'Don't let them kill an innocent man'

Hot off the presses and flying off the shelves! With the bold banner headline “Don’t let them kill an innocent man,” a new four-page newsletter, designed to raise awareness about Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 25-year-long struggle to win freedom from Pennsylvania’s death row, is being enthusiastically received all over Philadelphia.

“I never had people take papers like this before,” sister Pam Africa from International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal told Workers World. “You go into a place and put down a stack of papers. Before you get home, people are calling asking for more!”

Africa reported that the newsletter is particularly popular at the North Philadelphia office of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, where they were excited to see that it includes an article on UNIA founder Marcus Garvey focused around the struggle for immigrant rights. The Honorable Marcus Garvey was an immigrant worker from Jamaica who was deported in 1927.

“The newsletter provides facts about Mumia’s case, but it also covers a lot more issues including the war, police brutality, the elections, and it has articles in Spanish.” Africa noted: “It makes the point that all these struggles are really one. People especially liked the ‘Peoples’ Ballot’ mail-in coupon where they could check off ‘I vote for a NEW TRIAL for Mumia Abu-Jamal’.

“When I went to visit Mumia at SCI-Green I handed them out to family members of other death row prisoners on the bus who all wanted more copies to take back home.”

Thanks to the volunteer efforts of just a few individuals, over 15,000 copies of the newsletter were given out in New York City and Philadelphia in less than a week. Now calls are coming in from other cities asking for the papers.

Throughout Philadelphia wherever papers have been dropped off, at laundromats, barber shops, delis, beauty parlors, pizza or Chinese take-out shops, the response has been the same. One west Philly pizza shop owner told a volunteer, “You know the cops won’t like this, but you can leave a big stack right here on the counter.”

At a nearby beauty salon on 52^nd Street, customers got out of their chairs to get papers, excited to hear that Abu-Jamal’s case was finally going to be heard in the U.S. 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals, but angry that the state has never released him from death row.

Further down the street at the corner of Baltimore and 52^nd, one man told of growing up listening to Abu-Jamal’s radio commentaries. He’d already given away his first copy of the newsletter to his father so he took another, and then took a stack that he started handing out on the spot.

When an elderly African-American man with limited vision received the paper and learned what it was about he asked the volunteer to repeat the details of Abu-Jamal’s upcoming hearing on May 17 at 9 am at the federal courthouse at 6^th and Market Streets several times so he could remember it. “I’ll be there!” he promised.

At Market and 11^th Streets in Center City, one man out shopping with his children took a paper and commented that he wished he could still hear Abu-Jamal’s radio commentaries. He was thrilled to learn that they are available on line through www.prisonradio.org.

With less than two weeks before Abu-Jamal’s critical hearing on four appeals of his 1982 conviction, getting out information on his case and letting people know about the May 17 hearings is the number-one priority. The Fraternal Order of Police has been on a neo-fascistic rampage trying to silence support for Abu-Jamal as the court date draws closer. Just like Bush administration cover-ups around the war in Iraq, the FOP is trying to stop the truth about Abu-Jamal from getting out.

When the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reviews the case it will decide whether Mumia Abu-Jamal gets a new trial, life in prison without parole, or execution. The whole world is watching how the Third Circuit will rule.

We must let them know where we stand: Only Mumia’s release or a new trial is acceptable! Go to www.millions4mumia.org to download the “Don’t Let Them Kill an Innocent Man” newspaper, the May 17 leaflet and poster. To buy New York bus tickets to go to Philadelphia on May 17, call 212-633-6646.