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INTERVIEW: Linn Washington on Mumia
by
Michael Schiffmann | 05.07.2007
Interview with Linn Washington, Paris, place Denfert Rochereau, February 2, 2007 Meeting Mumia and Getting to Know Him, Seeing Him Interview with Linn Washington, Paris, place Denfert Rochereau, February 2, 2007 Interviewer: Michael Schiffmann, Abu-Jamal-News.com MS: Hi Linn, I have at least three questions here in that Café in beautiful Paris right at the “place Denfert Rochereau.” You were a speaker at the panel yesterday on Mumia Abu-Jamal at the 3rd World Congress Against the Death Penalty. Yesterday, you told me you are working on a book that’s putting together all the stuff you wrote on Mumia in the course of the last 25 years. But on the panel, you also said that you’ve known him for 34 years. That would be my first question: What can you tell me – well obviously not everything in the space of three or four minutes, but all the same – what can you tell me about when exactly did you get to know him, Mumia, and what are some of the things you actually did together? LW: I first met Mumia when I was a student at Temple University, and Mumia worked at the university’s radio station, which is WRTI/FM. It was a very progressive, all-jazz station with a very progressive community format at the time. And as it turned out, we had several com-mon interests like politics, black empowerment and utilizing the media to improve information to and information about black people. MS: At the time, Mumia must have just come back from college in Vermont, right? LW: Yes, probably so. This would have been 1972, ’73 – I was a DJ, I was a jazz DJ on WRTI, and I was also doing some news casts at the station. MS: Are you still doing this from time to time? LW: No, not DJ-ing, but I’m still with jazz, I still love it. As for Mumia, he was doing a community talk show program. But it was primarily news-based – things were different then; people were more news-orientated in terms of their radio presentations. Now, most talk radio is just chit-chat, yelling and shouting at each other, but back then it was more substantive. So that’s how I met him. At first, he was very quiet, kind of withdrawn, and the distinction with regard to that is that everybody else at WRTI, all the other on-air personalities, were very flamboyant. They were self-promoting type of people. Mumia was a very stark contrast to that: quiet, very humble, and very progressive. So it wasn’t like he was trying to build himself up as a personality like most of the other on-air personnel. MS: What do you mean by progressive? LW: What I mean by progressive is that he had a political orientation; he cared about the community, he was into Black Power in a real sense, not just the rhetorical one – because Black Power was the tenor of the times among most young blacks although some were more sincere than others in their commitment to Black Power. We started talking just being friends, it wasn’t that all of a sudden or automatically that we were instant buddies, but we just started slowly to develop a friendship. He continued with what he was doing at the WRTI and then he started going to other stations, I was seeing him from time to time, and it was pretty much a “hi-and-bye” sort of situation because at that point I would say we were pretty much professional acquaintances. Around ’76, ’77, at this point I’m reporting for the Philadelphia Tribune, I’m a bona fide newspaper reporter and photojournalist, and Mumia is now a bona fide radio reporter. So we would begin seeing each other on news assignments and one of the vulgarities about news reporting is that there is a lot of down time. You go to cover an event, it’s supposed to start at nine o’clock but it really doesn’t start until ten, so, as a consequence of that, we ended up talk-ing a lot, and that’s when our personal friendship began to develop. So that’s how I met him. And watching him work, I got a tremendous appreciation for his pro-fessionalism and his attentiveness to the craft; because I started in the news business from many different sides, from photo journalism, from radio, from audio, and my college training was video, television directing specifically. I kind of had an affinity for what other people did, and I looked at what they did, so from that vantage, one of the things that really impressed me about Mumia was the fact that he was really into sound. I often give the following example, which would probably have been in 1977 or 1978. I saw him at the scene of a police brutality incident. The police came and shot and killed some guy, who actually was breaking up a fight. This is showing the type of racism that was going on. This guy was a Black Muslim; he was a street vendor outside of a bar, there was a fight, he interceded; this vendor and his Muslim partner broke up the fight, and when the police came and responded to the fight, the fight was over, but they saw these Black Muslims, and they started hassling them. And of course they were not going to back down, they didn’t do any-thing wrong, and this guy ended up getting murdered by the police, shot in the stomach while his hands were cuffed behind his back! Police claimed the guy, Winston Hood, tried to grab a cops gun but his hands were cuffed and witnesses said he was not resisting. And of course, typical of Philadelphia, nobody was ever indicted or prosecuted. In fact, the guy who was with Hood was actually arrested and charged with attacking the police and ended up staying in jail for two weeks before he was released. But while in