Van Gosse & Kavita Philip. Radical History Review. Issue 81. Fall 2001.
In the December 2000 issue of the American Historical Association’s (AHA) magazine Perspectives, Radical History Review published “An Open Letter from American Historians Regarding the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” cosigned by ten prominent U.S. historians, all former presidents of either the AHA or the Organization of American Historians.
The initial impetus for the letter came at the end of 1999, when it was reported that Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge had signed a new warrant for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution. Though granted a temporary stay, Abu-Jamal’s appeals were nearly exhausted at the state level: due to restrictions imposed by the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Expedited Death Penalty Act, crucial evidence in his appeal might never be allowed in the federal court. To date, Governor Ridge has signed 179 death warrants;106 of them for African Americans in a state that is 10 percent black. Why did RHR choose to organize historians around the particular issue of Mumia Abu-Jamal, given the weight of official repression and racism against people of color, the killing machine of “death rows” holding several thousand poor and working-class men (including African Americans in grossly disproportionate numbers), and the risk of reducing these larger systemic issues to a single charismatic prisoner?
Our reasons are many. First, we think it is clear that he deserves a new trial, and many are convinced he is innocent of all charges. We see significant political implications, both domestically and globally, if Abu-Jamal is killed by the state. Given the level of outrage and doubt about so many aspects of the case, the willingness of multiple levels of government to acquiesce in a judicial murder (given how many could choose to intercede, officially or unofficially, to block the execution) would indicate a serious turn to the right—it would be a specific form of reaction, inevitably involving a calculation about the balance of forces. It could, and almost certainly would, legitimate more repression, perhaps even a kind of triumphalism, among large sectors of the right. We suspect that in its own way this could be another Sacco and Vanzetti, a historical blot with deeply embittering consequences. RHR discussed extensively how, as radical historians, we were also political actors: that there was clearly an urgent need for action to avert the execution, and an obvious role for us to play as historians. The highly successful political intervention of a group led by Sean Wilentz in the Clinton impeachment trial, regardless of one’s views, highlighted the utility of the professional claim, when used surgically, to ground an argument in history.
It took a large part of the year 2000 to gather the initial group of sponsors, former association heads and a few other leading scholars. About half of the former association presidents contacted, as well as a few other leading historians, agreed to sign on. To date, 227 historians have signed the statement, and the letter will “stay open” for quite a while to come. There are numerous options for how to use it, including sending it to public officials like Governor Tom Ridge, publishing it as an op-ed or letter to the editor in leading newspapers, and so on.
In this essay, we want to explain our purposes, encourage wider dissemination and signing of the “Open Letter” by historians, and place this modest campaign in a larger context. By historicizing the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the agenda of social forces seeking his execution, and the campaign to win him a new trial, this short article can only summarize key points. The scope and complexity of the issues raised would need an entire issue to analyze—but they serve here simply to suggest that historians have a real contribution to make, not just to our academic discipline, but also to the movement for social justice that has grown around Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A Case for Reasonable Doubt
“Uncorroborated or falsely reported confessions; the deliberate mishandling, destruction of evidence removed from the crime scene; very active judicial bias in the courtroom; excessive use of preemptory challenges, particularly African-American prospective jurors; prosecutorial misconduct, including withholding evidence that would exculpate, that would free the person charged; the use of snitch testimony; misidentification of persons at the crime scene … All these factors are present in Mumia’s case. Why don’t we then help the rest of the country draw the same conclusion, that if there are 95 persons who’ve been released from death row due to these factors, Mumia should be number 96?” — Sam Jordan, the former director of Amnesty International’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty at the “Freedom for Mumia!” national conference, Washington, D.C., March 30, 2001
In 1981, Philadelphia magazine named Mumia Abu-Jamal one of Philadelphia’s “people to watch.” He was president of the Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia and the recipient of the Major Armstrong Award for radio. During the brutal repression of Philadelphia’s inner city, having covered such landmark repressive events as the police attacks on the MOVE organization’s house under Frank Rizzo (then police commissioner, later mayor), he had become known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Others saw him as a person to watch as well. His reputation and radical journalism had drawn the ire of the Philadelphia city government and police force and the attention of the FBI. Jamal had no criminal record. But from the age of fifteen, when he was the Philadelphia Information Officer of the Black Panther Party, over seven hundred pages of FBI files were produced bearing specific references to Wesley Cook (Mumia Abu-Jamal).
