All things censored - National Public Radio program allegedly censored a poem - Cover Story

Progressive, The, July, 1997 by Martin Espada

I was an NPR poet. In particular, I was an All Things Considered poet. All Things Considered would occasionally broadcast my poems in conjunction with news stories. One producer even commissioned a New Year's poem from me. "Imagine the Angels of Bread" aired on January 2, 1994, in the same broadcast as the news of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. But now I've been censored by All Things Considered and National Public Radio because I wrote a poem for them about Mumia Abu-Jamal.

As most readers of this magazine are aware, Mumia is an eloquent African American journalist convicted in the 1981 slaying of police officer Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia--under extremely dubious circumstances. Officer Faulkner was beating Mumia's brother with a flashlight when Mumia came upon the scene. In the ensuing confrontation, both Faulkner and Mumia were shot. Though Mumia had a licensed .38 caliber pistol in his taxi that night, and the gun was later found beside him, the initial judgment of the medical examiner who removed the fatal bullet was that it came from a .44 caliber weapon. Several witnesses claimed to see an unidentified gunman fleeing the scene, leaving both Faulkner and Mumia severely wounded in the street.

What happened in court was a tragic pantomime. The trial featured a prosecutor who tried Mumia for his radical politics, including his teenaged membership in the Black Panthers and his journalistic defense of MOVE. Witnesses were coached in their testimony or intimidated into silence by police, and the trial was presided over by a judge notorious for handing out death sentences to black defendants. In August 1995, Mumia came within ten days of being executed by lethal injection. He is seeking a new trial.

Enter NPR. In 1994, National Public Radio agreed to broadcast a series of Mumia's radio commentaries from death row. The Prison Radio Project produced the recordings that April. Suddenly, NPR canceled the commentaries under pressure from the right, particularly the Fraternal Order of Police and Senator Robert Dole. Mumia and the Prison Radio Project sued NPR on First Amendment grounds. That litigation is pending.

This April, I was contacted by the staff at All Things Considered, their first communication since my New Year's poem. Diantha Parker and Sara Sarasohn commissioned me to write a poem for National Poetry Month. The general idea was that the poem should be like a news story, with a journalistic perspective. They suggested I write a poem in response to a news story in a city I visited during the month. Parker called to obtain my itinerary so NPR could give me an assignment relevant to a particular city. Fatefully, they could think of no such assignment. But the idea had found a home in the folds of my brain.

Since April is National Poetry Month, I traveled everywhere. I went from Joplin, Missouri, to Kansas City, to Rochester, to Chicago, to Camden, New Jersey. And then to Philadelphia. I read an article in the April 16 Philadelphia Weekly about Mumia Abu-Jamal. The article described a motion by one of Mumia's lawyers, Leonard Weinglass, to introduce testimony by an unnamed prostitute with new information about the case. This became the catalyst for the poem.

I also visited the tomb of Walt Whitman in nearby Camden, and was deeply moved. Whitman wrote this in "Song of Myself":

The runaway slave came to my house

and stops outside,

I heard his motions crackling the twigs

of the woodpile,

Through the swung half-door of the

kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,

And went where he sat on a log and

led him in and assured him,

And brought water and fill'd a tub for

his sweated body and bruis'd feet.

In my poem, Whitman's tomb became a place of refuge for the "fugitive slave," first for a nameless prostitute, then Mumia.

I faxed the poem to NPR on April 21. On April 24, All Things Considered staff informed me that they would not air the poem. They were explicit: They would not air the poem because of its subject matter--Mumia Abu-Jamal--and its political sympathies.

"NPR is refusing to air this poem because of its political content?" I asked. "Yes," said Diantha Parker.

She cited the "history" of NPR and Mumia, a reference to the network's refusal to air his commentaries. She further explained that the poem was "not the way NPR wants to return to this subject." Such is the elegant bureaucratic language of censorship. Parker would later admit, in an interview with Dennis Bernstein of KPFA-FM, that she "loved" the poem, and that "the poem should have been run, perhaps in a different context."

A few days later, I met Marilyn Jamal, Mumia's former wife. I presented her with the poem and watched her struggle against tears. Then she said: "I promised myself that I wouldn't cry anymore." I concluded that NPR's censorship should come to light.

The people at All Things Considered expressed indignation that I was aware of their "history" with Mumia, and still wrote the poem anyway. Sara Sarasohn, the same producer who solicited my New Year's poem, told me: "We never expected you would write this!" Said Parker to Dennis Bernstein: "He should have known better."