Nearing 70 years old, Mumia Abu Jamal has spent more than half his life in prison for the shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. His death sentence was ultimately overturned by a federal court, and he is serving life without the possibility of parole. In a three-part series beginning today, Todd Steven Burroughs looks at Mumia Abu Jamal’s case and considers its meaning for journalists who center communities in their work. Mumia was a community journalist in Philadelphia, and the former president of a chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. As Burroughs explores in this series, the controversy regarding Mumia Abu-Jamal’s flawed trial and sentence forced Black journalists to confront directly the lines between “objectivity” and advocacy. “NABJ was filled with professionals who, unlike their white colleagues, had to prove to their white bosses that they could be trusted to be objective,” Burroughs recalled. “Many a hiring anecdote within NABJ lore dealt with being asked by an editor, ‘Are you a Black person first or a journalist first?’ Mumia Abu-Jamal's controversy, dropped at the group's ideological doorstep, made that question both public and applied to the group, perhaps for the first time.”

Part 1: That time a “post-Civil Rights organization” faced a public relations crisis

The professional maxim in the journalism profession, at least in mainstream quarters, is that a journalist should never be part of the story he or she is covering. It’s a challenge to the mainstream journalist, who always has to draw the fine line between observing and participating. For two decades from its founding in 1975 to 1995, the National Association of Black Journalists had established clear boundaries. Under public and sustained criticism from many loud radicals, it had to repeatedly explain to members of Black communities that its mission was different than that of the more advocacy-oriented Black press, while simultaneously explaining to white newsroom managers that their coverage needed the input of Black perspectives.

But in 1995, the plight of a former member—a former president of a NABJ chapter that pre-dated the organization’s founding—would put the white-hot spotlight on this Black organization. How “objective” did an organization of Black journalists—a group founded after the Civil Rights Movement, arguably the last group of Black professionals to form a national organization—have to be?

Mumia Abu-Jamal was the journalist in question. The former president of the Association of Black Journalists of Philadelphia (now called the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists), on Death Row for the 1981 murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, was under an active death warrant in the summer of 1995. Philadelphia Gov. Thomas Ridge wanted the lethal injection to take place on August 17—the birthday of Marcus Garvey and, coincidentally, exactly when the NABJ would be holding its 20th annual convention in Philadelphia. Would Black journalists mingle, party and look for better jobs in bigger media markets while one of their own—a Major Armstrong award winner for National Public Radio affiliate WUHY-FM (now WHYY-FM)—was strapped to a chair in a Pennsylvania prison and poisoned until he died?

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case was forcing the NABJ to decide what its role was in the Black community as a post-civil rights group. At work, the individual Black journalists were just observers—just chroniclers, with a smattering of editors and columnists. As columnists, the individual journalists could take stands. But the tension now resolved around whether an organization—funded by corporate America—could take the same type of stance as an individual columnist about an individual columnist who was a convicted murderer. 

The first reaction was not exactly encouraging. On June 27, 1995, the NABJ stepped right into the activist fire, and, by doing son, it gave anti-death penalty activists around the world a new, public target to attack. It issued this press release:

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, President of the National Association of Black Journalists, issued the following statement today:

“The Board of Directors of the National Association of Black Journalists, at its recent board meeting in Philadelphia, decided to abstain from taking an official position in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former journalist on death row in Pennsylvania.

“As an organization of journalists, the board felt that the complicated issues involved are ones around which individual members in their capacities as journalists may make personal and professional judgments. The organization, however, does not see this unfortunate circumstance as an issue of journalism upon which it feels compelled to take a stand at this time.” 

Three days later, Gilliam released the verbatim statement, adding a sentence about a forum “to explore all sides of this controversial issue” at the convention on the case.

The NABJ’s ignorance (Abu-Jamal was writing columns that were printing in newspapers and recording them for broadcast, which made him, at best, a “full-time freelancer” or journalistic contributor—he clearly wasn’t a “former” journalist) was trumped by its tone-deafness to the Black radical mood of that year. 

This statement from a Black organization sizzled in the public arena in the summer of 1995, a racially charged time in America. The National NAACP was still in recovery mode from the ouster a year earlier of its executive director, the Reverend Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, a progressive activist who got caught in an office sex/payoff scandal. Chavis had moved on to the Nation of Islam, where he was heading up the scheduled Million Man March that the Nation’s leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had been planning for a year. The march, slated to take place in October of 1995, was a major point of discussion in Washington, D.C., the march site. For much of 1994 and 1995, during and after the Chavis scandal, some prominent political leaders and opinion-makers demanded that Black leaders disavow Farrakhan for his controversial, and often anti-Semitic, public comments about Jews and their “control” over Black communities. (There was much public criticism directed at Chavis because he had invited Farrakhan in 1994 to be part of a National African-American Leadership Summit, held at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore; it remained throughout until the day of the march.)

In addition to the Million Man March, this was also the summer of the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted on October 6, days before the march. The O.J. trial, broadcast on cable television and network and network affiliate television from gavel to gavel in 1995, brought up issues of racist police officers that still matter in 2024. And it was the police—and the Black Panther Party—that were forefront in the minds of Black and Left activists around the world, because they saw linkages between Abu-Jamal’s surveillance as a teenage Black Panther from 1969 to 1971 and how his trial was conducted. To many on the Left, Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and award-winning journalist who the state (of Pennsylvania) had turned into a political prisoner.