One night in December of that year, Mumia Abu-Jamal was, as he related it later, driving his taxi, when he came across a policeman beating his brother on the street. On going up to the scene, Mumia was shot and wounded by a Philadelphia policeman. He was later accused of the murder of policeman Daniel Faulkner. Pronounced guilty in an obviously biased judicial process, Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent nineteen years on death row. On legal grounds alone, the trial was fundamentally flawed. Witnesses whose observations supported Mumia’s version of the night’s events were intimidated and harassed by the police and prevented from presenting their evidence at the trial. After stating that Mumia had said nothing at the hospital, the police claimed, two months later, to remember a confession that then became central to the prosecution’s case. Mumia was refused the right to choose his own representation; then refused the right to represent himself; then provided with an incompetent and underfunded defense. Mumia’s former activities in the Black Panther Party and his radical political views were presented as central support for the prosecution’s argument for the death penalty. The imposition of the death sentence on Mumia Abu-Jamal thus seems to repeat the tactics used against political dissent in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, political prisoners executed for their beliefs.
The particular circumstances of the case suggest an embedded, complex causality for why it stays unresolved. It cannot be argued that there is a simple one-to-one relationship between the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s (and city of Philadelphia’s) propensity for state violence and repression and Abu-Jamal’s death sentence. Rather, the specific character of Mayor Frank Rizzo’s regime in Philadelphia during the 1970s, unequaled in any other “Northern” city for its boastful embrace of racist violence, clearly defines Abu-Jamal as a political prisoner. He was a prominent activist, known to the police. His militant activity was cited by the prosecutor as exacerbating his guilt. In all countries, in all periods, so-called “criminal” cases involving dissidents are a well-known method of exercising legal repression. We should be no more ready to accept this old ruse in the United States than anywhere else. Do political activists on the left on occasion engage in common crime, whether embezzlement, shoplifting, or even murder? Certainly, as a group they (or we) are no better or worse than any other group of human beings. But historical precedent argues for a jaundiced eye when a militant with a long history of challenging police violence is suddenly charged with violence against a policeman.
It is significant to understand the political resonance of the label— “cop killer”—that constructs Mumia Abu-Jamal as a dangerous criminal. Abu-Jamal was not a bank robber or burglar charged with killing others during the commission of a crime, nor a drug dealer or mafioso who wiped out his competition in one fell swoop. If he was any of those things, he might have bargained for his life, traded in a minor accomplice, or cast sufficient reasonable doubt on the evidence (as there evidently is in this case) to obtain a jail rather than a death sentence. Instead, he is branded a “cop killer.” The emotional and cultural resonance of that particular crime is so strong, bringing in so many other actors beyond “the state” itself, that both Abu-Jamal and those officials who move inexorably to kill him are fixed in a scheme of retributive violence that seems preordained.
The Social Wage of Whiteness
There is a basic political and historical “frame” for this case, which we as historians believe is a central one in defining the history of the settler colonies that became the United States: the state or state-sanctioned violence of a special sort directed at dissident, disobedient, or simply upstanding and successful black men. This frame includes not only lynching, of course—its most characteristic expression from first to second Reconstruction—but also flogging, a popular southern sport even in modern times, prison camps and chain gangs of an exterminatory nature, and above all the perverted form of “justice” that obtained under slavery and then Jim Crow in the South, and to a lesser but significant form in the North, whereby black men were subject to summary physical punishment, from jailing to execution, for any possible legal infraction involving a white person.
