How the “Free Mumia” movement rocked Black journalists in 1995 and how the case still resonates in 2024: Part 3

A demonstration to free Mumia Abu-Jamal in front of the Federal Building Philadelphia, Dec. 11, 2021. (Photo by Darlene Troutman) 

In the third and final article in this series, Todd Steven Burroughs considers Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case from the vantage point of 2024. What lessons can Black journalists - and non-Black journalists - draw from what happened to Mumia? What lessons can community journalists draw? Does your First Amendment right to freedom of expression really only offer protection when you’re espousing popular ideas? The recent experiences of doxing and arrests of reporters writing critically about the Israeli-Hamas war are not reason for optimism.

Part 3: What the “Free Mumia” movement means today in 2024

In 2024 and beyond, it might be hard for those who have grown up with the World Wide Web, and social media in particular, to understand that there was not an instant grapevine in 1995 for Black journalists from across the nation to immediately learn about the First Amendment violations of a convicted murderer in Philadelphia who was an affiliate president 15 years prior to the 20th anniversary NABJ convention.

So much has happened since that 1995 conflict:
·   NABJ: For instance, Richard Prince’s Journal-isms news media/journalist monitoring column, with its 2024 international online readership, home webpage and instant email newsletter alerts, was still a print product in The NABJ Journal in 1995 and 1996, back when information was slow. But when Journal-isms—which, by the way, has covered Abu-Jamal regularly from 1995 to the present—went online in 2002, information for all journalists of color speeded up to instantaneous. And it’s important to mention that by 2024, NABJ had established NABJ News and Views, its online news portal that, at this writing, has curated commentaries about, if still not by, Abu-Jamal.

·   Two New Generations of Black Elite/Radical Writers/Journalists/Pundits: As NABJ continued into the 21st century, media was expanding exponentially and, as a result, new forums and people were assuming new roles to fill them. Elite, national opinion-journalism magazines began to hire Black writers: Jamil Smith joined Rolling Stone, Jelani Cobb joined The New Yorker and probably most famously, a young writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates joined The Atlantic. Meanwhile, Black broadcasting was expanding its scope: The Tom Joyner Morning Show, the first of several nationally syndicated morning-drivetime radio programs, and BET made a young radio commentator and Democratic Party activist from Indiana, Tavis Smiley, a national Black media star. Still meanwhile, a new breed of Black public intellectuals—Black scholars with Ivy League degrees, teaching at top white mainstream universities—took over much of the airwaves, major newspaper Op-Ed columns, and significant amounts of national magazine space: bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, among others. By 2024, there was a second generation of Black public intellectuals, many of which had their online media forums on YouTube and Facebook: scholar/activist Marc Lamont Hill (who in 2024 created a podcast with Abu-Jamal), the collective of Black radical activists, scholars and journalists at Black Power Media—a champion space for political prisoners such as Abu-Jamal—and Black Star Network, founded by former NABJ Vice-President of Digital Roland Martin are prominent—and quite “unobjective,” it must be pointed out— examples. These Black content-makers define objectivity for themselves.

·   The Tension With “Objectivity” Within Cable News: In 1996, a cable news and news-commentary channel called MSNBC was created. By 2024, the NBC platform would be filled to the brim with Black liberal activists and commentators—mostly as guests, because MSNBC management would part ways with many host voices that were upsetting to it and advertisers. [lxxiii] One activist MSNBC has kept was the Rev. Al Sharpton, the formerly controversial New York City activist. He has been considered an important part of the MSNBC family as the Black Lives Matter movement developed, and the news-commentary channel arguably was forced to throw objectivity out the window during the 2016 election and 2016-2021 presidential administration of Donald J. Trump, and will clearly do so again as the election year 2024 progresses and American liberal democracy becomes more threatened. Meanwhile, CNN struggles with how to proceed as an objective forum, continuing to claim the middle ground between liberal MSNBC and conservative FOX News.

