Today we write to you with serious news. Mumia Abu-Jamal is experiencing a severe decline in health and we must act now to secure his release from prison.

While Mumia Abu-Jamal— the 66 year old award winning journalist, former Black Panther, and US political prisoner— has been ill for years with Hepatitis C and other ailments, he is having difficulty breathing and chest pains. Like so many incarcerated elders, he is vulnerable to COVID-19 behind bars. We must act now.

For 39 years, a wide coalition of solidarity organizers have worked tirelessly to release Mumia from prison, where he is unjustly incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, and to abolish the prison industrial complex. After 25 years, organizers were successful in removing him from death row— but the fight continues for his release and the abolition of the prison industrial complex. 

Today we must make phone calls and demand Mumia's release.

Many are wondering how to respond to the current white supremacist threat. We only have to look to history — to those who organized against the brutal culture and laws of segregation in this country — for inspiration on the importance of relationship building, creative strategies and training to dismantle it today. Few people today know that it was transnational solidarity between Black and white Christian clergy in the United States and Indian activists fighting for independence from British colonial rule that introduced the philosophies and strategies of revolutionary nonviolence to the United States, and that this work would build the foundation leading towards the civil rights movement.

In the late 1930s, Black people around the United States were searching for leadership and methods to end racial discrimination. Black publications were reporting on the Indian liberation movement with great interest. Indians and others involved in the movement for Indian independence brought the story to the United States. And Black leaders traveled to India to meet with Gandhi, with growing interest in the method of satyagraha, which translated into “nonviolence.” 

We kicked off our year-end fundraising on Giving Tuesday by asking you to help us raise $5,000 for WRL’s antiwar work. With your help and matching funds from a generous donor we raised $8,192! Thank you!

Now, for the month of December we’re setting an ambitious goal to raise $30,000 for WRL and we need your support! Can you make a gift today to help us get to $10,000 by the end of this week?

WRL thanks and honors the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, three of whom (Carmen Trotta, Martha Hennessy, and Clare Grady) were sentenced last week for their bold Trident disarmament action at the Kings Bay nuclear submarine base in south Georgia. Several of the Kings Bay Plowshares are WRL members and have participated in WRL organized nonviolent actions. All are war tax resisters. 

50 years to the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 2018, over two and a half years ago, the seven cut a lock and entered the base where nuclear-armed US submarines are home-ported, in a plowshares action which included pouring blood, posting an indictment which charged the US government for crimes against peace, posting crime scene tape and hanging banners, one of which said, "The Ultimate Logic of Trident is Omnicide", and damaging Trident D5 monuments. Plowshares actions seek to enact the prophecy in the Biblical book of Isaiah that nations will beat swords into plowshares and study war no more.