Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal was born Wesley Cook in Philadelphia in 1954. In 1968 a Kenyan teacher leading a class on African cultures encouraged students to take African or Arabic names, and gave him the name Mumia. That same year, at fourteen, he was beaten by white racists and a policeman after trying to disrupt a rally for George Wallace, an episode he has described as kicking him into the Black Panther Party. He helped form the party's Philadelphia branch and served as its Lieutenant of Information, writing its news and communications. He dropped out of high school, lived at the branch headquarters, and spent time with Panthers in New York and Oakland before leaving the party in October 1970 at sixteen. Surveillance under the FBI's COINTELPRO program, carried out with Philadelphia police cooperation, shadowed those years. After leaving, he went back to his old high school, was suspended for distributing literature calling for black revolutionary student power, and led an unsuccessful campaign to rename the school for Malcolm X. He later earned a GED and studied briefly at Goddard College.

He then became a radio reporter in Philadelphia and served as president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists from 1978 to 1980. He supported the MOVE organization and covered the 1978 confrontation in which a police officer was killed and the MOVE Nine were convicted. He worked at the public radio affiliate WHYY from 1979 to 1981, where management asked him to resign, saying his approach was not sufficiently objective. When he is asked about that today, he answers that if you are not bringing your whole self to the job, you are not doing the job. He argues that the objectivity ideal arrived when journalism was professionalized, and he points back to an older press printed by unions, churches and other groups. He calls himself a griot, probably a progressive one, who tells the stories of a tribe of rebels, the poor and the oppressed.

In 1982 he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death. He has maintained his innocence since then. Supporters, including Amnesty International, have called his trial constitutionally deficient. Their concerns include the use of his political beliefs against him, discriminatory jury selection, shifting witness testimony, and prosecutorial and police misconduct. The Faulkner family, politicians and law enforcement groups hold that the trial was fair and his guilt is beyond question. A federal court overturned his death sentence in 2001. In 2011 the prosecution agreed to life imprisonment without parole, and he entered the general prison population early the next year. His papers, from letters and legal materials to artwork and handwritten writings, are now held at Brown University.

From prison he kept working as a journalist and writer. His first book, Live from Death Row, appeared in 1995, and he is now described as the author of fifteen books. In 1994 National Public Radio dropped his commentaries after pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police. In 1995 prison officials barred press interviews, a ban later lifted after a federal lawsuit. The Prison Radio Project's Noelle Hanrahan kept recording him, in handcuffs behind Plexiglas, with typed scripts taped to the glass. His radio essays start from concrete cases, such as the decisions not to seek death against wealthy defendants, and read them as evidence of whom the system serves. In 2025 he described the reach of incarceration this way: there is no space in the American landscape where the shadow of the prison doesn't fall. He was blind for nine months before cataract surgery, and he has since turned back to his PhD dissertation. He treats his own medical neglect as an example of how all prisoners are treated.