The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, marked the 45th anniversary of the MOVE organization with recollections of when MOVE members were undergound in Rochester, New York. There, they “lived a life of peace that was unthinkable in Philadelphia,” because “they lived out of the eye of a merciless media,” he said. “Absent the ‘zone of negativity by the media, people met MOVE as people, and loved them.” In contrast, police and media hostility to MOVE in the City of Brotherly Love led to life sentences for nine MOVE members in 1978, and the bombing of the MOVE residence in 1985, killing eleven members, including five children.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s “Lynch Law in America” remains a compelling account of white violence as both savage and systemic, and of the US as irredeemable.
The United States recent democracy summit would have been laughable if its implications were not so serious.
News of the deployment of National Guard troops to an unspecified location in the Horn of Africa is an indication that US interference in the region will continue.
 
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is William C. Anderson.
