NJ Teacher Whose Students Sent Get-Well Cards to Mumia

Defend Marylin Zuniga

By Class Struggle Education Workers

Marylin Zuniga speaking at Orange, New Jersey school board meeting,  April 14.(Photo: NJ.com) 

Class Struggle Education Workers stands in solidarity with Orange, NJ elementary school teacher Marylin Zuniga who was suspended after her third grade students sent “get well” messages to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the re­nowned black radical journalist who was framed and convicted in the 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Despite Mumia’s innocence, he was sentenced to death and kept on Death Row for 29 years. He is still imprisoned for life while the authorities are determined to silence this “voice of the voiceless” one way or another.

Zuniga’s suspension by the Orange school board stemmed from a lesson she taught on civil rights leaders back in February during Black History Month. She asked her class of black and Hispanic students to consider the meaning of a quote from Jamal: “So long as one just person is silenced, there is no justice.”

On March 30, Jamal went into diabetic shock with life-threatening high blood sugar and was taken from prison to an outside hospital. Two days later he was suddenly returned to SCI Mahanoy, the same prison whose medical personnel had failed to diagnose or treat him. That’s when the kids sent their cards. Zuniga told a WABC reporter, “In April, I men­tioned to my students that Mumia was very ill and they told me they would like to write ‘get well’ letters to Mumia.”

Zuniga’s victimization was not because school children sent cards to prisoners but because the prisoner is Mumia Abu-Jamal. The suspension is part and parcel of a decades-long vendetta against Jamal spearheaded by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), dutifully whipped up by the right-wing media, and supported by both Democrats and Republican politicians. John McNesby, the president of the Philadelphia FOP wasted no time in attacking Zuniga. “It’s absolutely not teaching them anything except how to interact with a convicted cop killer.” (New York Daily News, 11 April).

Jamal has been in the crosshairs of the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia police since he was a teenage member of the Black Panther Party. His subsequent courageous and eloquent writing and radio broadcasts in Philadelphia earned him both the reputation as the “voice of the voiceless” and the undying hatred of the Philly PD and the FOP. The cops shot and beat Jamal on the night Faulkner was killed, then railroaded him onto death row. For thirty years, they tried to execute him. In December 2011, Jamal’s death sen­tence was overturned in favor of “life with no parole. “Now Jamal’s enemies hope medical neglect and abuse will finish the job. For those who are determined to silence Mumia, the third-grade class at the Forest Street Elementary School in Orange NJ can’t be allowed to get in the way.

There is opposition to Zuniga’s suspension and possible firing. Prominent academics including Noam Chomsky and Cornell West signed a letter from Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal and sent it to the superintendant of the Orange public schools calling for her immediate reinstatement. The letter likens the messages from Zuniga’s class to the letters written by students worldwide that were sent to Nelson Mandela while a prisoner of South African apartheid and branded a terrorist by the U.S. State Department.

 When the Orange school board met on April 14, a vociferous crowd of Zuniga supporters demanded that the teacher be allowed to speak. Zuniga stated that she was “very proud of my students’ work” while conceding that she believed she had erred in publicizing the students’ messages online for which she apologized. As Zuniga reaffirmed her love for her students, their families and Orange community, as well as her desire to continue teaching at Forest Street Elementary School, the crowd cheered “Let her teach!” The school board tabled the issue of Zuniga’s fate and will meet again in May.

There should be more teachers like Marylin Zuniga. Class Struggle Education Workers demands: Full reinstatement for Marylin Zuniga. Let her teach!