Category Archives: world history

Want A Government Job? Don’t Be Involved With Mumia!

Posted on by toddpanther

By the way, “Writing on the Wall,” the forthcoming Mumia book Fernandez is editing, will be Mumia’s eighth. Here are the previous seven, in chronological order.

And here’s Mumia’s response.

And here’s the Mumia biography filmmaker’s response. Here’s the text, in case the blog moves on:

Behind the Flash mob Attack on Obama’s DOJ Attorney General Nominee Debo Adegbile

There is a story that lies behind the Adegbile partisan fight on the senate floor.  If you want to understand why the Republicans are using Adegbile’s association with Mumia Abu-Jamal to try and block his nomination, take a long hard look at ‘Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary”, www.mumia-themovie.com.  This will give you the measure of the man.  It chronicles Mumia Abu-Jamal’s evolution as one of the world’s most notable public intellectuals.

Today’s stage is the floor of the U.S. Senate where a cloture vote on Adegible’s nomination takes place in the wake of his clearing the Judiciary Committee.  According to an OP ED in the Wall Street Journal Adegbile’s representation of Mumia Abu-Jamal when he headed the NAACP LDF is reason enough to derail his nomination.  The Fraternal Order of police, Fox News and bipartisan derision from Pennsylvania politicians republican Senator Pat Toomey, and Democrat Bob Casey has fueled the impending drama.

It is a drama where U.S. Senators and political pundits regurgitate blatant lies that seek to demonize Mumia because they face zero accountability to the facts(1).   Just one fact: When Terry Maurer Carter, a court reporter came forward and sworn in an affidavit that Albert Sabo the original judge said of during the first week of Mumia’s trial”  “I am going to help them fry the nigger”,  Philadelphia Common Pleas court judge Pamela Dembe ruled it “irrelevant”, and that it was not an indication that the case was racially biased.

The media and congressional pundits deplore that Mumia’s death sentence was overturned and he was removed from death row. They repeatedly attribute this result to advocacy lawyers who put forward fabricated tale of racial bias.   Come now, really?  Racial bias in the U.S. Criminal Justice system and Philadelphia is a fairy tale?

They also conveniently ignore that Mumia’s death sentence was overturned by a court: the U.S. Third Circuit and that decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme court- hardly a liberal bastion by any means.

But why is Mumia relevant at all.  Why are they concerned that he lives or dies?  What does he represent?  Why must he have remained silent.  The answer is because what he says and has been saying for over thirty years is relevant.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, is an internationally acclaimed intellectual who writes in the tradition of Franz Fanon and Noam Chomsky.  That he has done his work from an Pennsylvania  prison cell for over 33 yrs.  (30 of which were spent in solitary on death row) is remarkable.   His weekly worldwide radio broadcasts and bestselling books have been translated into nine languages.

Nelson Mandela, the European Parliament, Maya Angelou, E.L. Doctorow, Amnesty International, Danielle Mitterrand, Danny Glover, among many others have called his trial a miscarriage of justice and lauded his incisive writing.

Abu-Jamal through his radio essays and writing directly challenges the false but convenient “we have realized the dream narrative” that everyone from  Time Magazine to Obama is promulgating as we  honor Martin Luther King and celebrate Black History month.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is the conscience of America.  And the backlash is swift.  The level of vitriol and outright demands for his death/silence reminds one of the terrorist label put on Nelson Mandela for a quarter of a century.

Certain revolutionary ideas were not meant to survive the U.S. state sponsored “programme” that targeted Black freedom leaders such as Martin Luther King and ultimately for the last fifty years, black life in America.

The “dream” was assassinated whether it is comfortable to admit that or not.  Mumia Abu-Jamal survived.  And he is one of the many U.S. political prisoners, who are the living witnesses to the true struggle to realize the dreams of freedom and justice.  The United States government through CointelPro and other repressive means has consciously and deliberately attempted to suppress the hopes and dreams of many African Americans.  Listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal www.prisonradio.org.