Yet to the extent that the state wishes to appear impartial and unbiased, it risks losing its legitimacy by stepping into a frame that is publicly recognized as tainted. Indeed, one suspects that many of the leading officials of these governments, both Republican and Democrat, wish the Mumia case would just go away because of the perception of a growing political cost to pursuing his execution. A key political interest of a state claiming to be democratic is the appearance of stability, legitimacy, and reasonable order that will command active obedience, even loyalty, from people who see themselves as citizens with both rights and duties. Dubious capital cases causing great outcry are the very opposite of this systematic urge to rationality, which is a central reason why every other advanced capitalist state dispensed with capital punishment some time ago.
The social fraction mobilized by the “unforgivable” crime of killing a police officer, even in self-defense, is the most volatile in the United States—the so-called white “ethnics” (itself a mystified category invented in the early 1970s by future neoconservatives like Michael Novak), spread across the exurbs of the northeastern and midwestern Rust Belt, and their Anglo cousins in every other part of the country. It is not accurate to describe these strata as “the white working class” in the fashion of political journalists like Thomas Byrne Edsall who pick out places like Macomb County (north of Detroit) to paint passionate pictures of UAW members turned “Reagan Democrats” because of the excesses of the 1960s. The glow of the steel furnaces and the CIO faded long ago, after all, and has been exceptionalized in any case, since only in specific factory or urban enclaves could one say that a working class, white and otherwise, existed as a solid, compact bloc, for any serious length of time. More generally, both earlier and in the post–World War II era, we are looking at a dense web of plebeian whites, in which a given family or neighborhood is likely to mix proletarian and petite bourgeois together indiscriminately: unionized semiskilled assembly line workers, self-employed small business owners or artisans, members of exclusive craft unions such as plumbers, carpenters, clerks, and teachers.
For these communities, the historical access to the lower levels of the state apparatus, in particular police (as well as fire) departments, is a crucial social wage. In tandem with generations of lily-white craft unionism, still residing like a stone in the heart of the American labor movement, it is literally the mechanism that whitened up generations of Europeans who otherwise were despised migrants. This is not merely a question of civil service wages, pensions, and benefits denied to most people of color until a generation ago. There are also the visible markers of status derived from uniforms, nightsticks, pistols, shotguns, and squad cars, and in the case of police, the right to detain, order (“move along”), interrogate, and even use force against one’s social betters. In fact, one of the favorite tropes of popular melodrama in the U.S., from the nineteenth century right through to last week’s episode of NYPD Blue or Law and Order, is how blue bloods and professional-managerial class types demand deference from cops, and get it shoved right back in their face.
More important, however, than the privilege of occasionally dressing down the bourgeoisie is the mandate to police the criminal classes, meaning first and always African Americans as well as other people of color (in parts of the West and Southwest, Native Americans or Chicanos are clearly the policed, subject population). The fiction of a neutral, safe public space is exactly that—a fiction. Leaving aside for the moment the Jim Crow South, there is a bloody record of sustained mob violence against black people in the urban North across the past century, in which the color line was drawn across geography again and again with bombs and fire and stones, as Thomas Sugrue and Arnold Hirsch have documented in chilling detail for cities like Detroit and Chicago. Nowhere in these decades of maintaining “ethnic purity”—to use candidate Jimmy Carter’s judicious phrase from the decisive 1976 Pennsylvania primary where he sealed his nomination—is there any record of police forces using serious violence to break up these white riots, despite their threats to both people and property. There are no martyrs to the “white line” in Trumbull Park, in Southie, in Northeast Philadelphia, in Canarsie, no “killer cops” hung in effigy for shooting these particular teenagers with Molotov cocktails in hand. That kind of repression would have violated a very fundamental bargain. And this explains why the police are seen on one hand as benevolent protectors, and on the other as at best highly unreliable, and at worst a brutal occupying army.