·   Birth and Growth of a Human-Rights Newsmagazine That Championed Abu-Jamal: Also in 1996, the Pacifica Radio network created a newsmagazine called Democracy Now! The new program, chiefly hosted and executive produced by Pacifica investigative journalist Amy Goodman, combined news, investigative reporting and an overall public forum for Left activism. Its original subtitle was “Exception to the Rulers,” and it also referred to itself in its early years as “Resistance Radio.” It emphasized grassroots struggles. It steadily covered post-1995 developments in Abu-Jamal’s case, aired his commentaries and interviewed him live for most of its almost three-decade existence. Democracy Now! slowly developed not only into a television news program but a space to try to create a unifying common ground for the predominately white radical Left and the “progressive,” white liberal nonprofit Left. It will celebrate its 30th year in 2026 as a well-funded, more mainstream and now self-described “independent global news hour.”

 Oftentimes, the answer to fighting against the core values of a group in which one disagrees is to form another group. In the 1990s, Democracy Now! would cover mass protests where Leftist demonstrators would say, “Don’t hate the media—be the media!”

The idea took hold.

By 2024, activists had grabbed the digital mike, completely bypassing the mainstream media (which, according to many of them from their social media and YouTube criticisms, now includes Democracy Now!). For example, Black Power Media was formed in 2021 when Dr. Jared Ball, a media and Africana scholar at Morgan State University, along with others with their own multi-media platforms online decided to form a collective. Under their agreement, they would extend and incorporate their regular work to create an approximate broadcast days’ worth of programming. In 2022, for another example, the Institute for the Black World-21st Century had formed the Black World Media Network, an online portal that included a 24-hour radio station airing progressive Pan-African music and commentary.

If the mainstream media and some progressive media were no longer relevant to a media-empowered Left in 2024, then Black mainstream journalists were definitely no longer relevant to many grassroots Black activists, who quickly learned publishing and editing software and had access to smartphones and other video equipment that could record and post video that was instantly archived and accessible to internationally-viewed platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Clubhouse. As a result of the 2020-2021 COVID outbreak in America, Black people of all political and social stripes—including members of The Richard Prince Journal-isms Roundtable, a monthly meeting of Washington, D.C. Black journalists (dominated by NABJ members) who listen to and interview newsmakers about issues concerning the Black community—started having live events and forums on platforms such as Skype and Zoom and then posting them on Facebook and YouTube, effectively becoming their own broadcasters. In Prince’s case, broadcasting the monthly meeting meant creating a second way to give instant information regularly to Black journalists and other interested parties around the world.

NABJ has always been a broad-based organization but, not unlike other organizations, one that speaks with one voice from its core values. Its goal is still to desegregate the mainstream media, a part of society they, as middle-class, college-educated Black professionals, still see as very relevant. Although it is tolerant and encouraging of independent journalism, it is still clear about its mission. It is important to point out that for all of the (mostly individual) online journalism activity occurring around the world, there is no person-of-color, activist journalist equivalent of NABJ. There once was a more radical group, the National Alliance of Third World Journalists (which still exists, but doesn’t have real influence outside of a website) and Black and Brown bloggers attempted to organize into an organization, Blogging While Brown, in the 2000s through 2016. But neither had anywhere near the power or prestige of the near-50-year-old Black corporate assemblage.

The group’s power, as much as it has in a worldwide social-media-production landscape, comes from its corporate funding, large membership (some conventions reach up to 4,000 members attending) and proximately to America’s most powerful mainstream media companies: its influence has not been equaled, neither by NNPA (which preceded it) nor even its smaller “sister” organizations (which followed it), The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Native American Journalists Association and the Asian American Journalists Association. [lxxvi] So one Black professionals’ ideological trap/critique is another’s consistent core values, Abu-Jamal be damned figuratively or literally.

