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Summary
Summary
"A must-read for anyone interested in social justice and inequalities, social movements, the criminal justice system, and African American history. An excellent companion to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th ."-- Library Journal , Starred review
"I was fortunate to grow up in a community in which it was apparent that our lives mattered. This memory is the antidote to the despair that seizes one of my generation when we hear the words 'Black Lives Matter.' We want to shout: Of course they do! To you, especially. In this brilliant, painful, factual and useful book, we see to whom our lives have not mattered: the profit driven Euro-Americans who enslaved and worked our ancestors to death within a few years, then murdered them and bought replacements. Many of these ancestors are buried beneath Wall Street. Mumia Abu-Jamal's painstaking courage, truth-telling, and disinterest in avoiding the reality of American racial life is, as always, honorable."--Alice Walker
"Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era. These razor sharp reflections on racialized state violence in America are the fire and the memory our movements need right now."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Mumia Abu Jamal's clarion call for justice and defiance of state oppression has never dimmed, despite his decades of being shackled and caged. He is one of our nation's most valiant revolutionaries and courageous intellectuals. "-- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
"This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos."
--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
In December 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness.
In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.
"[Mumia's] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently."--Cornel West
"He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them."--Angela Y. Davis
Author Notes
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist & author of two books, "Live from Death Row" & "Death Blossoms", which address prison life from a critical & spiritual perspective. In 1981 he was elected president of the Association of Black Journalists (Philadelphia chapter). His 1982 murder trial & subsequent conviction has raised considerable controversy & criticism for alleged constitutional violations & other improprieties. In spite of his almost two-decade long imprisonment on death row, Abu-Jamal has fought for his freedom & for his profession. He holds a BA from Goddard College & an MA from California State University, Dominguez Hills. His books have sold more than 100,000 copies & have been translated into seven languages.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The 75 pithy essays collected here, written between 1998 and 2017 by political activist and journalist Abu-Jamal (Live from Death Row), possess the impact and immediacy of the events that precipitated them (half of the essays are set in motion by the recent killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown) while also being haunted by the longer history of police violence. While the author does reflect on the widely reported cases of police violence against African-Americans, as well as on the role of the media in determining what gets attention, the strength of the book rests in the essays that draw attention to lesser-known victims of police violence, particularly women of color whose stories never reached the mainstream media. Over the course of nearly four decades in prison, Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death in 1982 for the shooting of a policeman (a conviction that was overturned in 2001), has become an astute student of the justice system as well as a particularly cogent opponent of the death penalty. "The rage of protest," he observes, is often followed by silence, and "the silent assault of mass incarceration" persists. The brief essays here offer small but potent doses of Abu-Jamal's informed and impassioned writing. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A series of manifestoes in black and white, without any shades of gray.Abu-Jamal (Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2015, etc.) has spent 35 years in prison, much of it on death row for allegedly killing a police officer in Philadelphia. Despite plenty of popular opposition to the verdict and questions over witness reliability, he remains under a life sentence without possibility of parole. A Black Panther before he became an award-winning journalist, he remains passionately committed to the resistance toward institutional racism. Most of these broadsides are less than two pages and have been sparked by an incident involving a black victim and some embodiment of white oppression, whether it be a cop, a judge, the court system, the FBI, etc. Sometimes the black victim had been suspected or accused of wrongdoing, but such suspicions and accusations were false, in the author's opinion. Too often, the police who arrested, mistreated, or even killed the black victim were exonerated as just doing their job, making them all guilty in Abu-Jamal's eyes. These writings date from the late 1990s and often show prescience on the part of the author, who was writing well before the Black Lives Matter movement that "when the system kills Blacks, there is no outrage, for it has been normalized by centuries of white enslavement, terrorism, and injustice. Such violence is simply the accepted way of how things are." Also included is a series of articles on the killing of Trayvon Martin, accurately anticipating the acquittal of the white man who shot him, and another series on Ferguson and its aftermathhow "Ferguson may prove a wake-up call that Black lives matter. A call for youth to build social, radical, revolutionary movements for change." The last piece is the longest, a pamphlet on how to build such a movement with a historical perspective on why this is necessary. A collection to rally the believers into action rather than persuade doubters or skeptics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Writer and imprisoned activist Abu-Jamal (Writing on the Wall) assembles commentary written between 1998 and 2017, documenting the historical, contentious relationship between the criminal justice system and the black community. From the beating of Rodney King in 1991 to the death of Tamir Rice in 2014, the author successfully expounds upon their treatment by politicians, media, and the police, while also using historical movements to show how fear, wealth, and government acquiescence normalize police aggression and impunity. In doing so, he sheds light on how each justify the maltreatment of blacks within the justice system and society at large. Abu-Jamal also compares the modern civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter (BLM), detailing the efforts needed to make BLM stronger. These writings draw parallels to court injustices in Philadelphia, where the author was once referred to as "the world's best known death row inmate." VERDICT A must-read for anyone interested in social justice and inequalities, social movements, the criminal justice system, and African American history. An excellent companion to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th.-Tiffeni Fontno, Boston Coll. Educational Resource Center © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.