Journalism and advocacy in the 1995 Mumia Abu-Jamal and National Association of Black Journalists controversy: Part 2
A protester with a banner at a rally to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. (Credit: Joe Piette/Flickr)
In part one of this three-part series, Todd Steven Burroughs explored the National Association of Black Journalists’ (NABJ) public relations crisis as the "Free Mumia" movement clashed with the objectivity of NABJ. In part two, Burroughs continues an examination of how the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, originally sentenced to death for the shooting of a Philadelphia police officer, forced the National Association of Black Journalists to rethink its identity. If it couldn't stick up for a journalist sentenced to death, what good was it? And what does this failure say generally about the work of Black journalists?
Part 2: Mumia Abu-Jamal and what it means to be a journalist
NABJ was an easy target for the “Free Mumia” movement because the traditional professional journalism values of objectivity and detachment, according to the group’s president, prevented it from taking a political position. But this only raised some important questions: Don’t people form organizations in order to be able to take a collective stand? Doesn’t the organization provide a cover, a collective shelter of the results of private votes, in order to do what you could not get away with as an individual? How come, at least for NABJ, the situation seemed to work in the reverse?
The complexity of their employment as African American journalists — that is, expectations they would remain neutral even in the face of a life-or-death situation of a fellow journalist — was lost on many members of the Left, who were wearing out fax machines and photocopiers in the Washington, D.C. and New York City metropolitan areas in an attempt to stop the execution of Abu-Jamal. For activists, the priority that summer was saving a former Black Panther’s life, not navigating the paradox of the middle-class Black mainstream journalist. So, Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the President of NABJ who used to answer her own phone at The Post, got so much harassment from activists that the newspaper assigned someone to screen her calls. In a time of great activism, small groups of activists in Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia successfully used NABJ to assist in their international campaign.
How NABJ responded to the “Free Mumia” movement’s attack shows how, at this point in its racially-negotiated history, NABJ was set up for this kind of failure. Using Letrell Deshan Crittenden’s NABJ as a “post-civil rights organization” argument — that NABJ narrowed its focus during its near 50-year existence from racial issues in the public sphere to just employment and the white mainstream newsroom — as this journey’s theoretical framework will help to explain what happened.
Pamela Newkirk, a former New York newspaper reporter who became a scholar, outlined the white-mainstream-journalism-ethics-versus-community dilemma from the perspective of the Black mainstream journalist:
[T]he ostracizing of Black journalists by prominent members of their own race is an unavoidable consequence of working in the mainstream news media, which African Americans have historically viewed as tools of oppression and degradation. The latitude given Blacks who write in the Black press — which has resulted in a large body of critical writing on Blacks by such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois — is not automatically accorded even to the most crusading Blacks in the mainstream media. Their motives and loyalties are immediately suspect given their ties to an institution that has historically denigrated them.
According to Crittenden, this ostracization is more the result of a conscious choice of choosing the side that offers individual advancement. Crittenden argues that NABJ has “succumbed to incorporation” and has become “useless to the Black public sphere.” The answer to the question of why NABJ as a group could not take a collective stand like other groups might be simple if the criticism becomes harsh and Gilliam’s and Stuart’s arguments are incorporated: that the entire operation of NABJ is separate because the other (civil rights) groups are, by design, more directly connected to the needs, concerns and political wants of Black communities.
The 1995 Mumia Abu-Jamal-NABJ controversy is an excellent example of what Crittenden is explaining. As a national group, the NABJ was largely ignorant of the case and the nature of its multi-pronged response — first a tone-deaf public statement, followed by gathering information and assessment before joining with mainstream groups in a legal action, then significant public relations spin, and then a public forum before, finally, setting up an internal rapid-response procedure to prevent another controversy from publicly damaging and overshadowing the organization — showed it was primarily concerned only with its reputation, not getting Abu-Jamal out of the lethal-injection chair or other local and national social justice issues that continue to bubble up from loud, rowdy activists on the national and/or international front.
NABJ was founded at the Sheridan Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. by 44 women and men on Dec. 12, 1975. Chuck Stone, a Black press veteran and a columnist at The Philadelphia Daily News at the time, was its first elected president. It is considered to be the last national Black professional organization to be created, in 1975. This could be because of the independent nature of journalists, who eschew joining organizations and associations because it would compromise their objectivity. The purpose of the new group was to give Black journalists beset by institutional racism at work a friendly space to network with and honor each other, to lobby the nation’s mainstream media for more hiring of Blacks at all levels of the journalism industry and to be a watchdog of white mainstream media coverage of African Americans.
