by Mark Lewis Taylor
As I was preparing for classes yesterday, I quickly squeezed out a reply to FOX News reporter, Joshua Rhett Miller, and his inquiry to me about the possible comparisons of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King, Jr. The reporter was preparing what proved to be a FOX News attack essay on an Oakland Unified School District’s planned lesson menu, comparing similarities and differences between Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King, Jr. Historians would have made additional points to mine below, and no doubt with important nuances. I myself wish that I had added to what is below, by noting that both Mumia and Martin were subjected to FBI monitoring, harassment, police brutality, and that both experienced unjust jailing and imprisonment by law enforcement officials.
The FOX News story that appeared, of course, omitted my points regarding Mumia and Martin sharing life-long commitments to fighting white racism, and their sharing, too, a well-documentable fervent belief, in King’s words at Riverside Church in April of 1967, that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And not surprisingly, the FOX story completely avoided my language about Mumia’s call for “a revolutionary democracy today.” For the record, here is what I wrote to the reporter.
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Mumia Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King, Jr., are fundamentally similar in that both have committed their entire lives to challenging systemic white racism in the U.S. and accompanying forms of structural violence suffered by everyday people.
Thinking quickly, I would identify three major differences between Abu-Jamal and King:
(1) Mumia Abu-Jamal, from the very beginning has worked, more obviously than King, within an international framework of justice struggle, foregrounding colonial struggles, and international peoples’ movements against imperial and colonizing powers. King articulated this mostly in the years immediately preceding his assassination (even though his early non-violent direct action was influenced, in part, by visits to decolonizing India and Gandhi’s struggle there).
(2) Mumia Abu-Jamal, more than King, has worked to mobilize grassroots organizations and peoples’ movements, discussing and recognizing them in his journalist career. King had a tendency to privilege Black church organizations and, at times, work out of a certain sense of Black Middle class advantage and leadership styles. Abu-Jamal himself comments on this tendency in King, in a recent article of his about the ways women’s grassroots organizing in Memphis challenged King’s approach there.
(3) Mumia Abu-Jamal, frames political struggle issues in a way that is more foundational, politically. King used the rhetoric of the U.S. constitutional language, and hopes for “a more perfect union”, to motivate civil rights change. Abu-Jamal is committed to that also, but, in some tension with King, he stresses that both white racism and unchecked corporate greed run deep in the very founding of the nation and in its present political rhetoric. So, Abu-Jamal utilizes language that calls for a more revolutionary political democracy for today.
But what King and Abu-Jamal shared should not be overlooked. One shouldn’t juxtapose a respectable “cuddly” Martin Luther King, over and against a more radical and supposedly “villainous” Abu-Jamal – as the media hype often has it when they relentlessly mis-represent him as “cop-killer.” In fact, authorities have had the wrong man on death row and in prison these 32 years, not the man who actually shot Officer Faulkner.
Importantly, the three figures oft-cited (Mumia Abu-Jamal, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X) shared much in common, perhaps especially if one considers King’s famous line at Riverside Church against the Vietnam War in April 1967, the year before King’s death, where he identified the U.S. as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” Many of us working to win Abu-Jamal’s release as the innocent man he is would hold – as I am quite sure Abu-Jamal does also – that this is still an accurate description of the United States.