"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 inful 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 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 and beaten into
unconsciousness by Philadelphia . 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 bullets or racist
abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to
address 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 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
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 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 nent of the death penalty.”—Publishers Weekly