ABSTRACT
Abu-Jamal is the only classic radical chic cause to survive into the 1990s. He is the focus of arguments about race, the death penalty, and radical attempts, here and abroad, to depict America as a vindictive, racist nation. Because Abu-Jamal has a powerful intellect and writes well, the more sophisticated segment of the cultural left quickly took to him too. Officer Daniel Faulkner stopped a Volkswagen driven by Abu-Jamal's brother, William Cook, apparently for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. When Cook turned and struck Faulkner, the officer began beating Cook with a seventeen-inch flashlight. Abu-Jamal, who was moonlighting as a taxi driver, came running over, armed with a.38. One of the oddities of the case is that Abu-Jamal has never explicitly denied that he shot Faulkner. Abu-Jamal is not Martin Luther King, Jr., not a folk hero and not anyone who should be honored at a college commencement. But he ought to get a new trial.
