In Prison My Whole Life: A Journey towards Freedom

In the documentary In Prison My Whole Life, young William Francome tells us that he was born the night that Mumia Abu-Jamal was jailed for the killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner and that his mother has often reminded him that every year of his life represents another year in prison for Mumia Abu-Jamal. After listening to Rage against the Machine voice their support for Mumia, he sets out on a journey to find out about the man who’s been in prison his whole life.

“Now renegades are the people with their own philosophies. They change the course of history. Everyday people like you and me”.
(“Renegades of Funk”) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTbvlq3k_Ek

Young Will discovers a man whose whole life has been a fight for freedom, his own and the freedom of a people enslaved and brought to the shores of a cold and distant land in chains. This is the context of the slave rebellions Mumia describes in his book We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party, and of a liberating faith described in his lesser-known book Faith of our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People. It is also the theme of many of his essays on the prison system of the United States, the “shadow world” explored more fully in his new book Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A.

Will tells us that he had frequently listened to Mumia’s radio broadcasts on Democracy Now when he was younger, and his first interview is with Amy Goodman. She emphasizes that all the horrors we are seeing in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo start at home, in the prisons of the United States, and that is why Mumia’s broadcasts are so important. As scenes of torture are projected, we hear Mumia’s voice reading his own column:

“In an empire that picks puppets for other nations, this is not acceptable. It wasn’t acceptable under the Roman Empire, it wasn’t acceptable under the British Empire, nor its North American successor, the American Empire. For this latest global incarnation of the white nation, Arabs are but “sand niggers,” to be beaten into submission and obedience. It is the refusal to accept this status that is fueling what the U. S. media calls “the insurgency.”
http://www.prisonradio.org/Attica2Abu-GraibMumia.htm


Before driving up to meet Mumia, Will visits with Mumia’s literary agent Frances Goldin, who warns him that the Fraternal Order of Police has renewed its campaign to kill Mumia because of their fury over the street recently named in his honor in France. Since 1996, she says, no one can take his picture or tape him. It’s a “Mumia law” —one of many.

Will and his girlfriend describe their experience of walking through the eerie corridors of SCI Green prison as nothing less than “terrifying”, yet they spend five and a half hours with a man who hasn’t lost his human warmth and his ability to relate to them even after being deprived of all physical contact for decades. On the contrary, he makes them feel right at home.


“I’m from the illest part of the Western Hemisphere
and if you’re into sightseeing, don’t visit here.”
(“In the Music,” The Roots)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klbQoiWoDzE

As they walk along the streets of the city known as “the Cradle of Democracy,” Philly journalist and long-time colleague of Mumia, Linn Washington, tells Will, “You’ve got to understand that during the ‘70s, the Philadelphia police shot and killed more people than the police in New York City. And at the time, New York City was four times larger that Philadelphia.”

Will learns about the public threats made by former mayor and police chief Frank Rizzo against Mumia after the young journalist covered the city’s 1978 military assault against the MOVE organization, eight of whose members were sentenced to 30-100 years in prison and are demanding their release today.

Will sits on a curb, dwarfed by an enormous mural of Frank Rizzo. He views the bronze statue to Rizzo in the plaza facing the Courthouse. He visits Geno’s Steaks, with its signs honoring Daniel Faulkner and others that say “This is America. When ordering, speak English.” He reflects on the heavy racial divisions in the city: “Why has Philly, a city that gave birth to two black boxers like Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier chosen to have a statue of a white fictitious one called Rocky Balboa? Has it chosen to believe in a fictitious history of itself rather than face up to the real one?”

Will speaks to Ramona África, the sole adult survivor of the city’s bombing of the MOVE house on May 13, 1985, ordered by the city’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode. Eleven people were burned alive and 61 houses were destroyed with C-4 explosives provided by the FBI. She says, “People still come up to me to this day and tell me that they remember exactly what they were doing, like how they turned on their television or looked over and saw their television and thought they were seeing Beirut or Vietnam and were shocked to see that it was Filadelfia!”

