SYC Campus Protests Demand: Free Mumia Now!

(Young Spartacus pages)

Los Angeles

On May 17, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case of black death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the object of a vicious racist frame-up. The day before, the Los Angeles Spartacus Youth Club held a speakout at UCLA under the slogans: “Mumia’s Life Is in Danger—Mobilize Now! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Mumia Is an Innocent Man!” The speakout coincided with Black Wednesday, a weekly gathering of black students in response to the drastic decline in black enrollment at University of California campuses that was caused by skyrocketing tuition costs and the gutting of affirmative action. We drew attention from these black students, and other students stopped to hear about Mumia’s case.

Our speakers described Mumia’s history as a lifelong fighter against racial oppression, which is the background for his political frame-up by the cops and courts. We explained that the cops and courts are part of the bourgeois state, an instrument for the violent repression of the working class and the oppressed. The SYC emphasized the need to forge a revolutionary workers party, independent of the Democrats and all capitalist parties, that would fight for black liberation through socialist revolution. Students got a sense of why Mumia was known as “the voice of the voiceless” when we played the recorded greetings Mumia sent to the 2005 rallies that the Partisan Defense Committee and Labor Black Leagues initiated in his defense and in defense of Lynne Stewart and Assata Shakur.

A representative of the African Student Union addressed the speakout, saying, “We stand in solidarity with the Partisan Defense Committee to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. It is critical that we look at political struggles and we understand that there are still political prisoners in this country.” A supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) also spoke. Although the RCYB spokesman said, “We can’t let the system kill this brother,” the RCYB and its affiliate, the Revolutionary Communist Party, have actually helped to demobilize what was once a powerful international movement.

The Partisan Defense Committee’s speaker, Valerie West, explained: “In January 1999 representatives of various reformist groups, including Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Refuse & Resist...along with the International [Concerned] Family and Friends of Mumia and others, joined to reject the call to free Mumia and to oppose the racist death penalty in favor of calling for a new trial.” This was done as an appeal to bourgeois liberals who view Mumia’s case as an aberration in an otherwise “fair and impartial” justice system. It meant rejecting the reason so many were drawn to Mumia’s case—revulsion against the injustices inherent in capitalism: poverty, racial oppression, war.

West further explained that the mountains of evidence of Mumia’s innocence make clear “that Mumia was the victim not of a rogue cop, not a bad prosecutor or a racist judge, but of an entire so-called ‘justice system’ in which the cops, prosecutors and courts act to uphold the class interests of the capitalist rulers.” The SYC seeks to mobilize students behind the social power of labor to fight to free Mumia as part of the fight to get rid of this racist capitalist system.

Chicago

On May 3, the Chicago SYC organized a speakout on the Main Quad of the University of Chicago demanding, “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!” Chants including “Labor has the power to make the courts bow! Mumia is innocent—Free him now!” and “Execution is the legacy of chattel slavery—Abolish the racist death penalty!” drew students and campus workers to find out more about the case. The MC encouraged all those outraged by Mumia’s frame-up to join the campaign: “Mumia is an innocent man, and every hour he sits in jail is an outrage.... We look to the power of the working class to bring its fist down on the capitalist court benches and demand his freedom.”