5/09/00 1:10 p.m.
Among the Mumiacs
A Garden of left-wing disfunction.

By Cristopher Rapp, NR associate editor----------------crisrapp@mindspring.com

ne of the great things about going to a left-wing political event is all the free literature you pick up. Standing in front of Madison Square Garden on Sunday afternoon, as I waited for the “Day for Mumia” rally to begin, I was handed a month’s worth of bathroom reading. A scruffy white guy from the Revolutionary Communist Party gave me his paper, and graying hippie ladies passed out current issues of Workers World and News & Letters (a journal promoting “Marx’s Marxism”). A guy from the International Action Center vshoved a flyer into my hand advocating the speedy return of Elian to Cuba; another leaflet favored the abolition of the death penalty. Still others advertised a birthday party for Malcolm X and an upcoming workshop, hosted by the Student Liberation Action Movement, called JOHN BROWN 2000.

It was a familiar radical scene-young guys with scraggly goatees and carefully chosen “shabby” outfits; young gals with less hair than usual on their heads and more than usual under their arms; middle-aged men with Birkenstocks and comb-overs waving their arms as they talked; and more olive-green T-shirts and piercings per capita than anywhere this side of a Berkeley poetry slam. A seriously pale white dude dressed in camouflage pants walked around banging a bongo drum. A very cute alterna-girl held court near a sign that read “DEFEND THE GAINS OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION.” There even was a Crazy Old Lady — a stock character at such gatherings — standing at the curb dressed in a baggy version of a nun’s habit, yelling in Spanish to no one in particular about the evils of Los Estados Unidos. My favorite person, though, was a guy lurking around in a black judge’s robe and a pointy witch’s hat. His face was caked with white Halloween make-up and he held a toy skeleton that dangled from a hangman’s noose. Asked what it all meant, he leaned in close, revealing a set of plastic Wolfman teeth. “Justice has a white face,” he said. Then he growled: “Uuuurrrrrggggghhhhhh . . .”

The only one missing was the star of the show, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia, as he is universally known, is on death row, as he has been for 18 years, ever since he was convicted of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. But he didn’t need to be present to imbue the occasion with radical chic; his dreadlocked image, emblazoned on everything, was enough to sanctify the occasion. The success of the day-an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people paid $15 to attend the event, filling the theater-testified to the power of his celebrity. He is an international figure, with people from Desmond Tutu to Elie Wiesel to the Danish parliament coming out in favor of clemency. He receives honorary citizenships and degrees. He is especially popular in the world of entertainment and literature, counting Maya Angelou, E. L. Doctorow, Roger Ebert, Spike Lee, Norman Mailer, Paul Newman, and Oliver Stone among his supporters. Last year Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys held a sold-out benefit concert for him that raised nearly $400,000. The steering committee for Sunday’s event included Ed Asner, Rep. John Conyers, Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, and Alice Walker. The day of the rally, 700 “educators,” including Jonathan Kozol, Toni Morrison, and Cornel West, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding a new trial.

This sort of attention is nothing new. In 1994, Mumia inked a contract with National Public Radio (NPR) to provide commentaries on its show All Things Considered. When protests led NPR to change its mind, the Pacifica network picked him up. His regular columns are featured on a host of Internet sites and left-wing magazines. Last year he was the commencement speaker, via videotape, at Washington’s Evergreen State College; this year it was Antioch College in Ohio. His second book, All Things Censored, comes out this month. It’s a brazen title: He is one of the most uncensored men in the world. Without doubt, he is the most uncensored cop-killer.

The murder occurred at around 4 a.m. on December 9, 1981. Officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, was working the graveyard shift when he pulled over a Volkswagen Beetle for a traffic violation. Just after doing so, apparently sensing trouble, he radioed for assistance. There was a scuffle between him and the driver, a man named William Cook, the younger brother of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia, a former journalist then supporting himself by driving a cab, happened to be parked across the street. He ran up and shot Faulkner in the back from a distance of about 19 inches. The officer fell, but managed to fire one time, hitting his assailant in the chest. Mumia then stood over Faulkner and shot him in the face from approximately 12 inches away. Faulkner died instantly. Mumia was apprehended moments later, the gun-which was registered to him-at his feet, its chamber empty. Six months later, a jury of 10 whites and 2 blacks found Abu-Jamal guilty and sentenced him to death.

Since that day, Mumia’s supporters have claimed he was the victim of a frame-up by racist police, an allegation dismissed by at least 13 different appellate-court judges over the last 18 years, and most recently the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In the coming months, a federal district court will rule on what will likely be Mumia’s final appeal. Sunday’s rally was designed to ready the troops for an even bigger protest to be held on that still-to-be-determined day.