In light of this history, although Abu-Jamal’s case appears by most legal accounts (such as the report by Amnesty International) to represent a conflict between an unjustly accused man and the U.S. judicial system, there are really three sets of actors here: the various “state-level” agencies (including Pennsylvania courts and the federal judiciary, as well as the Justice Department); those white people, across the country, for whom the police are the front line of their peculiar race/class privilege; and finally, but in an increasingly powerful sense, the social movement in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The latter articulates concerns about the death penalty and the case of a particular miscarriage of justice against a radical black man, but also, beyond that, points to the systematic contradictions of the democratically legitimated state that are revealed by Abu-Jamal’s case. The criminalization of black males and the systematic brutalization and incarceration of entire populations marked by their race and class reveal the structural dependence of the state on a systematic violence against particular sections of its population. The power of the social movement around the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is that it reveals that Abu-Jamal’s persecution is a required and routine element of the wages of privilege; a systematic part of the claims of “democracy” that legitimate the social position of the former two sets of actors.
The Current Situation
At the moment, there is a stay on Governor Ridge’s signed warrant for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution, pending consideration of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal. The next legislative step will occur when federal district court judge William H. Yohn Jr. decides whether evidence barred by the Pennsylvania courts will be heard by federal court. The evidence barred by Pennsylvania courts, which speaks to such allegations as the intimidation of witnesses who supported Mumia’s story and the inconsistency in ballistics tests and police testimony, is a crucial element of the fair trial for which the Mumia movement is calling. Yohn’s court ruling will determine whether or not Mumia receives an “evidentiary hearing” to reopen the factual record in his case, or whether all future appeals will be based on the court record of Albert Sabo, popularly known as “the hanging judge” because of the staggering number of death penalties he imposed in his career.
Many observers despaired when the former governor of Texas, the state which executed Shaka Sankofa despite the existence of evidence suggesting his innocence, became president of the United States. It is true that Texas under Governor Bush killed an average of one prisoner every two weeks (the most active execution chamber in the nation, as noted by Robert Sherrill in “Death Trip: The American Way of Execution,” in the Nation, January 8, 2001). But it is also true that death row’s efficiency had already, under Clinton, been enhanced in ways that chillingly threaten defendants’ fundamental protections against race and class bias, on the one hand, and procedural rights to habeas corpus, on the other.
In 1995, Congress eliminated federal funding for PCDOs (Post-Conviction Defender Organizations), which are often the sole cause of the overturning on appeal of flawed judgments. Conservatives cite the release of innocents as proof that the judicial system “works,” yet the already underfunded PCDOs (whose lawyers often worked for no pay) have now been completely shut out from federal funding, further tilting the scale against indigent defendants. In 1996, Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which drastically restricts the scope of the federal appeals process and reduces time between sentence and execution. To paint Bush as a singular, aberrant evil disregards the systematic role of state executions in the maintenance of class and race privilege in the United States.
The International Context
Even organizations not opposed in principle to the death penalty have called for a moratorium in the United States because of the egregious discrimination in its application. The International Commission of Jurists, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Amnesty International, and human rights organizations have concluded that the death penalty in the United States is inextricably tied to race, ethnic origin, and economic status and that it is undeniably arbitrary and racist in its application. Yet federal authorities refuse to answer international queries and recommendations, asserting that the judicial system provides adequate safeguards and denying systemic bias (Amnesty Report, http://www. rightsforall-usa.org/info/report/r06.htm#, page 11).
The United States is part of what Amnesty terms “the tiny group of nations responsible for the vast majority of the world’s judicial killings” (Amnesty Report, http://www.rightsforall-usa.org/info/report/r06.htm# page 1). More than twenty-five Amnesty International reports, as well as independent studies by university research groups, have found U.S. application of the death penalty to be biased against racial minorities and the poor. The evidence that the death penalty does not lower the murder rate is widely acknowledged even by lawmakers. Nevertheless, officials at all levels campaign for election on the plank of being “tough on crime,” constructing executions as bloodthirsty circuslike opportunities for vengeance and retribution.
