19th Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 836, 12 November 2004.

The Partisan Defense Committee is launching its 19th annual Holiday Appeal for class-war prisoners, those among the inhabitants of America's prison nation who were singled out for standing up to racist capitalist oppression and exploitation. We provide monthly stipends to 16 class-war prisoners—trade-union militants, fighters for black freedom and opponents of imperialism and capitalist militarism—as well as holiday gifts for them and their families. These gifts and messages of solidarity are a necessary reminder to these brothers and sisters that they are not forgotten.

The PDC initiated this stipend program in 1986, reviving a tradition of the early International Labor Defense (ILD) under its secretary from 1925-28, James P. Cannon. Carrying forward the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) principle, "an injury to one is an injury to all," a resolution from the ILD's first conference in 1925 declared:

"The labor movement must be awakened from its slumber and must be roused to the menacing significance of the attempt of the capitalists to break the morale of the working-class by imprisoning its best fighters. The workers must not be allowed to forget those who lie in prison for them, but must be stirred into action in their defense."

This year's Holiday Appeal takes place as Bush, Cheney & Co. salivate over their prospects for four more years of grinding attacks on labor, immigrants, blacks, gays, women and what remains of the Bill of Rights. With the help of the Democrats, who overwhelmingly voted for the Patriot Act, this administration has overseen a qualitative diminution of democratic rights. Court rulings that stand in their way are used as food for the shredder. Laws they don't like are just ignored. And as seen in the police mobilizations and mass arrests at the Republican National Convention this past summer, the bipartisan "anti-terrorism" laws are directed at anybody whose political views are deemed objectionable by the government. Only three American cities have populations exceeding that of the prisons. New restrictions on unions join dismantling Social Security on the administration's anticipated hit list. Union activists, opponents of the imperialist occupation of Iraq, fighters for black rights, and even the lawyers who try to defend them in court, are faced with the threat of prison.

Standing with those fighters for the oppressed already in the grasp of the capitalist prisons is a necessary step in organizing a class-struggle fight against this all-sided reaction. No case is more urgent than that of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. A former Black Panther Party spokesman, MOVE supporter and award-winning journalist, Jamal was framed up on charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981 and sentenced to death. Despite the sworn confession of the real killer, recantation of prosecution witnesses, irrefutable proof of the trial judge's racist bias, and the prosecution's racist jury-rigging, coercion of witnesses, doctoring and concealing evidence, Jamal remains in the shadow of Pennsylvania's death chamber.

This could well be the last Holiday Appeal before the long-awaited decision in the federal appeals court, the last legal step before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ruling on Jamal's federal habeas corpus challenge to his conviction and death sentence, in December 2001 federal district court judge William Yohn overturned Jamal's death sentence. At the same time, Yohn affirmed Jamal's conviction, refusing to even consider the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed officer Faulkner. The prosecution appealed, seeking restoration of Jamal's death sentence. Mumia also appealed, seeking to overturn the conviction. Those appeals were on hold until a final determination of Jamal's appeals in the Pennsylvania state courts, a determination which took place earlier this year. In June, the federal appeals court lifted its stay on Jamal's proceedings. A decision could come at any time.

Jamal has been in the racist rulers' sights from the time he was a 15-year-old Panther spokesman. A prominent and widely respected journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless," Jamal became a supporter of the MOVE organization while covering the weeks-long siege and ultimate brutal cop assault on their Powelton Village home in 1978. Blaming the MOVE victims for the death of a cop in the police crossfire, Philadelphia mayor Rizzo promised to make the "new breed" of journalist pay, and three years later Jamal was gunned down on the street and hauled off to prison. With Jamal silenced behind bars, Philadelphia's besieged black population was without a prominent voice of protest when black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode ordered the police bombing of the MOVE home in 1985, killing eleven black people, five of them children.

Jamal's case cuts to the core of black oppression in the U.S. A black man set up to be legally lynched through state-sanctioned murder, Mumia's case throws a spotlight on the barbaric, racist death penalty, a form of institutionalized state terror directly descended in the U.S. from the system of black chattel slavery.

As they listened to Cheney's rantings at last year's convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference, delegates wore "Fry Mumia" T-shirts. This racist and class hatred is not unique to the Republicans. The District Attorney who put Jamal on death row is current Pennsylvania Democratic governor Ed Rendell, and it has been Philadelphia's Democratic Party administration that has fought for his execution for over two decades. The racist rulers of this country—Democrat as well as Republican—want Jamal's execution as a message to anyone who fights against the ravages of this capitalist system—"Shut up or die!"

The threatened execution of Jamal stands in a long tradition of seeking to silence by state murder fighters for the oppressed: the Haymarket Martyrs—anarchists, union organizers and leaders of the fight for the eight-hour workday executed in 1887; Joe Hill—immigrant, migrant worker, IWW militant put up against a wall by a Utah firing squad in 1915. Following the electrocutions of anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti by the capitalist rulers of Massachusetts in 1927, Cannon wrote:

"The rope which strangled the Haymarket martyrs, the chair which snuffed out the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti, the prison walls which confined them all—these instruments of torture and death are weapons in the class war, employed against prisoners taken on the field of battle."

We seek to mobilize the working people, minorities and all opponents of racist capitalist repression in protest actions centered on the social power of the labor movement. Our fight to free Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty is part of our perspective of winning workers to the understanding that the capitalist state, with its cops and courts, is not some "neutral" agency which serves society as a whole, but rather exists to defend the class rule and profits of the capitalists against those they exploit.

We urge all WV readers to join the fight: Free Jamal and the class-war prisoners now! Abolish the racist death penalty! Build the Holiday Appeal for class-war prisoners!