Where's Scrooge?
Finally 2 p.m. came around and we made our way into the Theater at Madison Square Garden. I hadn’t been there since I saw Dickens’s Christmas Carol a couple of years ago. The place looked a bit different this time around. A bongo-and-flute ensemble played as speakers took the stage. The balconies were covered with banners from the rally sponsors. One especially helpful sign read: AFRICAN ANCESTRAL LESBIANS UNITED FOR SOCIETAL CHANGE, INC (FORMERLY SALSA SOUL SISTERS). I made a mental note to update my rolodex.

Onstage, a 30-foot banner read: FIGHT POLICE TERROR. It set the tone for much of the afternoon: In the mind of the Mumia supporter, the cruel murder of a cop is somehow transmogrified into a tale of police brutality. And so we heard former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver on the evils of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. The local producer of Mumia’s radio show decried the Philadelphia prosecutor’s “obsessive attention to detail.” When former mayor David Dinkins dared to admit that the vast majority of police officers are completely law-abiding and try to do a difficult job well, he was booed fiercely. Seconds later he said that in New York the police were acting like “the enemy”; applause rained down. Johnnie Cochran and Ramsey Clark made appearances, as did Dick Gregory, who told us he was on day 61 of a fasting-and-prayer vigil for Mumia. Rapper Will Villanova offered that “In a way, we are all living in a prison.” There were several rounds of “No Justice, No Peace!”

C. Clark Kissinger, the former S.D.S leader who was last seen cheering on the L.A. rioters and now heads up something called Refuse & Resist, attempted to deconstruct the case against Mumia. At one point he made the hoary claim that the bullets found in Faulkner’s body were .44 caliber, and thus couldn’t have come from Muma’s .38 caliber handgun. It’s a charge refuted by Mumia’s own ballistics expert in a 1985 hearing.

But no matter: The case for Mumia has always been less about facts than faith. Indeed, the proceedings had the feel of a religious revival. “This is like being in church,” said actor Ossie Davis as organizers took up a collection from the audience. Another speaker upped the ante, saying, “I truly believe that Mumia is in all of us.”

Representatives of various groups came forward, hoping to appropriate some of Mumia’s glory for their own causes. A group of students from who had participated in the World Bank protests came on stage and spoke of the need to “shut down capitalism.” Said “youth coordinator” Sarah Sloan, “The Spirit of Seattle is alive and well today.” Someone named Angiri Shakur got cheers for calling former President Bush “the butcher of millions of Iraqi people.” A group from out west held up a sign “LESBIAN, GAY, BI, TWO-SPIRIT, and TRANS PEOPLE SUPPORT MUMIA.” (Joked a “gay Latina” comedian, “I haven’t seen this many gay people here since the Liberty game!”) Others talked about Mumia’s Native American counterpart, Leonard Peltier, and noted that Cuba, unlike the U.S., “has no political prisoners.” None of this, of course, had anything to do with what actually happened that night in December 1981, but that didn’t seem to matter. Mumia is a one-man litmus test: Calling Mumia a “freedom fighter” and a “prophet” makes you a freedom fighter and a prophet too.

Things reached a climax at around 5 p.m., when Pam Africa took the stage, dreadlocks flying. Introduced as the “heart, soul, and unifying voice” of the free-Mumia campaign, Ms. Africa is the “Minister of Confrontation” for MOVE, a Philly-based back-to-nature cult, and a regular at rallies like this one. She launched into her standard tirade, shouting about the “goddamn United States,” which she said was bent on imprisoning black and Latino “babies of resistance.” But then it got especially ugly.

She asked for a show of hands: Who here knows Mumia? Every hand went up. And then:

“Who the hell is Danny Faulkner?… We’ve known who Mumia Abu-Jamal is from the time he exited his mother’s womb. Now who the hell is Danny Faulkner? Why is the government so hell-bent on breaking the law that they won’t tell us who Danny Faulkner is? I don’t know, but I got some hearsay. . . . I heard from reliable sources that this man was a pimp to some black women, teenagers in schools. . . . I don’t know, it’s hearsay. But if you are calling this monster a hero, like we’re calling Mumia a hero, then dammit, prove it! . . . We are demanding to know who’s Danny Faulkner!”

The crowd cheered.

As we filed out, I noticed that the small group of Philadelphia police officers who had been holding a counterprotest across the street were long gone. The Mumiacs were the only game in town. I thought about a man I had seen earlier in the day who was selling beaded jewelry. His sign said that it had been created “in the spirit of Mumia.” I’ll bet he made a killing.