Sever penchant for racist death penalty

Tuesday, November 10, 1998

Sever penchant for racist death penalty

DEATH: Join working class in fight to free activist Jamal from
capitalist legal system

By Michelle Oberman

The vindictive, racist frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal now places
his life directly in the scales of justice as the state’s
executioners prepare their machinery of death. On Oct. 30, the
Pennsylvania Supreme Court officially rejected every challenge to
his false conviction for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police
officer Daniel Faulkner.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and its
supporters have conducted an ongoing sinister, racist campaign to
prepare the public for the legal lynching of Jamal, whose case has
become the focus in the fight against the racist death penalty in
the United States.

As a Black Panther in the 1960s, Jamal was an eloquent and
outspoken opponent of the rampant racist terror by the Philadelphia
cops. Now as an award-winning journalist, Jamal is an innocent man
ensnared by a decades-long political vendetta.

The potential execution of Jamal reveals the death penalty in
all its sordidness – as a legacy of black chattel slavery meant to
silence those who would protest the racist brutality endemic to
American capitalism.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court brazenly ignored the mountain of
evidence proving his innocence, such as the five witnesses who
identified another man as the person who shot Faulkner.

It is no accident that the ruling was released only days before
the elections – as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge campaigned for
another term – amid a heinous, murderous campaign of bigotry
against homosexual rights and the right to abortion.

Both the Democratic and Republican Parties promote the speed-up
on death rows around the country; this expresses the impulse to
genocide on the part of racist American capitalism. The
"right-to-life" terrorists who assassinated Dr. Barnett Slepiana
few weeks ago are the same forces who howl for racist legal
lynching.

Only through the social power of the integrated working class
will the executioner’s hand be stayed.

When Jamal was threatened with execution during the summer of
1995, the Spartacus Youth Club (SYC) helped build successful
labor-centered protests in his defense. Such protests are again
necessary.

The integrated unions link the ghetto’s social discontent with
labor’s power to shut down production – setting the stage for black
liberation through socialist revolution.

Today, after decades of defeat, the labor movement itself is
increasingly combative, from the United Parcel Service Teamsters
strike last year to the United Auto Workers Flint strike this
summer.

In fighting for the freedom of Jamal, the working class
struggles against the brutal racist system that keeps it
divided.

Such struggles will provide the tinder for forming a multiracial
revolutionary workers party, countering both the Democrats and
Republicans and ready to overthrow the entire system of racist
capitalist exploitation.

Students and youth should join in the campaign to free Jamal by
building demonstrations on campus and participating in labor
rallies.

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