A Call to Action: Abolish the Death Penalty

A Call to Action: Abolish the Death Penalty

Howard Zinn delivers this speech at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1996, helping to launch the Campaign to End the Death Penalty alongside Cornel West, Bill Keach, Robert Meeropol, and former death row inmate Lawrence Hayes. He argues that the anger surrounding the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is not really about one man alone, just as the outrage over Rodney King reflected a much longer history of accumulated injustice. Zinn traces opposition to capital punishment back to Beccaria's 1764 essay "On Crimes and Punishment" during the Enlightenment, to British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and to post-Revolutionary Americans who cut down the king's long list of capital crimes. He notes that Karl Marx, writing for the New York Tribune in the 1850s, called capital punishment intolerable in any civilized country, a warning Zinn extends to any self-described Marxist state that still practices it. He insists that capital punishment cannot be separated from poverty and racism, renaming it "capitalist punishment" and linking it to the broader injustice of a prison system holding a million and a half people, disproportionately poor and Black. He recalls that the Supreme Court briefly struck down capital punishment as arbitrary and capricious only after a sustained NAACP campaign fought case by case, and that the Court later reinstated it on a 5-4 vote. He cites a 1982 case in which the Court, again 5-4, upheld the conviction of a Black man by an all-white jury after every prospective Black juror had been struck, ruling that discrepancy in justice is "inevitable" and that no "constitutionally significant" risk of racial bias had been shown. Zinn situates Mumia Abu-Jamal within a history of Americans executed or targeted for their politics: the Chicago anarchists put to death after the Haymarket Affair in 1887, Sacco and Vanzetti executed in Boston in 1927, and the Rosenberg case. He argues political radicals receive harsher sentences than others for comparable offenses. He turns the accusation of criminality back on the state itself, noting its long record of violence, including the killing of two striking tailors in New York in 1850, the Republic Steel Massacre, and the Ludlow Massacre, and extending the charge to war. He says he does not seek capital punishment for Nixon, Johnson, or Ford, naming Ford's role in killing Cambodians and about eighty-seven Americans in an incident off the Cambodian coast after the Vietnam War, and invokes the My Lai Massacre as another instance of hypocrisy without accountability. He recalls that police in the MOVE case assembled six hundred officers and a helicopter, dropped bombs on houses, and killed eleven people, including five children, with no one ever charged. He argues that public support for capital punishment reflects what people are told repeatedly through media portrayals of heroic police and vicious murderers, and that public opinion can shift when confronted with indignation and information. He closes by arguing that lasting change requires transforming the distribution of wealth and the economic and social system itself, while insisting that in the short term people must still struggle to save those, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, facing unjust execution by the state.

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Political Essay, Abolitionist Literature, Social Criticism · 1,874 words

First lines

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 11, 1996.

Zinn helped launch the Campaign to End the Death Penalty at this event with Cornel West, Bill Keach, Robert Meeropol, and former death row inmate Lawrence Hayes. Throughout his life, Zinn corresponded with prisoners, spoke about the racism and injustice of US prisons, and worked for the abolition of capital punishment.

Genres

Tags

capital punishment · abolition · death penalty · criminal justice · human rights · social justice · activism · advocacy · civil rights · legal reform · social reform · punishment systems

What this Textopian page supports

A Call to Action: Abolish the Death Penalty is listed on Textopian as a speech by Howard Zinn, dated Date unknown.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Howard Zinn