Prison officials bar Mumia's new book
By Heather Cottin
The Security Threat Group Coordinator of the
Indiana Department of Correction at Pendleton recently
confiscated from a Black prisoner a copy of Mumia Abu-Jamal's
new book, "We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party."
The prisoner, Zolo Agona Azania, is on death row.
Officials objected to "The Empire Strikes Back: COINTELPRO,
page #117." At least, that's what they said.
In that chapter, and on that page, Abu-Jamal, using public
sources from the 1976 U.S. Senate Church Committee Report,
writes about the perils of the government using secrecy to hide
its crimes against the people and the Constitution. COINTELPRO,
or Counter Intelligence Program, was an FBI initiative to track
and destroy revolutionary and progressive movements, including
the Black Panther Party, from the 1950s through the 1970s.
The page begins with a quote from Sup reme Court Justice
Hugo Black: "His tory should teach us ... that in times of high
emo tional excitement, minority parties and groups ... will
always be typed as criminal gangs."
The National Lawyers Guild and South End Press protested the
book banning. NLG Executive Director Heidi Boghosian said: "It
confounds common sense that ... 'We Want Freedom' should be
deemed a security threat. ... The National Lawyers Guild is
curious to see if talking about COINTELPRO will soon be illegal
for the general public."
Abu-Jamal responded: "Apparently, for the State of Indiana,
COINTELPRO, which occurred between 1956 and 1974 ... is a state
secret in 2004! Indianans are forbidden from accessing such
data, for to do so is a 'security threat.'"
Abu-Jamal, the world's best-known death-row prisoner, is on
23-hour-a-day lockup at the SCI Greene facility in Western Penn
syl vania. The African Amer ican journalist and activist was
put in punitive detention after writing his first book, "Live
from Death Row."
"We Want Freedom" analyzes the Black liberation struggle and
describes the heroic efforts of hundreds of activists who built
the Black Panther Party. It shows how the party was part of a
centuries-long tradition of Black resistance.
Zolo Agona Azania, an artist, writer and activist, has been
imprisoned since 1981, like Abu-Jamal. He wrote, "U.S. capital
punishment is fatally flawed, an instrument of class warfare,
organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multi
national, to operate without any con straint from democratic
human rights processes." (See the web site ccadp.org/
zolo-thelawisfor.htm)
Agona's supporters say that he, like Abu-Jamal, was falsely
charged with killing a police officer, and that his trial was a
travesty of justice.
This is not the first time the state has tried to silence
Abu-Jamal. Author Alice Walker has described him as "a rare and
courageous voice speaking from a place we fear to know."
Indiana prison officials know that Mumia Abu-Jamal speaks
directly to the people captive in the U.S. prison-industrial
complex--and to those who fight for freedom.
Reprinted from the May 27, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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