NABJ welcomes all—public relations practitioners, Black press veterans, freelance writers, undergraduate and graduate students—into its inclusive fold. But like most established organizations in America, it is led by people who have both similar core values and solid, trusted connections with hegemonic institutions—ones that NABJ members are proud to use in their insider attempt to institutionally force the most powerful and recognized mass news media in the world, the news media paid the most attention to by the world’s most powerful, to account for itself. If Leftist activists and people in most ideological shades of Black media complain that the strategy is nothing but chicken-stealing from the white, corporate master, then so be it, according to NABJ.

The contradiction remains, however, that the institutions NABJ leaders monitor are the same ones who fund them and set their “objective” professional parameters. So the situation the New York Black press complained about in 1989 still exists in 2024; the difference is now NABJ has been accepted for what it is, not the least because the grassroots have their own alternatives to it. There are now public, international spaces for truth-tellers of all shades,  a worldwide info-tent. So, not unlike the civil rights group the NAACP, relevant or not, popular with Left or Right activists or not, this particular post-civil rights journalists’ organization will continue to exist to fulfill its own specifically defined Black agenda.

POSTSCRIPT: Abu-Jamal addressed NABJ during its 2014 convention. Here’s his address:

 Journalism: Activism or Profession? (AUDIO LINK HERE)

[Speech writ. 7/29/14] © ’14 Mumia Abu-Jamal

When we consider the historic role of journalist among Black people, we are left with the deep conviction that, for Black people, the necessities of the time demand that activism must play a role in the performance of the profession.

It must be so, I argue, then – in our not-too-distant past – and now, in our troubled present, for to fail to do so leaves our people at the not-too-tender mercies of a system that has demonstrated a kind of vehemence and animosity that few populations in America have suffered from.

For ultimately, a profession is just that – a claim to act a certain way in the world, according to certain stated norms and codes that a certain area of employment must abide by.

Except in the long history of Black America, we know better.

We must know, as did the esteemed Black journalist, Frederick Douglass, that a constitution written on parchment would differ greatly from government and legal practice, when it came to Black people. They were promises: promises broken and unfulfilled for over a century, after the Supreme Court decided in the Plessy decision that ‘separate but equal’ was good enough. Black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett worked long and hard to bring light to the lies used to justify lynching’s against Black people. So much so that, according to recent scholarship, she was shunned and avoided by leading lights of the early civil rights movement, who regarded her as too militant’ too outspoken.

 Meanwhile, under the Hayes-Tilden gentlemen’s agreement, white terrorism, expressed by lynching was the peculiar American custom that wasn’t spoken of in polite society. So, quietly (except for Wells) Black bodies hung and burned by the thousands — across America, the courts and law deeming it mere local custom, beyond their control.

 When we enter the modern era, we see a panorama of Black pain that is as unprecedented as it is silent. I speak of mass incarceration, the targeting, imprisonment and criminalization of dark people in ways (and in numbers) the world has never seen. For decades.

 And, until recent days, the silence -even among Black journalists – has been deafening. Recently the New York Times has editorialized against it. How many Black newspapers have done so?

 Why not? Professionalism? A false objectivity?

 The late historian, Howard Zinn, for years decried the notion of professionalism. In a speech in Colorado in 2006, Zinn said:

‘We all go into professions where you’re supposed to be professional. And to be professional means that you don’t step outside of your profession. If you’re an artist, you don’t take a stand on political issues. If you’re a professor, you don’t give your opinions in the classroom. If you’re a newspaperman, you pretend to be objective in presenting the news. But, of course, it’s all false. You cannot be neutral.’

 In Zinn’s words, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

As journalists, the choices before you are actually quite clear. Follow the dictates of your bosses; or serve the interests of your people.

Black America, in the main, lives a life of hell – daily. For them, freedom is a word, but prison is inevitability. For them, civil rights are a mirage, and daily humiliations are a certainty.

 For all the powers of the State are arrayed against them.

 They know this – as do we, but such lived realities rarely flow from our pens, our mouths or our fingers.

 So, we write dross on the life-styles of the rich and famous. Or some blathering from a politician.

 While our people suffer.

 The choice, for any journalist, should be clear.

Thank you, NABJ.

–© ‘14maj