Although he began life as Wesley Cook in Philadelphia 50 years ago this April, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s voice was born at the age of 15.

At a 1968 George Wallace for President rally in Philadelphia, Cook and his friends booed and hissed Wallace and his supporters. Some Wallace supporters became a northern lynch mob. A frantic Cook happily spied a policeman. Abu-Jamal talks about what happened next in his first book, “Live From Death Row”: “The cop saw me on the ground being beaten to a pulp, marched over briskly—and kicked me in the face. I have been thankful to that faceless cop ever since, because he kicked me into the Black Panther Party.”

The following year, a May Day rally was held in Philadelphia for Huey Newton, then-jailed Black Panther Party co-founder. On that day, the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party—including someone now named “Wes Mumia” (a.k.a. “West Mumia,” a.k.a. “Mumia X,” a.k.a. “Bro. Mumia”)—made its first public appearance. He described the day in his new book, “We Want Freedom: A Life In The Black Panther Party” (South End Press):

“[B]etween fifteen and twenty of us are in the full uniform of black berets, black jackets of smooth leather, and black trousers…We thought, in the amorphous realm of hope, youth and boundless optimism, that revolution was virtually a heartbeat away. It was four years since Malcolm’s assassination and just over a year since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Vietnam War was flaring up under Nixon’s Vietnamization program, and the rising columns of smoke from Black rebellions in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and North Philly could still be sensed, its ashen smoldering still tasted in the air.” The atmosphere was also tainted with the stink of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which reported on the rally and immediately opened a file on the 15-year-old.

Wes Mumia threw himself into Party work, becoming the branch’s Lieutenant of Information. He wrote for The Black Panther, the BPP’s national newspaper (“Throughout our history, some niggers have refused to bow down and be beaten into the dust”), and served as the Philadelphia branch’s spokesman. All along, the Bureau followed his every move, taking down his every word—even when he left the Party in late 1970, got a GED and began attending Goddard College.

But Goddard couldn’t hold his attention. His voice, growing into its own adolescence as its holder grew into young adulthood, found its own space: The radio. Wes Mumia became Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Mumia Abu-Jamal became part of that first generation of Black radio reporters that dominated 1970s “soul” AM. Throughout his 20s, he bicycled the streets of Philadelphia, armed only with a tape recorder. But this now-recognizable voice would fade by the end of the decade. His on-air sympathy to the MOVE Organization, a radical, predominately Black back-to-nature group, got him dismissed from the media mainstream.

So, while driving a borrowed cab for a living, Abu-Jamal saw his brother, William Cook, and a Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner, in each other’s face on a city street in the early morning of Dec. 9, 1981. Abu-Jamal ran toward the two men. Guns were fired. Abu-Jamal and Faulkner were shot, with Faulkner dying at that corner. Abu-Jamal’s gun was found at the scene. Zealots and conspiracy theorists on the left and law-and-order types on the right have argued about the rest for more than 20 years.

Abu-Jamal was brought in front of Common Pleas Court Judge Albert Sabo, a former member of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police and the National Sheriffs Association. Amnesty International reports that Sabo "presided over trials in which 31 defendants were sentenced to death.... Of the 31 condemned defendants, 29 came from ethnic minorities." (In 2001, Abu-Jamal’s attorneys produced a sworn statement from a court stenographer who said she overheard Sabo saying he would help the prosecution “fry the nigger” during the trial. Sabo had denied this before his death two years ago, and the claim was ignored by Philadelphia’s District Attorney’s Office.) Only two Blacks remained on the 12-member jury after the prosecution removed most of the African-Americans from Abu-Jamal’s jury pool. Abu-Jamal’s demands to have MOVE founder John Africa serve as co-counsel while he defended himself were refused. Sabo took away Abu-Jamal’s right to defend himself—took away his voice in the trial—after the defendant continued to protest. Abu-Jamal, who had no prior criminal record, was convicted of first-degree murder. During the trial’s sentencing phase, the prosecution emphasized Abu-Jamal’s Black Panther past—effectively throwing his teenage Panther voice back at him in front of the nearly all-white jury. Sabo sentenced Abu-Jamal to death.

Different incarnations of Abu-Jamal’s defense attorneys have argued that he is either innocent of the crime or that he should not have been convicted of first-degree murder. For example, various witnesses have given various accounts of the shooting, with some mentioning a fourth person running away from the scene. All of his attorneys have argued that Abu-Jamal was given the following: an unfair trial by a pro-death penalty and pro-police judge, an ineffective defense attorney, and a sentencing hearing that emphasized his less-than-two-year-membership in the Black Panther Party.

Silence. Then a trickle of letters. Then an almost-forgotten chapbook of essays, “Survival Is Still A Crime,” mostly expressing his anger over the 1985 MOVE bombing. Then individual Op-Eds in the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of which were recorded for National Public Radio in 1994. NPR, however, dropped its plans just days before they would begin airing on its signature newsmagazine show, “All Things Considered,” after an avalanche of right-wing criticism. Soon after, he published “Live From Death Row,” a full-fledged collection of his essays about prison life. The book got him put in Death Row’s equivalent of solitary confinement for, according to prison regulations, engaging in entrepreneurship. He was placed in complete isolation in 1995 after receiving a date to die only a few months later. The execution date was later suspended.

Abu-Jamal eventually won the battle to write for pay from prison, but he would lose significant skirmishes. When HBO in 1996 aired the documentary “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case Of Reasonable Doubt?,” which included a compelling interview with its subject, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections banned outsiders from using any recording equipment in state prisons. In August 1999, prison authorities yanked the wires of Abu-Jamal’s telephone out of its wall when, for a brief time, he began doing his radio commentaries live on Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now,” the national leftist weekday radio newsmagazine. They did so while he was on the phone, while on-air.

But Abu-Jamal’s voice, now fully matured, took advantage of the controversies. It can now be heard regularly on Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now.” Or at concert fundraisers for his case. Or at graduation ceremonies at colleges filled with leftist students. On CDs produced by his supporters. In other books, including last year’s scholarly mediation, “Faith Of Our Fathers: An Examination Of The Spiritual Life Of African and African-American People” (Africa World Press).

The activist became the journalist, the journalist became the convicted murderer, and the convicted murderer became the symbol and the scholar, the object and the prism—all through the tenor and tenure of one voice. This one Black voice deepens and is heard, simultaneously shattering both the silence and the noise. Guilty or innocent, it echoes from the tiny chamber of death around the world, inspiring, engaging (and, for some, enraging), a dual symbol of oppression and freedom.

Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D. (tburroughs@jmail.umd.edu) is a researcher/writer based in Hyattsville, Md. He is a primary author of Civil Rights Chronicle (Legacy), a history of the Civil Rights Movement. He also is a contributor to Putting The Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching (Teaching For Change), a K-12 teaching guide of the Civil Rights Movement. He is writing a biography of Abu-Jamal.

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Reprinted from the September/October 2004 of Black Issues Book Review http://www.bibookreview.com/