From the beginning, there was tension because the majority of these journalists represented white mainstream organizations that had barred Blacks for decades and had been guilty of racist coverage of Black communities (if they covered them at all). The journalists were just beginning to earn the trust of those wary communities, who had heretofore depended on the Black press (including Black radio, which grew in popularity and power from the 1960s through the time of NABJ’s founding), the Black church and established civil rights groups. Their wariness was shared by some in the Black press, who openly grumbled when this new organization would not accept, as full-time members, professors and others who wrote part-time for the Black press. There was also the public question — goaded by a Black press who saw these journalists as rivals to their historic power of Black agenda-setting — of who did these journalists serve, the predominately white newsrooms or Black communities? So as NABJ grew and developed — particularly with increased funding from growing white mainstream media organizations — it had to establish itself as a Black organization on its own, desegregated, non-activist terms.
Those tensions would occasionally flare in the pages of the Black newspapers. Case in point would be in 1989, when NABJ had a lavish convention in New York City, complete with a private subway car that took them from the convention hotel, the New York Hilton, to the theater where the group’s Salute to Excellence awards ceremony, honoring the best in Black journalism done by members that year, would take place. By this time, the organization was led by la crème de la crème of Black journalists: network television reporters and syndicated newspaper columnists and national and White House correspondents who traveled the nation and even to apartheid South Africa, members with high visibility and prestige at powerful white mainstream media institutions that were mass media agenda setters in New York City and in Washington, D.C, among other centers of power in mass-society America. This was the era where being the NABJ president not only meant something to a candidate, but to his or her employer as well: Many candidates for NABJ president got significant campaign budgets from their bosses, who were excited to promote post-election that their employee was a prestigious national leader of a national journalism organization.
To the NABJ members, all of it was visible, tangible rewards of their two decades of hard-earned advancement to insider (and economically, the Black equivalent of still-new middle class) status in an institutionally racist industry that had significant, and disproportionate, power as to how Black people were perceived in America and around the world. To outsiders, it looked like a new, post-segregated Black Bourgeoise showing off their proximity to white power and influence. Unfortunately, in New York, there was more evidence of the latter: NABJ leadership had to disinvite the Central Intelligence Agency from its huge and popular Career Fair after members, Black activists and the Black press publicly complained, with one writer comparing the group to a Booker T. Washington recollection of how slaves would steal chickens from their masters to eat.
So, the NABJ leadership and membership, comprising a growing organization of people who were employed at corporations, were not ready for the grassroots explosion that happened over a Black Panther “political prisoner,” even one who had been a member and president of a local chapter. They had a brief discussion about it in their March 1995 meeting but did not take any direct action. In the transcript, it was discussed that the local Philadelphia chapter had been long criticized for not taking a stand on its former president. Gilliam said, “Well, I think we’re alerted and we will fashion an appropriate response at that time.” That response was the June 27 statement that caused all the uproar — one that the NABJ board criticized Gilliam for because it said she released it without its consent and that it hadn’t voted on how to handle the Abu-Jamal issue.
The life of the former president of the Association of Black Journalists of Philadelphia is defined by his community advocacy and journalism. His application of them is independent of many of the values collectively supported by NABJ. While a significant part of the Baby Boom generation, including Black journalists, integrated into corporate America on its terms, fighting to be insiders and accepted by white elites, Abu-Jamal, a counter-culture organic intellect representing Black communities’ radical wings, kept a free-wheeling, decolonized perspective throughout his life and career. He would start off as a journalist in Black media and spend a short time trying, and ultimately failing, to sustain his prominent crossover into the white mainstream.
Born in Philadelphia in 1954, Wes Cook (Abu-Jamal) became a founding member of the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party in the spring of 1969, part of the extraordinary growth of the Black Panther Party nationwide after the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By July 19, “Mumia X,” as he now called himself in the Party, had begun writing articles for The Black Panther. His Black Panther bylines varied with his nicknames: Wes Mumia, West Mumia, Mumia X and Bro. Mumia. (The name Mumia was given to him by one of his high school teachers, a Kenyan named Timone Ombina, who gave everyone in his classes an African name.) Sometimes he signed his birth name and used one title or the other, sometimes it was just “Communications Secretary, Philadelphia Branch.” The only other Philadelphia Panthers who signed their names to articles were Lynn Smith and Rolando Montae, but their names only appear occasionally. All Panther branches and chapters were encouraged to submit articles to the paper’s office at National Headquarters. The paper’s editors would pick the best of the lot, giving its organ national scope. Travelling across the nation as a Party member, he was taught journalism in the BPP National Headquarters in Oakland by editor Judi Douglas, as he wrote and edited dispatches.
