Topic: Mumia Abu Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook on April 24, 1954) is an African-American who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. Before his arrest he was a Black Panther Party activist, cab driver, and journalist. Since his conviction, his case has received international attention and he has become a controversial cultural icon. Supporters and opponents disagree on the appropriateness of the death penalty, whether he is guilty, or whether he received a fair trial. During his imprisonment he has published several books and other commentaries, notably Live from Death Row. On April 6, 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that his original conviction of 28 years ago would stand. A separate appeal by prosecutors to reinstate the death penalty has not yet been heard. In 2008, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the murder conviction, but ordered a new capital sentencing hearing over concerns that the jury was improperly instructed. Since 1995, Abu-Jamal has been incarcerated at Pennsylvania's SCI Greene near Waynesburg, where most of the state’s capital case inmates are held.

Abu-Jamal's father died when Abu-Jamal was nine years old. Abu-Jamal was given the name Mumia in 1968 by his high school teacher, a Kenyan instructing a class on African cultures in which students took African classroom names. He claims that 'Mumia' means "Prince" and was the name of anti-colonial African nationalists conducting warfare against the British in Kenya at the time of Kenya's independence movement. He adopted the surname Abu-Jamal ("father of Jamal" in Arabic) after the birth of his son Jamal on July 18, 1971. His first marriage at age 19, to Jamal's mother, Biba, was short-lived. Their daughter, Lateefa, was born shortly after the wedding. Mazi, Abu-Jamal's son by his second wife, Marilyn (known as "Peachie"), was born in early 1978. Abu-Jamal separated from Marilyn and commenced living with his third and current wife, Wadiya, shortly before the events that led to his incarceration.

In his own writings, Abu-Jamal describes his adolescent experience of being "kicked ... into the Black Panther Party" after suffering a beating from white racists and a policeman for his efforts to disrupt a George Wallace for President rally in 1968. The following year, at the age of 15, he helped form the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party, taking appointment, in his own words, as the chapter's "Lieutenant of Information", exercising a responsibility for authoring propaganda and news communications. In one of the interviews he gave at the time he quoted Mao Zedong, saying that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". That same year, he dropped out of Benjamin Franklin High School and took up residence in the branch's headquarters. He spent late 1969 in New York City and early 1970 in Oakland, living and working with BPP colleagues in those cities. He was a party member from May 1969 until October 1970 and was subject to Federal Bureau of Investigation COINTELPRO surveillance from then until about 1974.