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Book Club: Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?
July 25, 2020 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm PDT
Join Eastwind’s (virtual) Book Club!
In light of recent events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, our July Book Club selection is Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
New to the Movement? Fear not! Whether you’ve had many conversations about Black Lives Matter or this will be your first one, we welcome you all to join us as we learn and grow together.
The book club meeting will take place via Zoom on Saturday, July 25 at 3pm. Register to receive the meeting link.
Join our Book Club Facebook group to engage in conversation throughout the month: www.tinyurl.com/ewclub
Book Club members can use coupon code BOOKCLUB2020 for a 10% discount at www.asiabookcenter.com
This event is co-sponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley, OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates Bay Area Chapters, and Asian Pacific American Student Development (APASD).
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About the Book:
In December 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. 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.
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. 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. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.
About the author:
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist and author of two best-selling books, Live From Death Row and Death Blossoms, which address prison life from a critical and spiritual perspective. In 1981 he was elected president of the Association of Black Journalists (Philadelphia chapter). That year he was arrested for allegedly killing a white police officer in Philadelphia. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982. In 2011, after spending more than 28 years on death row, his death sentence was vacated when the Supreme Court allowed to stand the decisions of four federal judges who had earlier declared his death sentence unconstitutional. He is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. In spite of his three-decade-long imprisonment, Abu-Jamal has relentlessly fought for his freedom and for his profession. From prison he has written seven books and thousands of radio commentaries. He holds a BA from Goddard College and an MA from California State University, Dominguez Hills.