So, Abu-Jamal’s death warrant, and the initial NABJ statement, came during a particularly charged atmosphere, politically and culturally. Criticism came fast and furious from both the white and Black Left and in their (still-analog) media forums of radio and print periodicals. In a typical barb against the NABJ’s position, James Ledbetter of The Village Voice wrote, “Say what you will about the National Association of Black Journalists, but do not accuse the organization of excessive loyalty.”

The damage control NABJ engaged in was instructive. On July 18th, the group’s president, Dorothy Gilliam, and Reginald Stuart, president of the Society of Professional Journalists and, like Gilliam, a pioneering Black journalist who was hired as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, appeared on The Julianne Malveaux Show, originated by and broadcast to the left-wing Pacifica Network, to fully explain their position. After the opening segment, in which substitute host Julie Drizin asked Equal Justice USA’s Noelle Hanrahan for an update on Abu-Jamal’s upcoming hearing in front of his original trial judge (“He’s been an excellent jailhouse lawyer and he’s been very involved in his case.”), the talk moved to NABJ. 

Gilliam explained to the Pacifica audience that her first statement of June 27, revised June 30, was not the NABJ board’s official position. When that first statement was made, she said, the group did not know enough about the case—especially Abu-Jamal’s fight to have the First Amendment apply to him in prison. In the group’s second statement—released on July 12, six days before the broadcast—Gilliam said the organization believed Abu-Jamal had a right to write and be read and heard. “There may be disagreement about Abu-Jamal’s opinions, his guilt or innocence, but it is our responsibility as civil Americans to unite and defend his constitutional right to speak his mind and be interviewed.”

The board, she explained, felt that as an organization predominantly comprised of news reporters and editors—professionals who had to be objective, since the group only had 100 columnists out of at least 2,000 members—calling for a new trial for Abu-Jama would compromise their objectivity, effectively barring them from doing the news reporting on the case the group thought was necessary.  “We cannot do that [needed coverage] if we have publicly taken a position on the merits of the case.” The board’s second, approved statement from July 12, she pointed out, embraced Abu-Jamal’s First Amendment right—a right sacred to all journalists—and now that of which they were now aware. She also mentioned that as an individual Black journalist who was a Metro opinion columnist for The Post, she wrote a column calling for a new trial for Abu-Jamal—the goal of all of the activists attacking her individually and NABJ collectively. “Individual members have their point of view.”

The NABJ did not take issue with Abu-Jamal’s coming execution, explained the group’s president, for the same reason it didn’t take a political position on any development in apartheid or post-apartheid South Africa: that journalists silence themselves when they take positions. However, it was not pointed out on the show that, as Editor & Publisher magazine, the trade organization for American journalists, pointed out, NABJ “voted against holding any national conferences in California because of the state’s anti-affirmative action policies.” So NABJ’s collective positions, like many professional ethical decisions, are done situationally, on a case-by-case basis.

Stuart agreed with Gilliam on all of her points. He reminded the audience that the SPJ took a position on the case of Danny Martin, a prisoner who wrote articles for The San Francisco Chronicle. He explained that his group would join with NABJ and fight in court for Abu-Jamal’s First Amendment rights. (Three days after the broadcast, the amicus brief was filed in court.)

Salim Muwakkil, a Black journalist who worked for the alternative-weekly In These Times, was sympathetic to NABJ when he joined the on-air discussion: “It’s one of those very difficult situations for Black journalists in this country … Black journalism was born in the spirit of protest,” but “as Blacks who work as journalists have moved more inclusively in the mainstream, the contradictions as whether to fight the struggle for Black freedom or dignity or to adopt the kind of objective methodology of modern journalism has always been a strain. I think this particular issue exemplifies this strain.” Gilliam and Stuart had to counter that it was an issue of professional and public credibility, not personal belief. The duo said their goal as journalists was to get the facts out.

Muwakkil definitely related to the tension: He remembered that when NABJ was formed because of the “unique realities” of the African-American experience, many journalists openly wondered if having an organization based around race would compromise their objectivity individually. The Abu-Jamal case, he said, showed the “pressure and tension” within Black journalists about whether to enlist in struggle. Stuart disagreed, saying it was not an issue of whether, but how. The In These Times journalist thought the situation showed how mainstream Black journalists operate on “a different dynamic.”

Gilliam countered with the coming amicus brief, explaining the journalism groups were taking action because Abu-Jamal should not have his mail censored and not be penalized for writing his columns and publishing his article collection, Live From Death Row: He “is in jail being silenced … We’re going to court and we are going to fight for his right to be heard. That is a part of the struggle. That is a very political issue and very political stand. We are taking that stand as journalists. That’s what we can do.” That move, she argued, is an “essential part of the struggle … We do what journalists do, you do what activists do. When we put out the information in its fullest sense, we give the activists something to work on.”

But Drizin asked a key question: Was NABJ as an organization, helping Abu-Jamal, a columnist, get published in the newspapers and radio stations in which they worked? “We have not done that,” said Gilliam. Muwakkil mentioned that the News Service of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the trade group representing 200 Black newspapers in 38 states, was currently syndicating his column.

After a news break, Drizin broadcast a tidbit that was an interesting epilogue to the discussion. She pointed out that the National Black Police Association publicly allied itself with those calling for a new trial—a position NABJ “is unwilling to take.”