'I spend my days preparing for life, not for death'

The Guardian

Oct 25, 2007

 

The former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent 25 years on death row
in the United States - despite strong evidence that he is innocent. In
his first British interview, he talks to Laura Smith about life in
solitary, how he has remained politically active, and why the Panthers
are still relevant today.

by Laura Smith

...In Abu-Jamal's company, it is easy to forget that you are inside prison
walls. As he talks, one is pulled into a world of urgent work that needs
doing, of debates to be thrashed out, of injustices to be tackled. With
characteristic eloquence, he calls Hurricane Katrina "a rude awakening
from an illusion", watching television "a profoundly ignorising
experience" and observes that much commercial hip-hop contains "no
distinction, except in beat and tone, to a Chrysler advert". "If the
message is, I am cool because I am rich, and if you get rich, you can be
cool like me, that's a pretty fucked-up message." On American politics,
he is damning. "You would think that a country that goes to war
allegedly to spread democracy would practice it in its own country."

Born Wesley Cook in the Philadelphia projects, he adopted the name Mumia
as a 14-year-old (later adding Abu-Jamal - "father of Jamal" in Arabic -
when his first son was born). The following year, aged just 15, he
helped found the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther party after
being handed a copy of their newspaper in the street. "I was like,
whoah," he says. "It just thrilled me. I was like, this is heaven. This
is great. Everything. It was the truth. Uncut, unalloyed. It was
everything. It fit me."

He spent long days helping with party activities, which included free
children's breakfast programmes and the monitoring of police, whose
corruption at that time has since become notorious (at least a third of
the officers involved in Abu-Jamal's investigations have since been
found to have engaged in corrupt activities, including the fabrication
of evidence to frame suspects).

Mostly, as the party's lieutenant of information, he wrote, gathering
stories for The Black Panther, the party's newsletter. "It was great
fun," he remembers now. "You worked six and seven days a week and 18
hours a day for no pay ... When I tell young people that now they are
like, what was that last part? Are you crazy, man? But because we were
socialists we didn't want pay. We wanted to serve our people, free our
people, stop the homicide and make revolution. We thought about the
party morning, noon and night. It was a very busy but fulfilling life
for thousands of people across the country. We were serving our people
and what could be better than that?"

Subject to relentless disruption by the FBI's Counter Intelligence
Programme, which targeted radical and progressive organisations, and
riven by internal disagreements, the Black Panthers imploded in the
early 1970s. For Abu-Jamal it was a personal tragedy. "Despair," he
says when asked how it felt. "A profound despair."...

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