{"id":12037,"date":"2012-04-23T13:56:03","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T17:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=12037"},"modified":"2026-04-22T09:40:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T14:40:55","slug":"youth-of-color-watched-and-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2012\/04\/youth-of-color-watched-and-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"J\u00f3venes de color: Vigilados y baleados"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenixnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/mumia-and-trayvon.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12038\" title=\"mumia and trayvon\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenixnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/mumia-and-trayvon.jpg?resize=490%2C242\" alt=\"\" width=\"490\" height=\"242\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\"><strong>For Trayvon, Mumia &amp; the Many More<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">by Mark Louis Taylor<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Trayvon Martin and Mumia Abu-Jamal. One is dead. One languished on death row for thirty years. They are separated in age by a generation, separated by different locations and different life-histories, but their stories of being under surveillance, watched and shot, intersect strikingly with each other, and with many other people.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Both Trayvon and Mumia will be represented by scores of activists converging on Washington, D.C., on April 24, in an \u201cOccupy the Justice Department\u201d event, which joins the \u201cOccupy\u201d movement to the resistance movement against the criminalization of youth of color.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top \u201cone percent.\u201d As University of California sociologist, Lo\u00efc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts \u201creplaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9\/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today\u2019s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">An unsettling sadness accompanies my use of Trayvon Martin\u2019s death for public remembrance of so many others slain; sadness because our remembrance has to engage the circus coverage of the same media that often demonizes people of color, or renders them invisible, and also condones today\u2019s penal state; sadness, too, because we risk engaging a media frenzy that often reinforces misconceptions that Trayvon\u2019s case is an exceptional one.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Trayvon Martin, slain at age 17, was stalked by a \u201ccommunity watch coordinator,\u201d George Zimmerman, who told police over his cell phone that Trayvon \u201clooks up to no good, or he\u2019s on drugs or something.\u201d Zimmerman was initially taken in by police after the shooting, but then released because police officials and top prosecutors believed his story of \u201cself-defense,\u201d a generosity rarely extended, if ever, to youth of color accused of shooting white victims in similar scenarios.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Prosecutors did nothing for weeks. But national protests kept Trayvon Martin\u2019s cause alive, and Zimmerman was finally taken into custody. He is now out on bail. It remains uncertain how judges and courts will treat his self-defense claim. If history is any guide, odds weigh heavily against the claims of Trayvon and his family.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Consider the other young man, Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was 28 years-old, with no criminal record, when he found himself sentenced to death row in 1982, after being under surveillance by federal and local authorities since age 15. He had survived the Philadelphia projects to become a young activist, joining the Black Panther Party (BPP) for 16 months while in high school. Afterward he became student body president, but could not finish when officials\u2019 balked at his campaign to change the school\u2019s name from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X High School.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Still, Mumia secured his GED, so that at age 17 he began studies at Vermont\u2019s Goddard College. He then took time out to support his family back in Philly, started up a radio journalism career that brought him awards for excellence and the presidency of the Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">All this by age 27. Then, in one fateful pre-dawn morning, December 9, 1981, while working as a cab driver to help meet family finances, he came upon a white police officer, Daniel Faulkner, beating his brother. Both the officer and Mumia were shot and collapsed at the scene. Another man fled, eyewitnesses said. The officer died.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Mumia was sent to death row in 1982 for that shooting, having survived Officer Faulkner\u2019s gun, the vicious beating by arresting police at the crime scene, and the travesty of a trial that followed months later. Amnesty International in 2000 declared both the 1982 trial and the appeals process so flawed that a new trial was necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">In 2011 federal courts finally declared Mumia\u2019s death sentence unconstitutional, after 30 years of cruel and unusual punishment in a small death row cell. Mumia still serves a life-without-parole sentence in Pennsylvania\u2019s general prison population. The struggle for Mumia presses on, with many, including Nobel Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, now calling for his \u201cimmediate release.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Mumia also continues his radio and print journalism from general population, remaining the most well-known among U.S. political prisoners, a special \u201cvoice of the voiceless\u201d with trenchant critique of U.S. political and economic systems. From prison he recently described Trayvon Martin as \u201cEverybody\u2019s Child,\u201d because there are \u201cso many nameless, faceless Trayvons,\u201d killed under objectionable circumstances across America.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Mumia, too, was a watched teen, by Philadelphia police and the FBI.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">In the North Philly housing projects, Mumia had been a precocious, story-telling teen, asking big questions about life, even religion. He also was a voracious reader of Spiderman comics, says Terry Bisson in his biography based on independent research and interviews with Mumia and his family.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Mumia lived his teen years under the reign of Philly\u2019s notorious police chief and Mayor, Frank Rizzo, well-funded by the federal government\u2019s new \u201claw and order\u201d crackdown in cities of the 1960s. Rizzo in November 1967 was a ready accomplice, gleefully cracking heads of black high schoolers, leaving scores of them bloodied (\u201cGet their black asses,\u201d Rizzo had personally ordered).