The United States has long refused to comply with international law. Iran is the only other state to have flouted an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling. The United States has ignored an ICJ ruling against U.S.-sponsored human rights abuses in Nicaragua. It has abducted a Mexican citizen from Mexico in violation of international law. It executed Paraguayan citizen Angel Francisco Breard in 1998 despite an ICJ order to suspend the execution. When the United States does sign international treaties, it either delays ratification by decades or imposes “reservations” which effectively render the treaties ineffective. For example, the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) has numerous reservations in the U.S. ratification, which effectively contradict its purpose, such as the reservation insisting on the right to execute juveniles, or the right to use corporal punishment in schools, and prolonged solitary confinement and other conditions of detention that are defined as torture or cruel treatment by the ICCPR. The United States is the only country other than Somalia that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is one of a very few countries that has not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. It ratified the ICCPR twenty-six years after its adoption by the UN General Assembly and after 109 other states. Although the United States signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 1977, it still has not ratified it. The United States has not recognized any regional human rights treaties (and has flouted the norms of several of them), but it seeks to influence the political and military components of the Organization of American States. The U.S. report on its implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, overdue since November 1997, appeared in September 2000, and will be discussed at a 2001 human rights meeting in South Africa. Grassroots human rights groups from the United States and elsewhere are documenting the broad spectrum of racial discrimination practiced systematically by the United States. Among the cases they will take to the South Africa meeting in 2001 will be the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Social Movement in Support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
“We’re here tonight to make clear to the powers that be—those who want to execute our brother, those who want to execute hundreds of others who are living their lives barely on the death rows of America, those who are determined to extinguish the flame of freedom—we tonight must make clear in this house that that absolutely will not and cannot happen as long as we stand together in this movement. We are not going to allow this to happen. The reason that we are not going to allow this to happen is because we know that the criminal justice system is a criminal justice system, that it is a system that sends innocent men and women and even children to prison, that it does anything through prosecutorial misconduct to get convictions for politicized reasons and political motives.” —Damu Smith of Greenpeace USA at the “Freedom for Mumia!” national conference, Washington, D.C., March 30, 2001
A growing movement—including prominent writers, musicians, and artists as well as mainstream human rights organizations—has emerged around the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Even more significantly, his name is becoming a “household word” in society at large. Initially focused around the demand to free Mumia, the movement has more recently shifted its energies to demanding a new trial that takes into account the evidence that was either barred from the original trial or that has surfaced since then. Strategically, leading groups in this campaign see it is important to mobilize as many people as possible, from many different perspectives, around this demand, to include even those who are not yet convinced of his innocence. The courts and the state must see this issue as something they might need to “give” on, or risk a vital part of their legitimacy.
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case stands out not only because he is “on death row,” and therefore under the purview of anti–death penalty advocates. His case, and his cause, is a profound one precisely because he sees himself—and his supporters increasingly see him—in a historical context, in a situation that is contingently related to a whole slew of capitalist American structures of power and privilege. Mumia’s own journalism—particularly his radio series “Live from Death Row”— has not focused mainly on the merits of his case, but rather on the systemically unjust nature of the justice system, and on the systemically exploitative nature of U.S. social and economic policy, both foreign and domestic. He has inspired large sections of an emerging generation of militant youth and the broader African American middle class to question the multivalent injustices of a system by sketching the positions of their own silhouettes in the workings of the state’s variable geometries of coercion. The Mumia movement has made the death penalty and the entire judicial system in the United States a focus of major international debate and exposure. By shaming the United States in the face of more social democratic regimes, the movement has threatened to expose the raw power of contemporary U.S. policy, thus transforming the very viciousness of its agenda into its greatest public weakness.
Pundits who criticize the Mumia movement as “radical chic” either fail to grasp or openly bemoan its fundamental, positive aspect: its popularity. They bristle on hearing of his college graduation addresses, seeing his face at every demonstration, linked to every cause, postered on streets all over the world. What they miss is the possibility that he, that we, could win, and that it will require a change in the current social climate—not simply the enlightened ruling of a federal judge—for that to happen. His critics deride his support movement for making him a so-called poster child for abolition of the death penalty; but at the same time, he is used by everyone from the Fraternal Order of Police to Vanity Fair as a poster child for the death penalty. A victory for the forces seeking his execution would be a herald for many more devastating blows. A victory, on the other hand, for the social movement in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal could strengthen the cause of progressive social change on a number of fronts.