuniga and condemned her suspension. Scholars and educators nationwide, including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and Cornel West among others, signed a letter calling for her immediate reinstatement. On May 13, 2015, the Orange Preparatory Academy board voted to dismiss Marylin Zuniga after hearing from her and several of her supporters.
Written works
- Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader, City Lights Publishers (2024), ISBN: 9780872869264
- Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? City Lights Publishers (2017), ISBN: 9780872867383
- Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, City Lights Publishers (2015), ISBN: 978-0872866751
- The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America, Third World Press (2011), ISBN: 978-0883783375
- Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., City Lights Publishers (2009), ISBN: 978-0872864696
- We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party, South End Press (2008), ISBN: 978-0896087187
- Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People, Africa World Pr (2003), ISBN: 978-1592210190
- All Things Censored, Seven Stories Press (2000), ISBN: 978-1583220221
- Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, Plough Publishing House (1997), ISBN: 978-0874860863
- Live from Death Row, Harper Perennial (1996), ISBN: 978-0380727667
See also
In Spanish: Mumia Abu-Jamal para niños
