EMAJ begins with the simple fact that Mumia is a person, with family and friends, a human being now suffering grievous injustice.The specifics of his particular case have called forward our advocacy on his behalf, just as many other citizens have fought for the release of over 119 other individuals who, just since 1973, have been released from death row after having been wrongfully convicted and condemned. Mumia’s personal struggle for his own life as a human being, and for his right to have all evidence on his behalf considered, is enough to warrant our efforts on his behalf.
EMAJ’s special interest in Mumia Abu-Jamal also arises from the fact that his personal struggle, even before his 1982 condemnation to death row, has been a struggle for and with whole peoples: his own African-American community in the USA, but ultimately the multitude of those who are voiceless, confined in many different ways by structures of oppression and exclusion. Consequently, the scores of columns and the several books he has penned relate citizen struggles in criminal justice systems to racism, to U.S. nationalism, to economic injustice, to corporate exploitation of working women and men – in U.S. and global settings.
EMAJ’s special task, then, is in continuity with an educational aim of Abu-Jamal’s own work, i.e. to educate about the connections between the failure of prisons and criminal justice systems in the U.S., on the one hand, and the life of agony and repression suffered by so many throughout the nation and world, on the other. Mumia has always immersed himself in this broad and diverse global struggle; never posing as “poster boy” or individual hero figure for any one issue, be it abolishing the death penalty, reforming prisons, or for any other one selected issue or limited group of issues. What shapes the unique vocation of EMAJ is the need to reflect on the connections between Mumia’s personal struggle and the larger set of struggles that concern a whole nation, and a global humanity.
This is why each month, the EMAJ website will feature on its home page not just the image of Mumia Abu-Jamal, but also other “Images of Incarceration” in its photo inset box. Through art or photography, these images of incarceration will be evocative of the breadth of our struggles with unjust confinement in its myriad forms, one version of which has been borne so egregiously by Mumia in an imprisonment that now has lasted for nearly a quarter of a century. These are the connections and the images upon which EMAJ seeks to reflect for informed action.
