A Special Conference -
LIVE ON DEATH ROW:
MUMIA AT THE CROSSROADS
IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

CO-SPONSORED BY INTERCULTURAL HOUSE (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)
& EDUCATORS FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Teacher's College
Columbia University

Presenting:
VIJAY PRASHAD
Trinity College historian, celebrated social critic and author of
The Karma of Brown Folk; Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections
and the Myth of Cultural Purity; Keeping up with the Dow Jones: Debt, Prison & Workfare;
Darker Nations: A People¹s History of the Third World

Tentatively scheduled:
KATHLEEN CLEAVER
Yale Law professor, former Black Panther, and author

Other speakers and program to be announced soon

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther and the most famous death row inmate in the world today. He is the brilliant, humane, and prolific writer and advocate for social justice who has become known as the "Voice of the Voiceless." A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has once again made Abu-Jamal vulnerable to execution. The time to act is now!

At the April 3 event we will attempt to advance ongoing efforts to meet with Eric Holder to discuss possibilities of a civil rights investigation into Mumia's case. We will also foreground some of the best speakers from university and college life, clarifying what is at stake in Mumia's case for all of us.

The many violations in the Abu-Jamal case and appeals process, decried the world over by such organizations as Amnesty International (including judicial misconduct, discrimination in jury selection, and police corruption and tampering with evidence to obtain a conviction), account for the exponential and disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, Latinos and others in the United States over the last 30 years, making incarceration one of the gravest civil rights problems of our time.

In this moment of media-fascination with empty "race talk," we want to ignite a real conversation about the racialized character of mass and wrongful incarceration in America. We will explore this problem in the context of U.S. Human Rights violations and its racialized character nationally, and internationally in places like Guantanamo, against the backdrop of the continued assertion of U.S. imperial power and its grave consequences for peace, the world economy, gender relations, and the environment. For more information email johanna.fernandez@baruch.cuny. edu or mark.taylor@ptsem.edu.

Educators for Mumia Abu Jamal (EMAJ), Prof. Johanna Fernandez, Baruch College (CUNY), Prof. Mark L. Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary, Prof. Tameka Cage, Pittsburgh, PA