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">These high schoolers had walked out of classes to march peacefully down Philadelphia streets, calling for \u201cblack studies,\u201d and improvements in their dilapidated school buildings and communities. Thirteen year old Mumia had joined the marchers from his junior high school that day, but then turned off home for more reading. He missed the violence from Rizzo\u2019s police that day, but other beatings would soon come his way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">In 1968, at age 14, Mumia and three other teens went to a Philadelphia arena to protest the presidential candidacy of arch-segregationist Alabama Governor, George Wallace. As the teens began their protests, a team of thugs set upon them, beating them so badly Mumia was unrecognizable to his own mother in the hospital. During the beating, he called out for the police, but then from the ground, as he tells the story, he could see the police pant cuffs under civilian dress. \u201cThey kicked me right into the Black Panthers,\u201d Mumia later wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">As information officer for the BPP, Mumia worked not only in Philadelphia, but also did stints in New York, Chicago and Oakland offices. At age 15 he toured the assassination site where Chicago cops gunned down, in his bed, the charismatic community organizer-turned Panther activist and gang arbitrator, Fred Hampton. Fifteen year old Mumia wrote after visiting the grisly murder site, that Mao seemed right: all too often, \u201cpolitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.\u201d \u2013 referencing a series of killings by police at that time, in what evidence later proved to be an FBI- backed illegal campaign to eliminate the BPP.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">The FBI file on Mumia placed him on the Security Index, reported him also to the Naval Intelligence Service, the Office of Special investigations, Secret Service and Military Intelligence. In the end, although Mumia had never been convicted of a crime, the FBI compiled a file of over 700 pages on this teenage activist.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Years later, the Department of Justice couldn\u2019t help but acknowledge the special brutality at work in Philadelphia. A 1979 lawsuit was prepared against the entire police department, the first such suit in U.S. history.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">By bizarre coincidence to Trayvon\u2019s case, another \u201cGeorge\u201d also figures in the watching of teen-age Mumia. This was George Fencl, police lieutenant and head of Rizzo\u2019s \u201cCivil Defense,\u201d counter-insurgency squad. From the time Mumia was 16, Fencl \u201cwould aim a finger and cock a thumb,\u201d years later repeating these gestures whenever, as an older journalist, Mumia reported on police brutality. Fencl also led his squad in ransacking the Philly Panther office where Mumia worked. \u201cWe have more firepower,\u201d said Fencl as his men spirited away Mumia\u2019s mimeograph machine. His team held Mumia and three others \u2013 Mumia just overnite \u2013 on bogus charges. Another time, records Bisson, Fencl slowed to pass Mumia and his girlfriend, who was then pregnant with his first child, at the corner of Market and 7th, smiling and saying, \u201cI should get out of this car and kick that baby out of her stomach.\u201d Mumia and she did not lash out, they walked away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Police would get their chance to shoot, wound and beat Mumia in the extreme, at the crime scene on December 9th. Alfonzo Giordano, the chief inspector in charge of the investigation and setting up witnesses at the scene, took no steps to prevent police beatings, and may himself have administered blows, according to researcher, J. Partick O\u2019Connor, in his book, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Months before the trial, Giordano would be relieved of his inspector duties, and then just days after trial be removed from the police department, later becoming one among the full half of 35 police officers handling Mumia\u2019s case, who would be convicted and jailed on charges of graft, corruption and tampering with evidence to obtain convictions. The likelihood of their corruption extending to Mumia\u2019s case is further grounds for a DOJ investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Prosecutors rallied the jury to impose the death sentence by quoting 15-year old Mumia\u2019s quote from Mao, that \u201cpolitical power grows out of a barrel of a gun,\u201d as if Mumia was an advocate of gun violence, and not speaking against the gun violence the police used against the BPP, as they also had wielded it against the American Indian Movement \u2013 also against Asian-Americans and Latinos\/as who had made common cause with the BPP or who waged their own distinctive struggles for justice. Not just the vicious twist given the quoting of Mao by prosecutors, but even the mere use of such a political belief against a defendant has been found to be a constitutional violation in other cases.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">Police corruption and tampering require urgent investigation. There cases other than Mumia\u2019s that stand out: Neil Ferber was arrested in 1981, convicted in 1982, and later exonerated as well as released from death row. In spite of his and other exonerations, Mumia\u2019s case remains uninvestigated, and Pennsylvania generally has failed to review and correct its record of corruption in death penalty convictions. All this, too, is the burden of protests at the DOJ on April 24.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#000000\">PEN\/Faulkner award-winning novelist, John Edgar Wideman, once asked, \u201cWho of us is not on death row?\u201d Trayvon\u2019s street in Sanford, Florida, where he \u201cwalked while black\u201d became a death row for him. Many youth of color walk or inhabit similar death rows, in many different ways. Mumia resided on Pennsylvania\u2019s death row for 30 years; as a \u201cLifer\u201d he\u2019s still on a form of death row. It\u2019s time to win release, for him and the many more like him in today\u2019s penal state \u2013 even a freedom for those among \u201cthe young watched and shot\u201d of all communities of color \u2013 lost to violence but not forgotten. They still live in the memories of activists and in our work to forge another possible world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color:#0000ff\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2012\/04\/23\/youth-of-color-watched-and-shot\/\"><span style=\"color:#0000ff\">Fuente<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Trayvon, Mumia &amp; the Many More by Mark Louis Taylor Trayvon Martin and Mumia Abu-Jamal. One is dead. One languished on death row for..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,166,185,97,110],"tags":[357],"class_list":["post-12037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-discrimination","category-government","category-prisons","category-us-news","category-youth","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/mumia_12037_681a5.jpg?fit=598%2C296&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39624,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12037\/revisions\/39624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}