On a June morning in 1976, Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic waited in a Phoenix hotel for an informant who’d offered to fill him in on a crooked land deal. Bolles was called to the telephone. Then he was seen walking swiftly out to the hotel parking lot. He climbed into his white Datsun, six sticks of dynamite planted under the car’s frame exploded, and Bolles died 11 days later.
Some of the mystery surrounding the 1981 murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner is of Abu-Jamal’s own making. His new attorneys argue that his trial was tainted by incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, perjured testimony, and prejudicial rulings from the bench. None of that guarantees his innocence. Abu-Jamal has never offered his own full account of what happened the night he was wounded and Faulkner slain by gunfire on a Philadelphia street. Neither has Abu-Jamal’s brother, who was there.
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On July 15 Gilliam produced a column for the Washington Post that took a tougher line. She said Abu-Jamal’s lawyers had raised “serious charges” and now justice demanded a stay of execution and a new trial. But Gilliam was writing only for herself. The board of the NABJ had just voted overwhelmingly to keep the organization on the sidelines. The best the board could do for Abu-Jamal was a workshop during NABJ’s annual convention, which starts August 16 in Philadelphia. That’s a day before he’s scheduled to die.
I said some of this the next day to City Hall reporter Mary Johnson Mitchell of the Sun-Times. A vice president of the Chicago Association of Black Journalists, Mitchell had also missed the CABJ meeting.
“We’re going to Philadelphia, which is the other ugly, ugly thing. We’re finding ourselves in a very embarrassing situation to me. Each person has to ask themselves how they can sit back as a journalist, as a member of the organization, and do nothing.