After leaving the Party in 1971, and now named Mumia Abu-Jamal (he named himself after his first-born, Jamal), he got his GED and learned radio while attending Goddard College. By 1975, he began his Philadelphia career as news director at WHAT-AM. He would contribute stories to National Black Network as its Philadelphia correspondent. The field reporter, known for his dreadlocks, overalls and bicycle, was a weekend correspondent for WPEN-AM, a white mainstream radio station (he used the pseudonym “William Wellington Cole” there). He would later join WUHY, sharing a 1980 Major Armstrong Award with the news team of 91 Report. His on-air advocacy of the MOVE Organization, a radical, back-to-nature group that had several confrontations with Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police department, led to his being persona non grata to many station managers, and he was fired from WDAS-FM, the city’s powerhouse “soul” radio station, for not fitting a corporate image. He was driving a cab fulltime while “stringing” (freelancing) for WDAS when he confronted police officer Daniel Faulkner in the city’s red-light district. Faulkner was in an altercation with Abu-Jamal’s brother William Cook, and Abu-Jamal’s intervention led to his being shot and Faulkner’s being killed at the scene. At the time of the shooting, he was the outgoing AB of J president.
Abu-Jamal was convicted of murder in 1982 after a trial that was so flawed Amnesty International wrote an entire pamphlet outlining trial violations made during and after conviction. Not satisfied with his defense attorney, he repeatedly requested to represent himself with MOVE Organization founder John Africa as his co-counsel. Common Pleas Judge Albert F. Sabo, a friend of the Fraternal Order of Police, denied him, and their courtroom clashes resulted in the MOVE supporter being removed for approximately half his trial. Abu-Jamal’s Black Panther Party past was used by the prosecutor Joseph J. McGill to ensure his 1982 death penalty verdict and 1983 sentencing.
Because he refused to cut his hair, Abu-Jamal, the radical-turned-mainstream-journalist-turned radical again, was placed on “DC” — “disciplinary status.” He stayed in DC for several years. His writing did not stop, but his written and broadcast voice was now much more contained. He was out of sight, more underground. Some of his leftist supporters began to record radio commentaries, which WBAI-FM in New York aired in the late 1980s. As MOVE would violently climax in firebombing and fade in smoke, death and imprisonment, Abu-Jamal would take his pen and express his outrage of the world under President Ronald Reagan, former police chief and mayor Frank Rizzo and Mayor W. Wilson Goode, the latter allowing the MOVE bombing.
He produced an early 1990s pamphlet, Survival is Still a Crime, a post-bombing chapbook of essays. It contained his 1982 statement to the jury and a select number of subsequent writings — from 1982 to 1989, according to scholar/activist Johanna Fernandez, co-editor of an Abu-Jamal anthology. Fernandez describes Abu-Jamal’s prison writing process as “arduous.” She explains: “For the first 18 years of his isolation on Death Row, Mumia didn’t have access to a typewriter. With careful attention to penmanship, he wrote his commentaries longhand, in tightly compressed block letters, pressing firmly on two blank sheets separated by carbon paper.” This produced a callus on Abu-Jamal’s hand, particularly because he was only allowed the cartilage of a pen. He would keep this callus for several years, writing approximately a thousand 700-word essays, his bachelor’s degree work and two copies of a master’s thesis with that hand and those pen cartilages. In 1993, Mumia Abu-Jamal contributed two essays — “The Man Malcolm” and “Panther Daze Remembered” — to a small anthology on Black radical political prisoners.
By the time of the 1995 NABJ Convention, a new group of Abu-Jamal’s commentaries — recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio — were recorded from prison and shopped around to radio networks. National Public Radio signed a contract with Abu-Jamal and Hanrahan and publicized its planned airing. U.S. Senator Bob Dole went to the Senate floor and denounced the move, resulting in bad publicity and strong political pressure on NPR. As a result, the commentaries did not air. They were included in Live From Death Row, which came out in the spring of 1995. Abu-Jamal’s death warrant for Aug. 17, signed by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, soon followed.
Between the NPR debacle and Ridge’s death warrant signing, Black newspapers and left-oriented press began writing about Abu-Jamal’s. Thanks to the distribution efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee, a Marxist activist group, and Equal Justice USA, an anti-death penalty group, a small smattering of text-starved Black newspapers such as The Challenge carried Abu-Jamal’s Op-Ed columns. These newspapers then championed Abu-Jamal when he got his death warrant.
