Sujatha sent the opening chapters of her family history to the American journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Here is his reply:
(click on image above to read)
Mumia has spent 27 years on death row after being framed up on murder charges in Philadelphia. His arrest, prosecution, sentencing, and continued imprisonment under threat of execution are all politically motivated payback for his exposure of the racist brutality of the Philadelphia police as a radio journalist. In 1999 another man confessed in a sworn, videotaped affidavit to the murder for which Mumia was convicted, adding one more piece to the mountain of evidence demonstrating his innocence. A one-time Black Panther, a militant fighter for black rights in the U.S., and a radical critic of American imperialism, Mumia continues to speak out from his death-row cell through his journalism and other writings.
In August 1995, international mass mobilizations of supporters—notably including many trade unions—succeeded in staying Mumia's execution, which was within days of being carried out. But he was never removed from death row. He has now been entombed for more than half his life for a crime the cops know he did not commit, and he remains in grave danger. The U.S. Supreme Court, which in April 2009 threw out an attempt to get Mumia's conviction overturned on the basis of blatant constitutional violations in his original trial, could rule at any time on a petition to reinstate Mumia's death sentence.
Learn more about his case here or contact the Partisan Defense Committee, the class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense arm of the Spartacist League (U.S. section of the International Communist League). Since first taking up Mumia's case in 1987, the PDC has fought to expose his frame-up as broadly as possible within the international labor movement and among all opponents of racist state repression.