the aftermath of this I came to the scene, to do a follow-up story, Mumia was there, and I saw him with his microphone just pointing up in the air, even though he had already finished his interviewing work. I walked up to him and I said, “Hey, man, what are you doing? I mean, there is nobody here you’re interviewing; why do you have your microphone on?” He said, “Listen man, I’m just trying to get some sound. I need to have the sound of the scene. You know, you could write about it, you can take pictures of it, but I have to have sound!” I just said to myself, man, this guy is really into it! So that’s how I knew him, and then ’76 became ’77, ’77 became ’78, ’78 became ’79, and at that point, we were really close, we were friends; we would see each other a lot and we had very extensive conversations about politics and life and women and, you know, certain other things we liked to do together. And one of the things, and I have to make this distinction now in my response to this question: a lot is said about Mumia being a Black Panther, and of course at his trial that was bootstrapped to make a motive for killing the officer. MS: Yes, it was highlighted by prosecutor McGill. LW: Mumia and I had extensive conversations over a five-year period and he never once, never once, mentioned his membership in the Black Panther Party. And we were talking about topics where that would have been germane, and his BPP membership didn’t even enter into the conversations in a substantive sort of way. He wasn’t boasting about his membership or even pushing the historic importance of the Party. Now in the aftermath after his arrest, there were all these articles about he was a Black Panther and how he cultivated that philosophy and ideology and everything, and those news accounts weren’t accurate to the Mumia I knew. MS: Did you and did he cover the big MOVE trial? LW: He covered the MOVE trial. And by that time, he was pretty much enamored with MOVE, very close to them, and he had really crossed the line from just being a traditional journalist, traditional in the sense of arms-length reporting. MS: Is it true that he sold the organization’s newspaper? LW: Let me put it like this: I never saw him do it, but I wouldn’t doubt it. MOVE had a col-umn in the Philadelphia Tribune for a number of years, but then the column was canceled. So that’s when they started to produce their own publication. It was quite similar to the publi-cations that you see now being handed out by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. So, yeah, I could imagine him passing that out, while covering the trial. But an important part of his coverage of the trial is that he saw the injustices committed there. If you think his trial was a farce, that trial was a farce with a bucket full of absurdities added. So that had a really profound effect on him. But even more profound in terms of the starkness of the injustice was the trial for the police officers who were caught on news film beating Delbert Africa, after the August 8, 1978 shootout, and that was a trial that took place in 1981, where they brought a special jury from outside the city to ensure fairness to these officers. And after the defense presented its case, after the prosecution presented its case – MS: A jury from the super-suburbs, but finally, it was the judge who took the decision, wasn’t it? LW: Yes, the judge filed a “Not Guilty,” and he issued what was called a directed verdict of acquittal, and that’s a mechanism in the law where the defense attorney can say, listen, the prosecution has not made its case, it has not proven that my client is guilty. The judge then has the power to say yes or no. Here, the judge issued a directed verdict of acquittal that caught both prosecution and defense by surprise, since usually a directed verdict of acquittal follows a request from the defense – what made this one highly unusual is that the defense didn’t ask for it, and of course the prosecution didn’t ask for it! Rarely does a judge inject themselves that way into a trial. MS: It was just like the judge was somehow struck by lightning from heaven… LW: In that connection it is certainly nice to know that that particular judge was a political ally of the now ex-mayor of the Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo. So when Rizzo was elected in the early seventies, a lot of people ran on his ticket. Because he was so popular, anybody who ran with him at the time was all but guaranteed his election. I think that’s how Sabo got into his judgeship! So here we actually have somebody who like – Sabo was not bright, OK. Mumia writes that he was crafty, but he wasn’t intellectually brilliant. That was not his reputation in the legal community. Judges are supposed to be smart… well, they’re supposed to be well versed in the law… and I say: supposed to be… MS: He was just a bully. LW: He was a bully and he was a dummy. And that’s one of the things that I think were really unusual about his opinion that was issued right after Mumia’s 1995 appeals hearing. After an appeals hearing that stretched out for weeks, he issued a hundred-and-fifty-three-page opinion within four days. So what he did in fact was take what the D.A. offered: The prosecution says we think the opinion should go this way, and the defense says, we think the opinion should go this way – MS: Had he had it in a computer, he would just have copied and pasted it… LW: Well, in effect that’s what it was. It was copied and pasted from the prosecutions submission and Sabo’s copying of the prosecutions version even included substantive