Mumia Abu Jamal is one of the world’s best-known political prisoners. Convicted in 1982 of murdering a Philadelphia police officer in a trial filled with prosecutorial misdeeds, falsehoods and other manipulations, he remains locked up in Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution-Mahanoy. Despite ongoing health issues, censorship and the repression that is part of a prison sentence, Jamal continues to write and speak about numerous issues related to mass incarceration, war, white supremacy and politics in general. Jamal’s ongoing communications have helped to keep his imprisonment, the imprisonment of other US political prisoners, and the nature of the US prison-industrial complex in the public eye. These communications have included award-winning books, censored radio broadcasts, interviews, recorded speeches at college commencement exercises and more. This is despite the never-ending attempts by the state’s repressive apparatus—from the Justice Department to the US police union known as the Fraternal Order of Police(FOP). For those who don’t know who the FOP is, let me put it as simply as possible: it is an extremely right-wing/fascist organization that considers police to be above the law and represents over 350,000 law enforcement officers in the United States. One can be certain that whenever a resident of the United States is shot by police officers, the FOP will have their back. This is the case in virtually every such circumstance of that nature.
Recently, City Lights publishers released a book titled Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader. The book is a collection of excerpts from essays, speeches and other texts regarding the nature and history of enslavement and imprisonment throughout US history. The selections are radical in nature and, when considered as a whole, provide an eloquent and determined argument for the abolition of prisons. Just as the movement to abolish slavery in the United States worked from an essential premise that there was no such thing as a good form of slavery, so does the 
modern prison abolition movement operate from a premise that there is no such thing as a good prison. As Beneath the Mountain makes clear, this is even truer when that system of incarceration is fundamentally a continuation of the aforementioned system of slavery. Let me repeat that. The US prison system is a continuation of the system of chattel slavery—a system that involved the kidnapping, sale and breeding of Africans and their descendants for the profit of the powerful European colonists and their descendants. After years of struggle that culminated in a violent and bloody civil war, the US government under Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This official act not only declared that “all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free,” it also destroyed millions of dollars worth of assets (the enslaved) held by the slavers. It did not take long for the slavers to figure out other ways to keep their property working for them. As history moved on, this post-slavery reality would ultimately become the system of mass incarceration in place today.
One intention of this book is to trace the continuity of this project of white supremacist repression. More importantly, it is to show the contrasting resistance to that project. Mumia Abu Jamal’s life is that resistance encapsulated. The reader begins their journey with two short selection from slave resisters: the first from Ona “Oney” Judge Staines, whose captors were George and Martha Washington; the second from Nat Turner, who led an uprising in 1831 against various slavers in Southampton County, Virginia. The action resulted in his arrest and execution, but continues to serve as an example of resistance to fighters against repression around. The book continues, featuring readings authored by a list of North American fighters against oppression that spans the centuries of the colonial and US presence on the continent. Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Mother Jones, Nicolas Sacco, Angelo Herndon, the Rosenbergs, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, Angela Davis and George Jackson, Martin Sostre, Assata Shakur, Rita “Bo” Brown, Safiya Asya Bukhari, Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, Mumia, Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, the Free Alabama Movement, Ed Mead, Safear Ness, and Saleem Holbrook. As the reader can see, it’s a list that includes slavery abolitionists, labor organizers, communists, fighters in the struggle for Black liberation, anti-imperialists, prison organizers and prison abolitionists.
The title is a phrase taken from comments made by political prisoner Angela Davis after she was acquitted of conspiracy and murder charges in 1972. Each entry is preceded by a brief introduction describing who the speaker/writer is which also explains their inclusion in the collection. Beneath the Mountain is more than a collection of excerpts from the people’s side of US history. This text is also an introduction to that history, a useful instruction and an inspiration. In a time when considerably tamer versions of this version of history are being censored and banned—removed from schools, libraries and universities around the United States—its publication becomes more than just important. It becomes essential.
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