The Campaign to Bring
Mumia Home
Because our world would be a better place with Mumia
Abu-Jamal walking amongst us, we are urging you to financially support The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. The
Campaign is a united front effort bringing together a new generation of activists
alongside of Pam Africa and the International Concerned Family and Friends of
Mumia Abu-Jamal and the various currents within the movement to Free Mumia.
This grassroots movement of local, national, and
international activists is waging one of its largest battles yet. We are building an international public
awareness campaign to introduce a new generation of activists and organizers
to one of the most important freedom fighters of our time. We are organizing
events led by and oriented around the issues that concern young black and brown
youth and connecting the struggle to Free Mumia with the project of building a
better world.
We are in need of funds to finance our boots-on-the-ground
approach to organizing, which includes a strong and savvy viral media strategy
and a newspaper-ads campaign to publish our new petition in high profile
venues in Philadelphia, around the country and the world as we strive to meet
our goal of gathering one million signatures worldwide.
Our current petition is on Change.org and it calls on Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and recommend that Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania immediately release Abu-Jamal from prison. We need your help to gather one million signatures to Bring Mumia Home. Please sign and distribute broadly. http://www.change.org/petitions/release-mumia-abu-jamal
We also need funding to produce political
awareness events and teach-ins, materials such as banners, murals and t-shirts to
enhance the visual presence of Mumia in local communities across the country, and funds to rent venues for our national
and community workshops linking Mumia’s fight for freedom to broader struggles.
Our goal is to bring Mumia home as we work to end mass and
political imprisonment in the United States. Because Mumia is
known the world-over for his radical commentaries and writings on inequality and
because he has spent so much of his time in prison offering a radical critique
and analysis of the crisis of mass incarceration, a victory in Mumia’s case
would open up a much larger conversation in the mainstream about the crisis of
mass incarceration and political imprisonment in the U.S.
Our strategic plan is focused on
changing the perception of Mumia in Philadelphia, establishing the facts of
Mumia’s innocence, and raising his profile in key cities like New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago and especially Washington DC. Raising Mumia's profile among a new generation of young people is an important prerequisite to the civil disobedience actions that will be necessary to bring him home.
We have also begun to plan a weekend of actions and
activities in Philadelphia honoring the life, work and spirit of Mumia on his
60th birthday, April 24-26, 2014. We have high hopes for what we are calling
the Celebration of Life Festival. This weekend-long cultural and political
resource fair will feature the booths of social justice oriented organizations
and local businesses; a block party with socially conscious artists; panel
discussions on a wide-range of topics from war, education and health to mass
incarceration; organizing workshops; children’s activities and film screenings.
The purpose of this event is threefold: to celebrate Mumia’s 60th birthday,
engage the Philadelphia community in activities to bring Mumia home and raise
awareness about pertinent community issues.
We hope that you will donate generously and join us in our
efforts as we build the movement that will bring Mumia home and usher in a new
world.
What We Need & What You Get
$60K for Mumia’s 60th Birthday
Our goal is to raise 60K in the next 60
days
If 1000 donors gave $10 = $10,000
Incentive:
thank you message from Mumia Abu Jamal
If 500 donors gave $60 = $30,000
Incentive:
Mumia is Innocent sticker, Message to the
Movement by Mumia Abu-Jamal, name listed on commemorative program for Mumia's 60th birthday celebration and thank you message from Mumia Abu-Jamal
If 100 donors gave $100 = $10,000
Incentive:
Mumia is
Innocent T-shirt, Message to the Movement by Mumia Abu-Jamal,name listed on commemorative program for Mumia's 60th birthday celebration,
and thank you message from Mumia Abu-Jamal
If 20 donors gave $500 = $10,000
Incentive:
Copies of films Long Distance
Revolutionary & Justice on Trial:
The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mumia is Innocent T-shirt, Message to the Movement by Mumia Abu-Jamal,name listed on commemorative program for Mumia's 60th birthday celebration, and thank you
message from Mumia Abu-Jamal
If 10 donors gave $1,000 = $10,000
Incentive: Signed copy of We Want Freedom by Mumia Abu Jamal, copies of films
Long Distance Revolutionary & Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Mumia is Innocent T-shirt, Message
to the Movement by Mumia Abu-Jamal,name listed on commemorative program for Mumia's 60th birthday celebration, and thank you message from Mumia Abu-Jamal
The Impact
A Movement of
Movements
The movement to free political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal
spans 32-years. With its untiring and persistent grassroots approach and under
the leadership of Pam Africa and the International Concerned Family and Friends
of Mumia Abu Jamal, the movement to Free Mumia has, on a number of occasions,
delivered a crippling blow to the US judicial system. In the 1990s, the
political pressure produced by the millions of people that the movement brought into the streets
stopped the scheduled execution of Mumia – twice!