Noelle Hanrahan, Producer “Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary

globalaudiopi@gmail.com

Book Review: Brother Malcolm And Me

Posted on by toddpanther

Bailey book cover

Another backed-up book review, in the style of another website. Today is the 49th commemoration of the assassination of Malcolm X.

malcom-x

BOOK REVIEW: BROTHER MALCOLM AND ME
A Former Ebony Associate Editor Makes It Plain in New Memoir

After a while, history shifts on a subject. Heroes in life become villains in history decades after their deaths, and then become heroes all over again in new histories. When it comes to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), the history is almost always distorted. First, White journalism and White history books call him a racist who became the victim of the violence he preaches. Then, decades later, revisionist White journalism and history call him a former racist who became a proponent of racial brotherhood before dying tragically. Black journalism and history initially called him a Black nationalist who was the yang to Martin Luther King’s yin, while White Leftist journalism and history call him an internationalist Leftist—in effect, a radical integrationist. Now, a new generation of Black-led Malcolm scholarship is trying to turn him into some liberal Black progressive who publicly engaged in radical, often-unfortunate rhetoric.

Lost in all of this historical ping-pong is a real man who had very concrete ideas about the evils of America, how Black Americans should view themselves, and how and why they should unite with other Black people across the world to push for freedom on Black terms.

A. Peter Bailey is a former associate editor of Ebony and the author of several books, including his co-authorship of the seminal book on Malcolm’s family and his assistance on a major work about Malcolm. He is one of many still living today who worked with whom he always calls “Brother Malcolm.” Unlike most of his colleagues, he has accepted the responsibility to self-publish his memoir of his time with his mentor-in-struggle.

So who was Brother Malcolm to Bailey? “He urged that we strive, not for integration, not for separation, but the kind of group power that would enable us to effectively compete, on every level, with other groups in this group-oriented country. He believed strongly in self-defense as a way by which to curb the white supremacist-driven violence that killed and brutalized so many Black people between 1955 and 1965, the years he was on the public scene; he believed just as strongly in the need for us to develop independent political and collective economic power as instruments for group advancement and defense; he insisted that group cultural power was needed to combat the constant propaganda barrage from films, television programs, magazines, newspapers, textbooks, etc. that supported the ‘divine right’ of people of European descent to control the world; he taught us that we are a world-class people who were/are involved in a struggle for human, not just civil rights.”

In a highly readable, brief book, Bailey recalls and documents his work as a 20-something member of Brother Malcolm’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. He edited what would eventually be called “The Blacklash,” the OAAU’s newsletter. He writes at length about how Brother Malcolm taught him about domestic and international politics.

Historical gems Bailey presents include a never-before-published article that Brother Malcolm submitted for publication in “The Blacklash” the day before he was assassinated, pictures of the front pages of the newsletter, and Bailey’s stream-of-consciousness essay reacting to Brother Malcolm’s assassination hours after it happened.

The author’s emphasis is on Brother Malcolm’s potential impact as an African (-American) internationalist—someone who could organize the Third World versus the Western powers. He quotes now-defunct newspaper articles and now-forgotten-but-then-powerful columnists, Federal Bureau of Investigation files and other sources to show how the powers that be were scared to death of what Brother Malcolm could accomplish as a kind of roving “Black America Ambassador” of Pan-Africanism.

Bailey thankfully brings the story all the up to the present. He humorously recounts his post-assassination encounters with the New York City police and the FBI, both of whom tried to turn him. (Particularly telling is his documentation of the price he and his family paid—and still pay—for his activism, something activists rarely discuss publicly.) He documents an OAAU reunion in 2006, and includes the views of many of his former comrades about Brother Malcolm.

He should be thanked by all concerned African-Americans for this long-overdue, first-hand account. It’s just a small part of the “real” Brother Malcolm, but it’s an important part.

A_Peter_Bailey