Born Wesley Cook in the Philadelphia projects, he adopted the name Mumia as a 14-year-old. The following year, aged 15, he helped found the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther party after being handed a copy of their newspaper in the street. "I was like, whoah," he says. "It just thrilled me. I was like, this is heaven. This is great. Everything. It was the truth. Uncut, unalloyed. It was everything. It fit me."
He spent long days helping with party activities, which included free children's breakfast programs and the monitoring of police, whose corruption at that time has since become notorious (at least a third of the officers involved in Abu-Jamal's investigations have since been found to have engaged in corrupt activities, including the fabrication of evidence to frame suspects).
Mostly, as the party's lieutenant of information, he wrote, gathering stories for the Black Panther, the party's newsletter. "It was great fun," he remembers now. "You worked six and seven days a week and 18 hours a day for no pay ... When I tell young people that now they are like, what was that last part? Are you crazy, man? But because we were socialists we didn't want pay. We wanted to serve our people, free our people, stop the homicide and make revolution. We thought about the party morning, noon and night. It was a very busy but fulfilling life for thousands of people across the country. We were serving our people and what could be better than that?"
Subject to relentless disruption by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, which targeted radical and progressive organizations, and riven by internal disagreements, the Black Panthers imploded in the early 1970s. For Abu-Jamal it was a personal tragedy. "Despair," he says when asked how it felt. "A profound despair."
love and life
He is adamant that the party's message is still relevant today. "Millions of black people are more isolated in economic, social and political terms than they were 30 years ago," he says. "I remember a photograph of an elderly black woman (after Katrina) who had wrapped herself in the American flag and I remember looking at it and being so struck by it. Maybe she wasn't thinking visually, she was probably very cold and hungry, but I couldn't help thinking, what does citizenship mean? Are you a citizen if in the wealthiest country on earth you are left to starve, to sink or swim, to drown at the time of the flood?"
If Abu-Jamal's latest appeal is successful he could be a granted a retrial or have the death penalty overturned. If it is not, his execution could quickly follow. He does not sound afraid. "I spend my days preparing for life, not preparing for death," he says. "I believe in life, I believe in freedom, so my mind is not consumed with death. It's with love, life and those things. In many ways, on many days, only my body is here, because I am thinking about what's happening around the world."
As we leave, people emerge from other visiting rooms into the central area. All I can think of is my last view after saying goodbye to Abu-Jamal: a row of men, all black, standing behind glass. Their hands cuffed, their faces smiling goodbye to their families, their voices shouting greetings to each other. In a couple of minutes, each man will trek back to a cell no bigger than your bathroom, with no company but their own. But for now, just for now, there is the sight of life. And they're drinking it in.
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