Open letter to the Mayor of Philadelphia, Ed Rendell,from Julia Wright

Read from the platform of the Million Woman March in Philadelphia on October 25th 1997, 25 October 1997

Mr. Mayor,

It seems that I am addressing an empty chair since, after inviting yourself to the platform of the Black Women of the People, you left early when the booing started.

Mr Mayor, on June 5th of this year, a historical delegation came to see you from across the seas, from across the world. These ambassadors of good will had asked to be received by you to enjoin you, in your capacity as the former district attorney at the time of Mumia Abu Jamal's trial, to speak up in favour of a new trial for an internationally respected journalist, writer and community leader.

The fact remains that after 16 years on your death row, Mumia, who is black and poor, was never given a fair chance to prove the innocence he has maintained from day one, the innocence his defense team has ample new evidence to substantiate.

The reason why the international peace delegation travelled so far to be guests in your city and be received by you was that they knew that, back then, as district attorney, you could have chosen to say that the Commonwealth had no case against Mumia, the native son of Philadelphia.

But you did not so choose.

And Mumia was sentenced to death. With your blessings.

The members of that delegation and dozens of supporters were left in a narrow corridor in front of your closed door guarded with selected members of your discredited police force and an unusual number of plainclothes officers. Mr Mayor, I was part of that delegation and I was shocked. After an hour of this face-to-face, we were informed that you were not available, that there was no member of your staff to receive the delegates on your behalf. We were left in front of your door, packed like animals, guarded like delinquents not the delgates of world opinion we were.

Let me remind you who some of those animals were, Mr Mayor. One of them was the son and political heir of the greatest statesman of Africa to this day: the late President Kwame Nkrumah who brought panafricanism to power in Ghana and who succesfully obtained from President Eisenhower in 1958 that the governor of Alabama reverse the death sentence of a man both black and poor.

Another one of the animals you left in your hallway was none other than the son and intellectual heir of W.E.B. DuBois, one of our nation's historical thinkers as well as a writer you should have studied and been tested on in college, that is if you are at all educated, Mr Mayor.

In fact, Mr Mayor, that hallway of yours was ringing with history.

But your door remained closed.

My own father, the late Richard Wright, wrote books your own children have to read before being considered educated. My father also saved a man, black and poor, on death row in 1941 when it was still possible to awaken a sense of the human in elected officials like you. But, on June 5th, your door slammed shut on history, Mr Mayor, as you chose to insult the peace delegation who had come to your city not as lucrative tourists but to uphold the civil, constitutional and human rights of a man, any man, in the city of the Liberty Bell.

Today, Mr Mayor, from the platform of the Million Woman March, I am privileged on behalf of legions of us here to inform you that a People's International Tribunal will grant a new trial to Mumia Abu-Jamal in your city on December 6th.

According to the document I hold here, you are one of the officials who will be indicted, on that day, on charges of a co-conspiracy to target journalist and people's advocate, Mumia Abu Jamal, using false charges, a fraudulent trial, brutal imprisonment and imposing the death penalty to silence him forever.

Mr Mayor, it is an honour for me to present you with this notification of charges for your indictment emanating from the highest authority in the land, the people, the black women of the people, assembled here today in the presence of two million of us.

Thank you, Mr Mayor.
Sisters, On'a Move!