He also visits a City Council meeting and observes the Philadelphia dynasty in action: Frank Rizzo, Jr. and Wilson Goode, Jr., sons of the former mayors, are now city council members. Pam África and other Mumia supporters are demanding that the City rescind its resolution criticizing French cities for naming a street after Mumia. In a TV debate with Pam on Fox News, the representative of the Fraternal Order of Police Richard Costello likens Mumia to Satan.

It was in Philly where young Mumia took part in a student movement demanding that the name of his high school be changed from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, and where former Panther Barbara Easley Cox takes young Will to visit the man who was Mumia’s mentor in the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panthers, Reggie Schell. “Aw, he was just a 14 year old kid jumping into a man’s world,” says Schell. “Sometimes he’d take a little break and go back to being a child, you know. He’d go out and walk downtown and buy an ice cream or something and look at the sights and chase girls, but when there was work to be done, he was always there to buckle under and get it done.”

Years later, when Mumia was arrested, Reggie told him, “They gonna lock you up and try you as a Panther.” He explains: “That’s exactly what they did. They didn’t have no evidence. They convicted him on a speech he made about how political power comes out of a barrel of a gun.”

Reggie’s opinion is backed up by Noam Chomsky, who explains that Mumia made the statement immediately after murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton en Chicago. “It was one of the worst State crimes in our history.... An FBI organized assassination of a Black organizer. With totally fabricated evidence the FBI got the Chicago police to go in at 4:00 a. m. and murder him in bed.... Mumia was there [at the funeral]. He made strong statements about it as he should have. They were brought up at his trial to prove that he was a terrorist. That’s utterly outrageous. It was the State that was the terrorist.”

With regards to people on death row in the United States, Chomsky says, “Guilty or innocent, it’s irrelevant. They shouldn’t be on death row in the first place. Civilized societies don’t allow the State to have the power to kill people. Drawing out a case is just another indication of the nature of the society. It’s sometimes described as disfunctional, but I really believe that it’s functioning. It’s functioning to frighten the population, to build up support for power, and to harm the people in question. Mumia’s case is special because he’s articulate and outspoken and is saying things that the power centers certainly don’t want heard.”

The rapper Snoop Dogg also speaks about the history of the State in killing or locking up Black leaders and destroying their organizations, especially the way the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover planned to “contain” the Black Panther Party. And the way you do that, says Snoop, is to kill them or lock them up.”

Ex political prisoner and current prison abolitionist Angela Davis outlines some similarities and differences between Mumia’s case and her own on similar charges at the beginning of the ‘70s. She notes the difficulty of the current period but still thinks it should be possible to build crucial support for Mumia, remembering that the period when Reagan was governor of California and Nixon was President of the United States. “It wasn’t an easy period. I was called a terrorist by the President of the United States,” she remembers. Yet a strong, visible movement freed her.

“This is for the streets, the streets everywhere, the streets affected by the storm called America.”
(“Dollar Day, Katrina Klap” Mos Def) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2FlcRVTuCA

A segment of the documentary deemed irrelevant by some reviewers is one that doesn’t even mention Mumia, yet shows an action in support of people that he has often referred to in his essays, those affected by Hurricane Katrina. And of course, the rapper who staged the protest and was arrested outside the MTV Awards is somebody who has long supported Mumia. Mos Def. His philosophy? “He’s free. That’s why they locked him up.”

The theme of Katrina is picked up in a passage written and read by Mumia:

“It is amazing, the evocative power of one word, one name: Katrina.
In a flash, in an hour, in a day, in a week, we saw with our own eyes, the loss, the waste, the death and perhaps worse, the dismissal of black life by virtually every agency of State power. For if the State was deadly by its ignoring of black suffering. The media was deadly by its poisonous attention and its perversion of the truth. If U.S. blacks had any illusions, the dark fetid waters of Katrina washed them away. The waters of Katrina cleared the crust of sleep from our eyes and taught us that, if you are black and poor then you are utterly on your own”.
http://www.prisonradio.org/KatrinaMumia2006.htm


Will interviews the novelist and author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker, who is deeply offended by the way in which the news media pictured the people of New Orleans as being not worth saving. She insists that the legacy of slavery is still very strong, as Mumia himself often emphasizes in his writings, both in terms of oppression and rebellion. And she suggests to Will that Mumia’s enemies not only intend to kill him because they don’t want people to hear what he’s saying, but because they’re envious of him, of his courage. After all they’ve done to keep Black people in their place, how dare he sit there and tell them what he thinks!

