Mumia Abu-Jamal on the Charleston Shooting
Imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal has released a new Prison Radio commentary addressing last week’s massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman killed nine Black parishioners during evening Bible study.
Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and award-winning journalist who has spent decades on Pennsylvania’s death row and later in general population for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, has continued to file regular radio commentaries from prison throughout his incarceration, distributed by the Prison Radio Project and aired on community and independent stations nationwide, FSRN included. He has always maintained his innocence in Faulkner’s killing, and Amnesty International has found that he was denied a fair trial.
Abu-Jamal recorded the Charleston commentary while dealing with serious health complications. He had spent much of the spring hospitalized and in a prison infirmary, treated for diabetic shock and other complications that left him severely weakened and having lost significant weight. Supporters had organized national days of action earlier in the year demanding he receive adequate specialist care, even as he continued, from his infirmary bed in at least one recent instance, to record commentaries on breaking news as it happened.
That pattern has defined much of his recent work: recording reactions to killings and acts of racial violence in close to real time, often drawing connections between individual incidents and what he describes as the broader structural forces underlying them, rather than treating each event in isolation. In an April commentary on the police killing of Walter Scott, for instance, Abu-Jamal pointedly contrasted the media’s rush to label a young Black Ferguson shooting suspect a “thug” with the comparatively measured language used to describe police officer Michael Slager after he was captured on video shooting Scott in the back.
Listeners familiar with his body of work will recognize that same instinct at play in his response to Charleston: a tendency to situate a single act of violence within a longer historical pattern, rather than treat it as an isolated aberration.
The Charleston shooting itself has reignited a national debate over the Confederate battle flag, still flown on statehouse grounds in South Carolina at the time of the attack, and over the broader persistence of racial violence targeting Black communities and institutions, including houses of worship, across the country.