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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 12, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Students pack showing of Mumia Abu-Jamal video

By Sue Harris in New York

A group of students and others filled 270-seat Theater 2 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on Nov. 12 to see "The Prison Industrial Complex," an interview with political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The video was the last one permitted by the Pennsylvania State Prison Authority. This year they ruled that no prisoner in Pennsylvania may be taped for television or radio.

They also ruled that any news reporter who wishes to interview any prisoner in Pennsylvania must be admitted to that prisoners' visiting list as a relative, thus reducing their permitted contacts.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that the new ruling, affecting all Pennsylvania prisoners, was an attack leveled specifically at Abu-Jamal, whose voice and image are the very thing the prison authorities and the state want to destroy.

Speakers focus on defense

Safiya Bukhari, chair of the New York Free Mumia Coalition, Larry Holmes, one of the interviewers in the video, a Workers World organizer and coordinator of Workfairness, and Pam Africa, member of MOVE and leader of Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal, introduced the video.

They focused on mobilizing student activity in defense of Abu-Jamal and on clarifying the brutal realities of the prison system-which has become the number-one growth industry in the United States outside of the Pentagon.

They also made connections between the rising tide of repression and the increase in the number of hungry and homeless people in the United States. As Safiya Bukhari said, "When you have in New York over a quarter million people homeless, without jobs, eating out of garbage cans, in the richest society in the world, there's a problem."

Each of the speakers urged everyone to come out in support of Abu-Jamal to demonstrate at Wall Street on Dec. 9. The demonstration is not only to free Mumia Abu-Jamal but will demand to end the racist death penalty, stop police brutality, stop the war against the poor, free all political prisoners and dismantle the prison industrial complex.

It will take place at noon at Wall and Broad Streets, two blocks east of Broadway, and can be reached by the No. 4, 5 or 6 subway trains to Wall Street.

In the video, Abu-Jamal says: "They tried to cage me in all the ways they could. They tried to kill me in the street. And every attempt they made has been a bitter failure for them."

After the video was over, the students stayed to discuss what they saw with their teachers and the rest of the audience. They seemed very moved by what they saw and curious to find out more about Mumia Abu Jamal and about what he is fighting for, illustrating why it's hard to cage Abu-Jamal.

The People's Video Network plans to show this video again at the International Action Center and at colleges and universities and cable stations around the country. Those who are interested in obtaining a copy should call PVN at (212) 633-6646 or e-mail to pvnnyc@peoplesvideo.org.

[The writer works with the People's Video Network.]

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