Most recently, this international movement won Mumia's
release from death row. In October 2011,
the Supreme Court allowed to stand the decisions of four federal judges who as
early as 2001 had declared Mumia’s death sentence unconstitutional. In response, the Philadelphia DA, Seth Williams, decided not
to pursue the death penalty once again. He feared that doing so might galvanize an
international movement that would descend on his city and expose the manner in which
the courts, politicians, and the police conspired to silence and imprison this
radical journalist who is arguable, the Nelson Mandela of our time. So it was
that in December 2011, Mumia’s original death sentence was commuted to life in
prison without parole. Our victory in getting Mumia out of death row coincided
with a shift in consciousness in the US occasioned by the economic crisis that
began in 2008, the execution of Troy Davis, the emergence of the Occupy
Movement, the murder of Trayvon Martin, and the emergence of a new, embryonic
but growing movement against mass incarceration.
Given this shift, we believe that it makes more sense than
ever to focus our efforts and begin to imagine winning Mumia’s freedom. For this reason we are hard at work
building a strategic grassroots movement that takes the streets and
shifts the current media representation of this case, nationally and especially
in Philadelphia.
Educate yourself on Mumia's Innocence
The
Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Miscarriage of Justice
In
1981, Mumia was convicted for allegedly murdering Philadelphia police officer
Daniel Faulkner. Despite clear evidence of police perjury and
evidence tampering to obtain a conviction, and in spite of compelling evidence
of innocence, for 32
years, the courts have denied Mumia relief on his conviction. In 2000,
Amnesty International found that the case “was irredeemably tainted by politics
and race and failed to meet international fair trial standards.”
Because for 28 years Mumia was wrongly subjected to inhumane
conditions on death row, because he has been denied his Fifth Amendment right
to a fair trial, and because of the uninterrupted history of police corruption
and conspiracy in this case, we call on the Department of Justice to recommend
that Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania immediately release Mumia Abu-Jamal
from prison.
Judicial and
Prosecutorial Misconduct
• The prosecution's case is built on the erroneous
assumption that only three people were present at the time of the shooting, but
a fourth person – the probable perpetrator – was seen fleeing the scene after
Officer Faulkner was shot. The police, prosecutor Joe McGill, and the trial
judge suppressed this from both the defense and jury.
• Mumia was convicted in the absence of material evidence.
The bullet that killed Officer Faulkner could not be matched to Abu-Jamal’s
gun. The police also failed to perform routine tests on Mumia’s hands, which
would have determined that he had not shot a gun that night.
• A freelance journalist’s photographs of the crime scene –
which also disprove key points of the state’s case theory – were never made
available to the defense or the jury.
• A court stenographer testified in an affidavit that during
the trial she heard the presiding judge, Albert Sabo, say, “I’m going to help
them fry the nigger.”
Police Corruption
• In 1979, the Department of Justice filed an unprecedented
lawsuit against Philadelphia’s mayor and 21 top city and police officials. Its
conclusions? That the police department’s behavior – which included shooting
nonviolent suspects, abusing handcuffed prisoners, and tampering with evidence
– “shocks the conscience.”
• The officers who arrested and later brutalized Mumia came
from the 6th District, which was under yet another federal investigation for
police corruption by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, with the
approval of the U.S. Department of Justice under Ronald Reagan.
• As a result, fully a third of the 35 officers involved in
this case, including the top officer at the crime scene, Inspector Alfonzo
Giordano, were subsequently convicted of rank corruption, extortion and
tampering with evidence to obtain convictions.
We
urge people of conscience to call on the Philadelphia DA, the Governor of
Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Attorney General to release Mumia Abu-Jamal, and
bring Philadelphia’s native son home. Sign the petition. http://www.change.org/petitions/release-mumia-abu-jamal
For more information
Email: bringmumiahome@gmail.com
Websites
http://www.bringmumiahome.com
http://www.emajonline.com
http://www.freemumia.com
http://mumiaabujamal.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0GbNwKmHaE