Ironically, as NABJ was about to say that it had no position on Abu-Jamal’s case because it had nothing to do with journalism, he was officially viewed as a journalist by Pennsylvania and punished for it. On June 9, eight days after Ridge’s death warrant decree, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) put Abu-Jamal in Death Row’s equivalent of solitary confinement because the publication of Live From Death Row and his columns were viewed by the DOC as a violation of prison regulations prohibiting engagement in a profession or business. Abu-Jamal wrote a whole column about how he was guilty of the offense of journalism: “I’ve been called many things, but a ‘convicted journalist?’ That’s a new one.”
POSTSCRIPT
The NABJ convention would ultimately see a resolution, of a sort, of the painstaking internal debate and withering external criticism. At the convention, the NABJ board issued a statement criticizing Gilliam for jumping the gun with the initial, and highly criticized, statements. “There was never any formal vote taken by the board at its June 1995 meeting related to Abu-Jamal. The topic was brought up by the president with no advance notice and no background information. There was no proposal presented related to any efforts to win a new trial or any action item put before the board … There was never a vote taken to do or not do anything.”
The attack from activists, the statement continued, was taken deliberately to raise the issue, and “while this was successful for the organizers, this tactic has greatly harmed our association in some quarters.” The group said it would continue its collective goal as journalists, which is to “uncover as much as the truth as possible.”
Gilliam responded to the board’s public criticism. She reminded her fellow journalists that she called for a new trial in her July 15 column, “but my job as a columnist is to have a position. Many of our members … [are] city editors, reporters, who must be able to prove that they are fair and evenhanded. So, I understand the position of the board. I think it is a sensible, honorable journalistic position.”
At a panel discussion at the convention, the two opposing lawyers — original trial prosecutor McGill and current Abu-Jamal attorney Leonard Weinglass — laid out their arguments, while Washington explained the complexity of the 1982 trial: He described the case as “a journalists’ dream and a journalists’ nightmare.”
The Abu-Jamal supporters in the NABJ crowd were mostly white, except for Carla D. Williams, an African American advocacy journalist who opened the question-and-answer session with the direct question, “Which side are you on?” As the conversation raged, a white conservative observer later reflected that he saw some Black journalists leaving: “Elsewhere in the hotel were hospitality suites, recruiters for major newspapers, all kinds of attractions for the young, well-dressed, upwardly mobile cream of the African-American journalistic establishment. Inside was a debate between white people about what, when you got right down to it, was the sort of local crime story that most reporters have seen enough of.”
So, what was the opinion of the subject of the controversy? In an interview with his friend Linn Washington, Abu-Jamal had a response to the NABJ controversy that put on display the ideological differences between advocacy journalism and the national organization’s narrowed concerns to newsroom and coverage issues only:
Surprisingly, Abu-Jamal is not surprised that the board of [the] National Association of Black Journalists twice voted to not support the international demands for a fair retrial. He feels the board’s non-position is predicated in part on too many of those board members being “Black in name but not in spirit.”
Abu-Jamal … did express some surprise at the board’s repeated reference to him as a “former” journalist. He says his work currently appears in more publications than he can count.
“Calling me a former journalist is like calling me a former human being. I’ve published in more than 90% of the Black and white journalists in America. I’m publishing regularly in a German newspaper that has 100,000 subscribers. I am publishing regularly in the French equivalent of TIME magazine. My columns are published regularly in more than 35 newspapers across America.
“Maybe it is accurate to call me a freelance journalist or a former freelance journalist. How many former journalists have current writing contracts?” Abu-Jamal said, rhetorically showing a contract from a major Black magazine. Abu-Jamal, in an interview with this writer conducted in April 1993, said journalists have been duped into the illusion of “profession above everything else.”
During this most recent interview, Abu-Jamal emphasized that profession is what you do and not what you are. “We must remember that we are an oppressed African people. I read that in a Black newspaper when I was a teenager,” he said. During the most recent interview, as he did in 1993, Abu-Jamal described himself as a “revolutionary” journalist.
“My role as a journalist is to reflect reality from a revolutionary perspective. Too much of what really happens in our society is ignored,” he said. “Those who know rarely write and those who write rarely know …”
Abu-Jamal — a veteran of Black radio and white mainstream radio, a man who turned down being a high-paid local television news reporter because he would not cut his dreadlocks — understood well the problems that, from his point of view, NABJ gave itself.
