Socialist Action /July 1999
Evergreen College Graduates Hear Mumia Abu-Jamal
April 24, 1999: Close to 50,000 demonstrators marched
in Philadelphia (above) and San Francisco to support Mumia. This fall, supporters
must redouble efforts to save Mumia from execution.
By JEFF MACKLER
A number of the nation's major corporate media, including The New York
Times, felt compelled to report on the fact that Pennsylvania death row
political prisoner and award-winning journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal was selected
by Evergreen State College students in Olympia, Wash., to present a 13-minute
audiotaped address during the graduation ceremonies on June 11.
The Times and their corporate media co-thinkers focused on the presence
at the event of Maureen Faulkner, wife of Daniel Faulkner, the Philadelphia
policeman Abu-Jamal was falsely convicted of murdering. Faulkner signed
two police-funded advertisements published in The Olympian, protesting Mumia's
invitation by Evergreen students.
In the face of a national campaign to compel Evergreen, a four-year state
liberal arts college, to withdraw the invitation, college president Jane
Jervis defended the students' decision.
Mumia's invitation, said Jervis, served "to galvanize an international
conversation about the death penalty, the disproportionate number of Blacks
on death row, and the relationship between poverty and the criminal justice
system."
Protests were registered by leaders of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order
of Police and by District Attorney Lynne Abraham, who prosecuted Mumia Abu-Jamal
in 1982.
"To dignify a graduation ceremony with the words of a convicted
killer," said Abraham at a Philadelphia press conference, "is
an obscenity."
Washington Gov. Gary Locke canceled his scheduled appearance at the graduation
in protest. In Washington, D.C., Republican House leader Tom DeLay of Texas
branded those who selected Abu-Jamal as "twisted radicals" who
"perverted their vocation to better mankind through teaching."
The June 10, 1999, New York Times carried a major story on the
Evergreen event that was run on the wire services and published in papers
around the country. The Times reported that a dozen students protested Mumia's
speech by wearing yellow armbands and turning their backs on the podium.
An additional three walked out.
The Times neglected to report that the remaining 800 students
rose to give Mumia a standing ovation, an action that registers without
doubt the fact that growing millions have come to challenge the fundamental
injustice involved in Mumia's conviction.
In a June 14, 1999, New York Daily News op-ed article on the Evergreen
graduation, columnist John Leo declared that while he believes Mumia is
guilty, his trial was so unfair that the imposition of the death penalty
is "indefensible."
The nationally-circulated U.S. News & World Report dated June
21, 1999, reprinted Leo's column, a further indication that powerful forces
are beginning to question whether the planned state murder of Mumia will
cost them too dearly in regard to a profound loss of public confidence in
the criminal "justice" system.
Leo's column included a call for a new trial, an eventuality that Mumia's
legal team fully expects would result in Mumia's exoneration and freedom.
"Stuart Taylor Jr.," says Leo, "in a brilliant analysis
of the [Mumia Abu-Jamal] case in the American Lawyer in 1995 concluded that
Abu-Jamal's trial was 'grotesquely unfair.'"
"Taylor," Leo continues, "thinks an unfair trial was guaranteed
when it was assigned to Judge Albert Sabo, who is believed to have sent
more defendants to death row than any judge in America.
"As Taylor tells it, the sentence was 'pushed though by Sabo in
less than three hours on the Saturday of the July 4 weekend' in a proceeding
'riddled with constitutional flaws.'"
Socialist Action /July 1999 |