Tuesday, March 02, 2010

LIVE ON DEATH ROW: MUMIA AT THE CROSSROADSIN THE AGE OF OBAMA

From Mumia NYC:

HOLD THE DATE:

Saturday, April 3, 2010
Teacher's College
Columbia University

Speakers:
--Vijay Prashad, Celebrated social critic and author of Everybody Was Kong Fu Fighting, and Darker Nations: A People¹s History of the Third World

--Tentatively scheduled: Kathleen Cleaver, Yale Law professor and former Black Panther

Mumia Abu Jamal is a former Black Panther and the most famous death row inmate in the world today. He is the brilliant, humane, and prolific writer and advocate for social justice who has become known as the Voice of the Voiceless. A recent Supreme Court decision has once again, made Abu-Jamal vulnerable to execution. The time to act is now!

At the April 3 event we will attempt to advance the ongoing efforts to meet with Eric Holder to discuss the possibility of a civil rights investigation into Mumia's case. We will also foreground some of the best speakers from university and college life who clarify what is at stake, for all of us, in Mumia's case.

The many violations in the Abu-Jamal case and appeals process, decried the world over by such organizations as Amnesty International (including judicial misconduct, discrimination in jury selection, and police corruption and tampering with evidence to obtain a conviction), account for the
exponential and disproportionate incarceration of African Americans and Latinos in the United States over the last 30 years, making the issue of incarceration one of the gravest civil rights problems of our time.

In this moment of media-fascination with empty "race talk," we want to ignite a real conversation about the racialized character of mass and wrongful incarceration in America.

For more information and to help organize this event, email johanna.fernandez@baruch.cuny.edu or mark.taylor@ptsem.edu.

Sincerely,

Educators for Mumia Abu Jamal (EMAJ)

--Prof. Johanna Fernandez, Baruch College (CUNY)
--Prof. Mark L. Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary
--Prof. Tameka Cage, Pittsburgh, PA

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