New Garvey Movement Holds Fast in Support of Mumia’s Hunger Strike

Pan-African News Wire, 11 March 1998

Detroit, MI, March 11, (PANW)—Minister Malik Shabazz, the founder of the New Marcus Garvey Movement (NMGM) in Detroit, announced on Tom Pope’s syndicated radio program yesterday that the organization would observe a fast in support of the present hunger strike being held by 111 death row inmates at the SCI Greene Correctional Facility in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. This strike includes the African-American activist and journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on death row for 15 years for a crime that he maintains that he did not commit. Shabazz, a long time proponent of the demand for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, stated that his organization would refrain from eating on March 11 in honor of the heroic struggle being waged behind bars by Mumia and his fellow inmates in Pennsylvania.

The announcement was made on the Tom Pope show, which is broadcast from North Carolina to several areas of the country including: Youngstown, Ohio; Hartford Connetticut; Columbia, South Carolina; southern Ontaria, Canada and Detroit. Detroit is by far the largest market for this program, which is broadcast from 10:00 am-2:00 pm, Monday through Friday.

Mumia and the other inmates are protesting the new regulations restricting the prisoners’ access to family and legal visits; a reductions in the amount of personal belongings that they can keep in their possession as well as other issues. Jamal, an award winning writer, has published two books in the last three years dealing with prison reform and political questions related to the transformation of American society as a whole. As a former member of the Black Panther Party, Jamal has charged that his arrest and conviction in the early 1980s for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia was motivated by the government’s vendetta against revolutionaries in the United States.

Jamal’s death warrant was signed on June 1, 1995 by the then newly elected Governor, Tom Ridge. He was granted a stay of execution in August of that year in the aftermath of an internationally coordinated campaign to win a reversal of his conviction. An international tribunal in his defense was held in Philadelphia on December 6, 1997. The findings of this tribunal have been circulated globally. Supporters of Jamal are requesting that people fax or write the Acting Superintendent of Corrections at SCI Greene, Benjamin Varner, requesting that the prison officials immediately resolve the outstanding demands of the death row inmates.