factual errors, some of which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had to correct in footnotes in their 1998 opinion. So the judge in the Delbert Africa beating trial was an ally of Rizzo. From there, it was not surprising that he would – well, it’s not surprising that he would acquit them, because that was just the modus operandi at the time…the M.O. was to do all that was necessary to keep brutal police out of jail for their crimes. MS: Let’s now hop on to the post-1981 period. What were some of your earlier articles on the whole case? Of course you were also at the scene a couple of hours after the incident… LW: Well, it is accurate for me to say that I covered the Mumia case from the day of his ar-rest. But I really didn’t start writing a lot about the case until the early nineties. Now, when this incident happened I was covering City Council for the Philadelphia Daily News. I was assigned to the Daily News’ City Hall bureau. MS: Did you cover the trial? LW: No, I didn’t cover the trial, for two reasons. Number one, I was assigned to cover City Council, so that was my beat, I wasn’t covering courts. Two, from an ethical perspective, be-cause I knew him, it would not have been ethically appropriate to cover the trial. And, number three, I wasn’t a favorite in the news room, so the big stories got assigned to the favorite re-porters. And number four, not quite mitigating number three, was the fact that I was the head of the black employees organization at the paper, and so, from ’82 to about ’86, I was pushed further and further and further to the periphery of the news room, as retaliation for my role in urging management to hire more minorities and give better coverage to the minority commu-nities. So I didn’t have the opportunity to write. MS: So you were kind of a union guy? LW: Not really a union guy; I was a member of the union, and I participated in union activi-ties, but we, the few black employees, and the one Puerto Rican that was there, we had our own group, and we ended up fighting not only management but the union, because the union was racist. So I got the double wham. MS: You mean that was in the sense of a pressure group for certain minorities. LW: Not only certain ones. Our group was called the Third World Caucus; we were going to call it the Black Caucus, but the one Hispanic guy said, listen, I’d go along with this, but I’m Puerto Rican, and I’m proud of it, so I can’t go with “Black,” I wouldn’t mind being black, but I’m Puerto Rican. This guy is Juan Gonzales – MS: – who is now with Democracy Now!, so you had wonderful company! What papers were you writing for at the time, in the eighties? LW: In the eighties, I was writing for the Philadelphia Daily News; I worked for the Philadelphia Daily News from ’79 to ’89. I also did freelance writing for other publications around the country. MS: Do you see a change in the outlook of the Daily News from the time back then to today? LW: No, the paper has made moves, has made changes, but in terms of the substance of the coverage, it was more style than substance, it never was the “paper of record,” meaning that there are some papers that have a higher rated perception. You know, the Inquirer is per-ceived as the “paper of record.” That’s the official paper for Philadelphia. And the Daily News is just that crazy paper that’s out there, and it’s still that crazy paper that’s out there. MS: Does that also mean that the Daily News from time to time is more open than the “Inky”? LW: Well, it is more open, and it has a more liberal bent, in a conservative way. If we could put it on a political spectrum, the Daily News is about 25 degrees left of center, whereas the Inquirer varies from 5 to 2 degrees left of center to 30 degrees to the right. The Daily News, though, despite it being a recurring target of charges of racism, and despite my personal prob-lems for about a two-to-four-year period with the Daily News management – they were al-ways open and receptive to all of the enterprising and suggestions I came to them with. I was one of the most productive reporters in the paper. On average, I was in the paper five days out of their six-day publishing schedule, and 95 percent of the stories that I had in the paper were stories that I brought to them. You know, because I wasn’t a favored guy, I never got assigned to do a lot of stuff. I thus had to come up with my own things. But that’s what I do! So not being given “assignments” by editors was really no big deal. So the only coverage that I was actually involved in for the Daily News regarding the Mumia case was the articles in the first two days after his arrest, and after that, I dropped out. I monitored it and followed everything, and as things went on, I just became that consumed with the case. So I was reading all the legal pleadings, you know, from the defense and the prosecution, and was aware of this all. After I came back from law school and I had a deeper understanding of the law, then I started writing more about the case, primarily from a legal perspective. MS: That was in the early nineties then? LW: I was in law school from ’88 to ’89, so from ’89 on out, that’s when I really started writ-ing about the Mumia case, both under my byline, Linn Washington, and other pen names, because at one point, I was writing about the Mumia case, when I was working for the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court! So of course I couldn’t say, Linn Washington! So I had a lot of pen names, like Cindy Smith – MS: Like Mumia had. LW: Yes, he had his air names and once when I was