Live from death row.

• Author: Abu-Jamal, Mumia
• Position: Cover Story

The last yard of the day is finally called. "Capitals! Fourth, fifth, and sixth tier--YARD UP!" the corpulent correctional officer bellows, his rural accent alien to the urban ear. One by one, cells are unlocked for the daily trek from cell to cage. Each man is pat-searched by guards armed with batons and then scanned by a metal detector.

Once the inmates are encaged, the midsummer sky rumbles, its dark clouds swell, pregnant with power and water. A bespectacled white-shirt turns his pale face skyward, examining nature's quickening portent. The rumbles grow louder as drops of rain sail earthward, splattering steel, brick, and human.

"Yard in!" the white-shirt yells, sparking murmurs of resentment among the men.

"Yard in! Shit, man, we just out here!"

The guards adopt a cajoling, rather than threatening, attitude. "C'mon, fellas--yard in, yard in. Ya' know we can't leave y'uns out here when it gits ta thunderin' an' lightnin'."

"Oh, why not? Y'all 'fraid we gonna get ourself electrocuted?" a prisoner asks.

"Ain't that a bitch?" adds another. "They must be afraid that if we do get electrocuted by lightnin', they won't have no jobs and won't get paid!"

A few guffaws, and the trail from cage to cell thickens.

Although usually two hours long, today's yard barely lasts ten minutes, for fear that those condemned to death by the state may perish, instead, by fate.

For approximately 2,400 people locked in state and federal prisons, life is unlike that in any other institution. These are America's condemned, who bear a stigma far worse than "prisoner." These are America's death-row residents: men and women who walk the razor's edge between half-life and certain death in thirty-eight states or under the jurisdiction of the United States. The largest death row stands in Texas (324 people: 120 African Americans, 144 whites, 52 Hispanics, four Native Americans, and four Asian Americans); the smallest are in Connecticut (two whites), New Mexico (one Native American, one white), and Wyoming (two whites). You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else. African Americans, a mere 12 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death-row population. There, too, you will find this writer.

Don't tell me about the valley of the shadow of death. I live there. In south-central Pennsylvania's Huntingdon County, a 100-year-old prison stands, its Gothic towers projecting an air of foreboding, evoking a gloomy mood of the Dark Ages. I and some forty-five other men spend about twenty-two hours a day in a six-by-ten-foot cell. The additional two hours may be spent outdoors, in a chain-link fenced box, ringed by concertina razor wire, under the gaze of gun turrets.

Welcome to Pennsylvania's death row.

I'm a bit stunned. Several days ago the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed my conviction and sentence of death, by a vote of four justices (three did not participate). As a black journalist who was a Black Panther way back in my yon teens, I've often studied America's long history of legal lynchings of Africans. I remember a front page of the Black Panther newspaper, bearing the quote: "A black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect," attributed to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, of the infamous Dred Scott case, where America's highest court held that neither Africans nor their "free" descendants are entitled to the rights of the Constitution. Deep, huh? It's true.

Perhaps I'm naive, maybe I'm just stupid--but I thought the law would be followed in my case, and the conviction reversed. Really.

Even in the face of the brutal Philadelphia MOVE massacre of May 13, 1985, that led to Ramona Africa's frame-up, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Clement Lloyd, Allan Blanchard, and countless other police slaughters of blacks from New York to Miami, with impunity, my faith remained. Even in the face of this relentless wave of antiblack state terror, I thought my appeals would be successful. I still harbored a belief in U.S. law.

The realization that my appeal had been denied was a shocker. I could understand intellectually that American courts are reservoirs of racist sentiment and have historically been hostile to black defendants, but a lifetime of propaganda about American "justice" is hard to shrug off.

I need but look across the nation, where, as of October 1986, blacks constituted some 40 percent of men on death row, or across Pennsylvania, where, as of August 1988, sixty-one of 113 men--over 50 percent--are black, to see the truth, a truth hidden under black robes and promises of equal rights. Blacks constitute just over 9 percent of Pennsylvania's population and just under 11 percent of America's.

As I said, it's hard to shrug off, but maybe we can do it together. How? Try out this quote I saw in a 1982 law book, by a prominent Philadelphia lawyer named David...