

This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's black population. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States.

He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness.

He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. In December 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He is one of our nation's most valiant revolutionaries and courageous intellectuals."- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt "Mumia Abu Jamal's clarion call for justice and defiance of state oppression has never dimmed, despite his decades of being shackled and caged. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination These razor sharp reflections on racialized state violence in America are the fire and the memory our movements need right now."- Robin D. Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era. Mumia Abu-Jamal's painstaking courage, truth-telling, and disinterest in avoiding the reality of American racial life is, as always, honorable."- Alice Walker Many of these ancestors are buried beneath Wall Street.

In this brilliant, painful, factual and useful book, we see to whom our lives have not mattered: the profit driven Euro-Americans who enslaved and worked our ancestors to death within a few years, then murdered them and bought replacements. This memory is the antidote to the despair that seizes one of my generation when we hear the words 'Black Lives Matter.' We want to shout: Of course they do! To you, especially. "I was fortunate to grow up in a community in which it was apparent that our lives mattered. An excellent companion to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th."? Library Journal, Starred review "A must-read for anyone interested in social justice and inequalities, social movements, the criminal justice system, and African American history.
