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By Debra Dickerson

Dec. 21, 1999 |   Depending on who's doing the talking, convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal is either a race-maddened psychopath cynically manipulating the gullible into helping him get away with murder, or an innocent artist and revolutionary railroaded onto death row by the racist forces of oppression.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the dreadlocked Mumia (so famous that he's now down to just one name) is a potent reminder that we're far from through with the past when it comes to racial politics in America.

Centuries of racism, and the corrupt government structures that enforced it, are still a radioactive part of our living memory and will remain so for at least another generation. That means there will almost certainly be more of these racial cause célèbres in our future. After all, we've only had one generation since the triumphs of the civil rights movement to unlearn 350 years of hate and mutual suspicion.

Maybe it's because we're still wearing our egalitarian training wheels that the overarching issue of the role that race plays in the Mumia case has eclipsed other critical questions that bear analysis in their own right.

One of those is Mumia's fitness to be held up as a racial hero and martyr in the first place. Who gets to decide that question?

The basic facts of the criminal case against Mumia are simple. Around 4 a.m. one December night in 1981 in a seedy area in Philadelphia, a 26-year-old police officer named Daniel Faulkner stopped a car going the wrong way down a one-way street. A 27-year-old cabdriver (and radical journalist) named Mumia Abu-Jamal (né Wesley Cook) was parked nearby and saw the officer bludgeoning a man who had gotten out of the stopped car -- a man who just happened to be Mumia's brother, 25-year-old William Cook.

What happened next is in dispute. But soon after, Faulkner lay dead on the street, having taken one bullet in the back and one between the eyes. Mumia slumped nearby, shot in the chest. Responding police found Faulkner with most of his head blown away and Mumia fallen to the curb with both his holster and his gun empty.

Seventeen years, two appeals and two execution warrants ago, a jury found Mumia -- who has never told his side of the story -- guilty of first-degree murder. His most recent date for execution -- Dec. 2 -- was stayed pending further legal appeals of his conviction.

Mumia's supporters claim that the police rushed to judgment in their haste to nail someone for Faulkner's death and didn't pursue exculpatory leads. (Some witnesses claimed they saw a third man flee, for example, and Mumia's empty gun might have been a different caliber than at least one of the bullets found in Faulkner's body.) But Mumia hardly cut a sympathetic figure; his radical politics (he'd founded the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers at age 15) did not endear him to the police or prosecutors. His supporters believe that his trial was essentially a sham.

Over the years, as news of Mumia's fate has spread, demonstrations have been held on his behalf all over the world. Celebrity backers have championed his cause, documentaries have been made about him and Mumia himself has reactivated his moribund journalism career from death row.

Police organizations have been equally energized by his case -- from the opposite perspective. On a number of occasions, they've had to be coerced into providing security for Mumia benefit concerts and for his celebrity supporters; meanwhile, they've funded appearances by Faulkner's widow to counter what they see as the glorification of a cop-killer.

Right-wing commentators and conservative groups have joined the fray, so much so that smearing Mumia and his supporters has become a staple of the shock-show set.

So much for the left and the right. But what about African-Americans?

Contrary to stereotype, blacks as a group tend to be social conservatives, very tough on crime and not at all sympathetic to radical chic trends. Furthermore, they are unlikely to know, or care, about characters like Mumia.

Next page | How to win the hearts and minds of black folk