Selma James and Judicial Murder

This interview was published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper probably in 2013 and certainly during Obama’s presidency, but it is one that has been lost after an attack by hackers. The full text is published below.

Selma James, is the author of  books and pamphlets including Marx and Feminism, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, the founder of the  International Wages for Housework Campaign, which has seen legislation enacted recognizing women’s unpaid contribution to society in Spain, Trinidadand Tobago, and Venezuela. She was married to the famous Black activist CLR James for 25 years after he was expelled from the US during the McCarthy period. She was a spokeswoman for the English Collective for Prostitutes and has been active in campaigning against the US occupation of Haiti.  She has written the introduction to the recently published UK edition of the book: Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defend Prisoners versus the USA by Mumia Abu-Jamal,( Crossroads Books), whose death sentence was recently suspended pending a judicial review after he has spent 23 years on death row.

In explaining why Mumia’s case is so important, Selma says that Mumia is a Black journalist and she believes that he was framed for murder primarily because he told the truth about the persecution of a community by the city of Philadelphia. She believes that people who support Mumia in Europe are dedicated to ending the death penalty especially in the US, because more people incarcerated in the US  than any other country per head of population, and the number who are judicially murdered  is also very high by international standards.

She sees actions by prisoners in the US in the context of worldwide movements for social change and says that great leadership politically is coming out of the prisons precisely because the people who have been inside, really know how the state works. Movements were stopped in the 60’s by the murders of many high profile figures and by the imprisonment of many others. She sees this as a brutal realpolitik by those in power, to section off people involved in protest movements so that they appear weak and therefore unattractive to the larger society who might otherwise support them.

Selma and Niki Adams of Legal Action for Women (LAW) talk to The Prisma.

Graham Douglas

What do Jailhouse Lawyers do and why they are needed ?

People in Europe support Mumia also because it is a way to support the struggle against racism in the US, which is integral with US imperialism, and the contempt of the US establishment for anybody’s independence and right to freedom. Before we put the book out we advertised in Inside Times, which is a newspaper for prisoners, and said “Mumia Abu-Jamal is a jailhouse lawyer and he has written a book about them in the US, are there any here ?” Within 3 weeks we had a dozen letters from jailhouse lawyers detailing the cases they are dealing with.  Half of the people who answered our appeal were men of colour even though we were told there weren’t any.

The state of legal representation internationally is horrendous. because lawyers are concerned about what the judge and the prosecution think about them, not about their clients. Their business is to move on in the legal profession, You can really see it in the lack of representation that prisoners suffer, so jailhouse lawyers are needed everywhere. Since then others have written including a woman at Yarlswood  Detention Centre, when the women went on hunger strike because of their brutal treatment and the inedible food they were given. They were only asylum seekers “who are they,?you don’t have to bother being humane.”

Like Guantanamo they’re outside the categories –

Exactly, so the appeal of the book is both universal and local. Just as we were putting the book out there was a strike of prisoners at all the prisons in Georgia. Nobody left their cells in Georgia prisons, they refused to go and work for free. It was an amazing piece of organizing, so we did a stop-press at the end of my introduction that gave their demands. Slave-labour was not part of their sentence.

The point in my introduction that is underlined by news of this strike, is that great leadership politically is coming out of the prisons precisely because the people who have been inside, really know how the state works and they have learnt how to organize, to overcome their own divisions.

And increasingly, there is another element in this equation which is FICPs (Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted persons)in the US, and wait and see it will be here soon. They had their second national conference last week, and I met some of them at the US Social Forum in Detroit, where Global Womens Strike also participated. I was absolutely blown away !  The US has no national newspapers, but they were non-provincial, they had a national and international view, so that is another major force coming into society now with the Global Occupy movement. I feel that the book has come out at a moment in time which is made for it, where the difference between those of us who are inside and those who are outside prison, especially with the recent rebellion in the UK, with the kids who are being put away for trivial offences – that division is going to melt. The movement of prisoners now has to be seen as integral to Occupy and all the rest. The whole thing is going to crack wide open.  

Why is the death penalty still used in many US states when it is banned in so many countries ?

Until very recently nobody was saying that the prisons in the US were really concentration camps for the political opposition and dissidents, and that is precisely what they’ve become. The death penalty has been part of a US repression which was being overthrown in the 60’s and one of the people who the population hoped would help them, Bobby Kennedy, was killed. He had a real fire in his belly against racism and other injustices. He had learnt: he didn’t start life like that, the millionaire son of a millionaire, but he did learn and he was really captured by the movement so they killed him, and they killed JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton, who was killed when he was 21 or 22, but he was already a national leader in the best sense of the word, who isn’t known in Europe. He was bringing gangs of Black and Puerto Rican youths together and said “Stop fighting each other and start to fight for freedom.”

They drugged him and shot him full of holes in his bed. And the rest of the leadership was in prison, and when you have a situation like that there is not a great leap from unofficial to official murder – the death penalty.  

Are you saying the death penalty, is mostly aimed at Black people ?

Yes, and the reason is 2-fold. You are making black people untouchable by white people. If you mark off any sector of society as having less power, thay become less attractive. When we women organize a movement, we have to show men that to be with us is not to have less power but more. When the working class organise they have to let the middle and professional classes know that to organize with them is to be on the right side.

But if you have a series of defeats, people killed or framed, then white people are not going to turn to you and say “let’s unite”, so it’s a way not only of persecuting the movement leadership but of dividing the population and reinforcing racism. That’s what we have faced in the US, and here too they are trying to divide prisoners from the rest of us. The way that Cameron spoke about prisoners when the European court ruled in favour of prisoners having votes was worse than talking about animals – unchallenged by the Labour Party – that’s a classic example: “why be with prisoners they have no power to offer you ?” But they are mistaken, and prisoners will show them that.  

What do you think about the record of the Obama Administration ?

Well the military is in charge of him – Bush was part of the military, and Obama has never been, but he wasn’t able to come to us. He was like the others “I’ll do it” – and he can’t. He had to come to the movement which elected him –

Niki: People did come forward with the health care initiative , wanting to push it through but they were more radical than the proposals, and the Democratic Party machine wouldn’t accept people on those terms. They insisted that people accept their compromise position, rather than seeing that if there was a whole set of people who were pressing for more, that would strengthen their compromise.

Selma: They never wanted to be strengthened.

Because politicians only want  money and power ?

Yes, there is both corruption and fear. The same is true with Murdoch, were the MPs scared of him, or happy with what they were getting ? People will not sue because of what might come out.

So the distinction between financial corruption and political terror, is not clear, its both.