Panel Discussion: Trials of Mumia Abu Jamal, moderated by Melba Tolliver

In celebration of the breakthrough collective biography, The Trials of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Biography in 25 Voices, the book’s editor Todd Steven Burroughs talks with moderator Melba Tolliver –our book festival’s former board chair — along with Mumia Abu-Jamal’s spiritual advisor Mark Taylor, and the publisher of Mumia’s comix, Seth Tobocman of World War 3 Illustrated.

The Discussion

What brought Movement legend Angela Davis and a score of radical activists into action in 2021 on very short notice to demand “the only treatment is freedom?” It was the reality the world Left might lose one of its most prominent voices to COVID-19. That voice belongs to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and award-winning National Public Radio journalist who is arguably the world’s most famous political prisoner. Convicted of murder in 1982 and the author of more than 10 books and 2,000 Op-Eds for print and radio broadcasts, Abu-Jamal is easily the world’s most famous contemporary prison writer. The Trials of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Biography in 25 Voices is a collective evaluation of his life as told by those who know him best-his friends and allies. Edited by Abu-Jamal biographer Todd Steven Burroughs, it chronicles the struggles to get Abu-Jamal the health care he needed in 2021 as well as his life of radical, decolonized activism in the face of his monitoring by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) while a teenage Black Panther in Philadelphia and, later, as an inmate, decades of extraordinary repression by the state of Pennsylvania.

Todd Steven Burroughs is a journalist, historian, and popular culture geek. He holds a Ph. D. in Communication from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and s a lifelong student of the history of Black media.

Mark Lewis Taylor (born February 3, 1951) is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His major interests are in the political philosophy of religious practices and theological discourse, particularly in Christian communities and also broader social movements. He served as Chair of the Religion & Society Committee at Princeton Seminary. Taylor received the Best General Interest Book Award for his earlier book, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (2001). He is also the founder of Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The new edition of his award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of “Lockdown America” and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus’ followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining the “theatrics of state terror,” Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments—mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment—through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the United States a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism.

Against this, The Executed God proposes a “counter-theatrics to state terror,” a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus’ followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples’ movements. These are all intrinsic to Christian politics of remembrance that Jesus was executed by the empire.

Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms “a liberating material spirituality” to unseat the state that kills.

Melba Tolliver (born 1939) is an American journalist and former New York City news anchor and reporter.[1] She is best remembered for her defiant stance against ABC-owned WABC-TV when she refused to don a wig or scarf to cover up her Afro in order to cover the White House wedding of President Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia Nixon in 1971.

Tolliver was born in Rome, Georgia.

She worked as a registered nurse and later became a secretary at ABC in November 1966.[3] Strikes by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in April 1967 and by the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians in September led to short stints where Tolliver filled in for Marlene Sanders.[3]

Tolliver later became a full-time reporter and anchor at WABC from 1967 to 1976. In the early 1970s, she was a recurring panelist on What’s My Line? In 1976, she went to WNBC where she remained until 1980. She also worked at News 12 Long Island from 1986 to 1994.

Tolliver has co-hosted, with Gil Noble, ABC’s Like It Is series which focused on the Black Community. Melba Tolliver has a blog on her website and is working on a book about her experiences in the media. She is also featured in the documentary, “In Our Heads About Our Hair.” In 2015 Tolliver received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Empire State College.