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 broadcast, 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.
