Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?

Locations
Call Number: Black Studies 323.119 Ab
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Black Studies 323.119 Ab	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"'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; '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; 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, and Writing on the Wall"--Provided by publisher.

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Timely, yet Timeless submitted by kylewright on July 7, 2018, 4:54pm This short collection of dispatches and muses from Mumia Abu-Jamal interrogates race relations and the inequalities faced by African Americans in the United States, ranging from 1998 to 2017 ( the year of the book's publication). The essays in this work are short, most running only a few pages at most, with a longer essay at the end totaling around 25 pages. Abu-Jamal is concise, knowledgeable, and accessible and it is interesting to see how pieces written twenty years ago still ring as true as the pieces from 2016 and 2017.