visiting Mumia and we were talking, right when we were breaking up, he looked over at me and said: “Hey, say hi to Cindy for me!” And we both started chuckling! Well, he’s smart, and he knows my style of writing, and he knows that I’m the only one who would know the type of minutiae about his case Mumia would apply the law to. MS: When I write to him, I should say, hello William Wellington Cole. LW: Well, do that, and tell him again about Cindy Smith. MS: And my third question now would be, now you’re investigating what happened in 1981 with the murder of other police officers. The treatment, as you told me yesterday, is quite differential from what happened with Mumia, both in terms of the media and in terms of the courts. LW: In preparing to come to Paris and deliver remarks, and especially write a more academic examination, I started some more investigation, and I discovered that three police officers were shot and killed in 1981. The thing that I find very intriguing is the media treatment of it. The second of the two police officers other than Faulkner that were shot and killed – one was on duty, one was off duty –, the off duty shooting, was a horrific murder where the police officer was shot and killed by a drug dealer who was intent on stealing his car. The first police officer that was killed was a sniper attack. Both of those police officers were black. Both of the suspected assailants in these incidents were black. The news coverage on these incidents lasted one day. One day. There were two arrests in those killings but there wasn’t extensive news coverage like when a white officer is slain. MS: What was the background to the sniper attack? LW: The police officer was patrolling a housing project. This officer and his partner had just spent time taking care of a domestic incident, a husband and wife argument, they’re sitting in their patrol car, a bullet comes into the patrol car, blows the police officer’s head off. Two days later, they arrest an eighteen-year-old, who lived in the housing project. According to the news accounts, he confessed, they put him on trial the following a year, but a jury acquits him! So this notion that police and prosecutors and public officials in Philadelphia always propa-gate that evidence of guilt is overwhelming, that the crime is an open and shut case, you know, we have a confession so its open and shut… well there are problems with that! So the sniper shooting led to an acquittal, and no one else was ever arrested. And I don’t think there was any further investigation. The FOP, the police union, doesn’t jump up and down about it or anything, they do have this man’s picture on their website but there isn’t and there wasn’t a big public ruckus to find this officer’s killer. MS: I go to this web site from time to time, but I never heard about the case… LW: By now, the have a listing of all the police officers that were shot in the line of duty, including police officers that were killed in car accidents while on duty. MS: Yes, but these two cases must have been added quite recently, because I know the web-site on all the fallen officers and all that. LW: But the one who was killed in the sniper attack is on the website. And they probably put it up just before you looked it up, so you didn’t see it, they probably just put it up. The police officer who was murdered by the drug dealer is not on the website, because his murder was officially considered off duty. That particular person was arrested, tried, convicted – but sen-tenced to life in prison! Now, the legal distinction here is that this drug dealer planned to kill this police officer for at least a week, including contacting confederates, trying to elicit support of his confederates, his friends, to get him a gun, and then also to help him pull off the murder, and one of them actually was in-volved in helping him to dispose of the body! So if there was ever a clear case of premeditation, which should justify a conviction of murder in the 1st degree, but even more importantly, the death penalty, because of the heinousness of the crime, it would have been that. In Mumia’s case, even in the worst case scenario, where we would say, he did it, it was an act, a spontaneous act, not premeditated, and one that could be possibly mitigated by the fact that he saw his brother being beaten. Now, when people make that argument, the counter-argument from the police and the prosecutors is that he was only beating him with his flash-light, so how did that justify Mumia’s shooting him? The context is the core – the context of the times and the levels of police brutality historically in Philadelphia. We have Philadelphia where two years before the shooting of Faulkner, the federal govern-ment came in and sued all these top city officials, 21 top city officials including the mayor, for aiding and abetting police brutality. In the 1970s, Philadelphia police shot and killed more citizens than the police in New York City, and New York City was six times larger than Philadelphia in terms of population at the time. Ironically, two weeks ago, what was the front page article on the Sunday Philadelphia In-quirer: Philadelphia police shoot and kill more people than police in New York City. MS: So some things never seem to change. LW: Some things never change, or patterns just keep recurring. MS: So keep me posted about the book since I might try to find some German publisher. LW: Once I’m back home, I’m going to start working on it; I’ll send you a proposal! Interviewer: Michael Schiffmann
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