"A must-read for anyone interested in social justice and inequalities,
social movements, the criminal justice system, and African American
history. An excellent companion to Michelle Alexander's _The New Jim
Crow_ and Ava DuVernay's documentary _13th_."?_Library Journal_,
Starred review
"I was fortunate to grow up in a community in which it was apparent
that our lives mattered. This memory is the antidote to the despair
that seizes one of my generation when we hear the words 'Black Lives
Matter.' We want to shout: Of course they do! To you, especially. In
this brilliant, painful, factual and useful book, we see to whom our
lives have not mattered: the profit driven Euro-Americans who enslaved
and worked our ancestors to death within a few years, then murdered
them and bought replacements. Many of these ancestors are buried
beneath Wall Street. Mumia Abu-Jamal's painstaking courage,
truth-telling, and disinterest in avoiding the reality of American
racial life is, as always, honorable."—ALICE WALKER
"Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of
the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era. These
razor sharp reflections on racialized state violence in America are
the fire and the memory our movements need right now."—ROBIN D. G.
KELLEY, author of _Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination_
"Mumia Abu Jamal's clarion call for justice and defiance of state
oppression has never dimmed, despite his decades of being shackled and
caged. He is one of our nation's most valiant revolutionaries and
courageous intellectuals."—CHRIS HEDGES, Pulitzer-prize winning
journalist and author of _Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of
Revolt_
"This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell,
captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to
Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United
States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the
chaos."
—ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, author of _An Indigenous Peoples' History of
the United States_
In December 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and beaten into
unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself
shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted
and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has
denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial
fairness.
In_ Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?_, Mumia gives voice to the many
people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and
offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police
abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries
on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this
book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins
in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit
mission to terrorize the country's black population. Applying a
personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously
angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist
violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn
things around.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is author of many books, including _Death Blossoms_,
_Live from Death Row_, _All Things Censored_, _Writing on the Wall_,
and _Jailhouse Lawyers._
"[Mumia's] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our
prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly,
urgently."—CORNEL WEST
"He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational
possibilities often emerge where we least expect them."—ANGELA Y.
DAVIS
"These writings date from the late 1990s and often show prescience on
the part of the author, who was writing well before the Black Lives
Matter movement that 'when the system kills Blacks, there is no
outrage, for it has been normalized by centuries of white enslavement,
terrorism, and injustice. Such violence is simply the accepted way of
how things are.' Also included is a series of articles on the killing
of Trayvon Martin, accurately anticipating the acquittal of the white
man who shot him, and another series on Ferguson and its
aftermath—how 'Ferguson may prove a wake-up call that Black lives
matter. A call for youth to build social, radical, revolutionary
movements for change.' The last piece is the longest, a pamphlet on
how to build such a movement with a historical perspective on why this
is necessary."—_Kirkus Reviews _
"While the author does reflect on the widely reported cases of police
violence against African Americans, as well as on the role of the
media in determining what gets attention, the strength of the book
rests in the essays that draw attention to lesser-known victims of
police violence, particularly women of color whose stories never
reached the mainstream media. Over the course of nearly four decades
in prison, Abu-Jamal . . . has become an astute student of the justice
system as well as a particularly cogent opponent of the death
penalty."—_Publishers Weekly_
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780872867390
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Vendor
City Lights Publishers
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter