Mumia Abu-Jamal

Murder Incorporated is a three-book series by Mumia Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria, which I can highly recommend based on the first book. The other two are not out yet.

-by Denise SullivanFollowing the shocking back-to-back police murders of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castille outside St.

In the last full week of Barack Obama’s eight year tenure as President of the United States of America, dozens of political prisoners still sit in cages across the nation’s prisons, rotting away as Obama consciously chooses not to exercise the power to simply free them with the stroke of a pen. Many activists for Puerto Rican independence, Native American and African American rights, and other causes were targeted by the political police’s illegal COINTELPRO program and convicted in sham trials.

The tragedy that is America has deepened with the news that several people on Thursday organized a military-style sniper attack targeting police in Dallas during a protest march and rally against police brutality and killings of black people in that city.
The murder of anybody, whether it’s a police officer or someone who is simply stopped by a cop for a minor traffic violation and is then shot because a jumpy officer mistakes reaching for a wallet to be reaching for a gun, as happened just two days ago in Minnesota, is a dreadful thing.

During the height of the Ferguson Rebellion in late summer 2014, youth organizer, Joshua Williams quickly rose to the call of duty. In the aftermath of Officer Darren Wilson’s brutal murder of unarmed Black teenager, Mike Brown, 19-year-old Josh Williams, stepped forward in the most dedicated and courageous way possible – on the front lines.

Below is a slightly modified speech that I gave at the 50th Anniversary Tribute to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on February 27th at the Solidarity Center in Manhattan, NY. Organizers requested insight on how the Black Panther Party applied revolutionary socialist theory. This is my response.

We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are and to have somebody (Jonathan Pollard) screw it up… and then have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me…
— Admiral Sumner Shapiro, US Navy Rear Admiral who served as Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence (1978-82), Washington Post, 6/16/2008

Today, across the nation, we witness homicidal violence delivered against unarmed people by law enforcement officers. These beatings and killings are carried out with something close to impunity. The cops almost always get away with murder. Moreover, these crimes are nothing new; they are longstanding in practice.

From July 24-26 over 1500 registered Black activists and organizers from all over the U.S., Canada and even the Caribbean converged in Cleveland, Ohio for the 2015 Movement for Black Lives Convening. In addition to police terror and state violence, pertinent issues such as mass incarceration, economic empowerment, education, culture, housing and Black health were all working parts to an overwhelmingly incredible weekend.

Writing on the Wall-- Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal(City Lights Books, 2015)Foreword by Cornel WestEdited by Johanna Fernándezby Denise SullivanMumia Abu-Jamal has been in jail longer than members of the millennial generation have been alive.