To Protect and Serve Who? Organizing a Movement to Abolish Police Violence.
Mumia Abu-Jamal.
City Lights Open Media Series.
San Francisco: City Lights Books.
16 pp., $5

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the imprisoned journalist known worldwide for his writing and speaking, has, not unsurprisingly, hand-typed a document about fighting as he battles to get the needed medication that could cure his Hepatitis C.  A memorable pamphlet responds to the current moment with both stationary (historical) and fluid (current) thought, and this one doesn’t disappoint. In his first pamphlet in nearly three decades, the former Black Panther Party member attempts a tutorial for the Black Lives Matter movement. The radical writer gives a revisionist history of the Civil Rights Movement that centralizes the blood and anger of young people. He reminds his symbolic charges that movements come from oppression and will guarantee violent resistance. A brief-but-serious examination of the cost of struggle as Black America heads into the 50^th anniversary of both the Black Power movement and the founding of the Black Panther Party during 2016, Abu-Jamal continues to step into the role of social historian legends Lerone Bennett Jr. and Howard Zinn, in his own, deceptively simple agitprop style.