“The judge didn’t budge. Didn’t even look at him.
Gave him life. Threw the book at him.”
(Snoop Dogg vs Massive Attack “Calling Mumia”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tv78kaTGP4

Much of the evidence that destroys the State’s case against Mumia is taken from John Edginton’s film A Case of Reasonable Doubt, but the new documentary also includes an interview with court stenographer Terri Carter, who describes her feelings when she heard Judge Albert Sabo say, “I’m going to help them fry the nigger.” There are also clips from a video used in the District Attorney’s office to train young attorneys to eliminate Blacks and other “undesirable” candidates from a jury. For some reason, however, the film concentrates mainly on the need to eliminate intelligent candidates of all races, which, of course, is an important indictment of traditional practices, yet stops short of showing the most racist parts of the training video, such as the need to eliminate people from certain areas of the city with a heavy Black population. (The training video can be seen on http://www.abujamalnews.com )

Also included are graphic representations of bullet trajectories that show the impossibility of the scenario proposed by DA Joseph Mcgill, which has Mumia shooting the officer in the back and then standing over him and firing four shots, hitting him once between the eyes with the fatal bullet.

We accompany young Will and investigator Michael Schiffman to the house of photographer Pedro Polokaff, who shows us pictures that he took immediately after the shooting that demonstrate police misconduct in handling the crime scene and an absence of bullet holes or chunks of concrete in the sidewalk that would have been present if McGill’s scenario were true. The documentary fails to affirm the obvious implication, noted by Michael Schiffman in his book Race against Death, that the three main prosecution witnesses, Cynthia White, Michael Scanlan, and Robert Chobert, all lied when they testified that the shooting occurred according to McGill’s scenario. Neither does the documentary mention the fact that Polakaff’s photos show that Chobert’s taxi was not in the place he said it was in court, another proof of a lying witness. Even so, Will Francome notes that “the prosecution’s scenario seemed increasingly like a bad work of fiction.” The documentary advances the probability that the shooter of Daniel Faulkner was the passenger in Billy Cook’s car, Kenneth Freeman, and that if Mumia shot at all that night, it would have been in self-defense. In his first on-camera interview ever, Billy shows the scars that he still has on his head from the beating he suffered that night, and confirms that he has laid low ever since out of fear of police retaliation.

The appeal for a new trial based on constitutional issues explained in the documentary by Mumia’s lawyer Robert Bryan has now been rejected by the United States Supreme Court. As Robert Meeropol, the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed by the United States government in the 1950s points out to Will, even though Mumia had a stronger case than ever, legally speaking, the courts have often ruled against him because of the political nature of his case. There is still a grave danger that the Court may rule in favor of reinstating the death penalty, and Will goes to talk to singer and abolitionist Steve Earle, who tells him of his experience of witnessing an injection by legal injection. Says Steve: “It didn’t look like he was going to sleep to me.”

The documentary ends with a telephone call. Dear Will, this is Mumia calling you from death row, of course. It’s your birthday, December 9, a day I never thought of as a day of celebration, of cake and happiness. To meet you, born on that day 25 years ago, gives me a vivid sense of the time that’s passed. To see you is to truly see that a lifetime has gone by. It’s quite amazing actually. In the meantime, I dream of freedom. The sweetest word I’ve ever heard. I dream of it every night. I dream of a country and a world where the death penalty is a memory. It’s history. I dream of the absence of prison bars, the absence of shackles, the absence of the threat of death. Oh, happy birthday. I hope to one day meet you in freedom.

“No conclusion. Open your eyes.
Because the revolution will be televised”.
Snoop Dogg vs Massive Attack “Calling Mumia”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tv78kaTGP4


For further information, consult: http://www.inprisonmywholelife.com