I first went to prison at age nineteen. It was the spring of 2001, and the United States had passed a dystopic milestone one year earlier: more than two million people were now incarcerated in prisons and jails around the country, a higher rate of incarceration and a higher number of people in prison than anywhere else on the planet. Unlike the thousands of other teenagers who went to prison that year, however, my trip was voluntary and brief. I was just a visitor. I was a sophomore in college, interested in social movement history and just beginning to get passionate about school. Ninety miles from my small-town college campus was a maximum-security federal prison that held a former member of the Black Panther Party who had been incarcerated since 1973. My first time inside, I tried to notice all the details—the gun towers surrounding the prison and the perennials cracking through the sidewalk leading up to it, the concertina wire guarding us and the vending machines feeding us. It was just another high-tech institution in our dotcom world—except it wasn’t that at all.
Once inside, we had a grand time laughing, talking politics, and eating overpriced chips and popcorn. During my visit, I learned about life in the Black Panther Party and life in a federal penitentiary. I was learning, in fact, a deeper history of the intersection of black protest and state repression. It was the story not just of state violence but of alternate worldviews, a fact made plain by the letters Veronza Bower sent me, which were dated “ADJ.” The first letter I received from him was dated “30 years 231 days ADJ AKA 22 March 2001.” I learned that ADJ stood for “After the Death of Jonathan Jackson,” the seventeen-year-old brother of radical prisoner and author George Jackson. Both Jacksons died bloody deaths at the hands of the California prison system, Jonathan in an August 1970 attempt to free three prisoners from a Marin County trial and George a year later during a takeover of San Quentin’s solitary confinement unit. After Jonathan was killed, George wrote that his brother’s death marked a new phase of time—a tradition that some dissident prisoners continued to honor more than thirty years later. At the time, I knew little about George Jackson, but I was beginning to learn the parallel cosmology of prison organizing. Because the prison sought to control all aspects of life, dissident prisoners rewrote the taken-for-granted elements of everyday life. They politicized things typically taken for granted, whether through marking time or through identifying as “New Afrikans” to locate their identity within the complex social, political, historical, spatial, and discursive factors that have shaped black life in the United States in, through, and despite confinement.
By the time I met Veronza Bower in person, I had been corresponding with several American political prisoners for three years. As a sixteen-year-old high school junior and naive new organizer, I wanted to have a better understanding of social movement history and practice. But no one I knew was asking those questions in the suburbs of South Florida, where I had recently moved with my family. Through reading various radical newspapers, I came across groups that described themselves as supporting U.S. political prisoners—longtime activists who had been in prison longer than I had been alive. Finally, I had found people who had committed their lives to social justice, people who had retained their political commitments despite old age and restrictive conditions. They had names and addresses. The past suddenly did not seem so remote.
I began corresponding with people who were serving lengthy or life sentences stemming from their involvement in the Black Power, New Left, and Puerto Rican independence movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. I continued to write to them even after my parents forbade it. (I was, after all, a teenager.) I rented a post office box and continued the correspondence—my first lesson in the furtive communications that often accompany prison organizing. My relationships with these women and men, America’s political prisoners, have been a vital part of my subsequent education. Over the years, I joined letters with visits and phone calls and eventually, in some cases, e-mails.
My first teachers about the complex histories of prisons, prison protest, and the long arc of the two-plus decades of protest casually referred to as “the sixties” came from Sundiata Acoli, Herman Bell, Veronza Bower, Marilyn Buck, David Gilbert, Ray Luc Levasseur, Oscar López Rivera, Claude Marks, Jalil Muntaqim, Alicia and Lucy Rodriguez, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Laura Whitehorn, Donna Willmott, and others. These current and former prisoners, their friends and family members, introduced me to the realities of imprisonment, including the ways incarceration intersects with social movements and political economies. They encouraged me to take seriously the study of history and politics, a commitment that ultimately led me to pursue graduate education and the professoriate.
I did not initiate such correspondence out of any particular concern with the prison. To that point, I had been sheltered from the criminal justice system. Rather, I was interested in broader historical lessons and ideas about contemporary politics. But I slowly learned the idioms of incarceration, the petty and picayune rules that have a shared arbitrary nature but whose details vary across institutions: the byzantine mailroom policies and limited programming available, the overpriced phone calls and vending machines, the routine medical neglect that constitutes prison health care, and the bittersweetness of the visiting room. I learned the vernacular of incarceration, the shorthand ways of describing different events and the ways in which language choices convey complex ideological loyalties. What began as an idealistic but innocent act came to dominate my personal and political life. The prison haunted my social networks, as I counted more and more prisoners, former prisoners, and supporters of people in prison among my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I found myself in a growing but little-discussed category: those with incarcerated loved ones. I realized that far from being a static institution, the prison connects histories, ideas, and relationships that have been largely forced on certain communities even as its impacts have been more widely felt.
The prison is also a living archive, steeped in a denial of the histories it confines. My relationships with these prisoners and their loved ones caused me to think more about the space of the prison and all the ways that it had become interwoven with my own life. After serious reflection, it seemed neither coincidental nor conspiratorial that the prison was the best place for a white suburban teenager to learn about the histories and legacies of Black Power and the radicalism it inspired in the decades after World War II. The reasons were political, social, spatial, historical. As both a historian and an organizer, I was eager to learn from the life experiences of the incarcerated. The prison houses untold histories, complex identities, and diverse associations. It is a vital node in a complex network of personal and political ties that stretch across generations. If prison walls could talk, their stories would reveal profound and largely untapped reservoirs of politics and culture.
This book is one exploration of those reserves. From the mid-1950s until the early 1980s, the prison generated, intersected with, and constituted a vital form of black protest. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era tells the story of the multifaceted rebellions that occurred in and through American prisons. It attempts simultaneously to tell the story from the perspective of prison organizers and to uncover the conditions that created such worldviews. The interpretive frame is of course my own, though I have been guided by the rich archival voices of the prison and its captives. For that reason, I have retained all the original spellings and emphases found in direct quotations. The grammar of prison protest, with its alternate spellings and nontraditional modes of accenting key points, is often part of its political critique. Further, except for in direct quotations, I have refrained from the medicalized language of “inmates” and its consonant association with voluntary confinement or rehabilitative care.
Finally, the prison is a massive and monstrous classificatory enterprise, cataloging its captives by narrowly defined and rigidly policed categories of race and gender. As a result, I pay particular attention to how even prisoners working against the prison are still shaped by its confines. Their thinking about gender and race animates the following pages, as I believe it does the intellectual life of the prison itself. Prisoners are institutionally separated by sex yet divided by race, a fact that has often contributed toward making race a central and explicit subject of political critique. I am interested in what imprisoned intellectuals might teach us about the great American paradox—the coexistence of the mutually exclusive categories of freedom and racism, democracy and confinement—while recognizing the limitations placed on them by their environment.
Dissident prisoners, their family members, and a large, sometimes surprising supporting cast of figures populate this story, conveying some of the counterintuitive sense of possibility that has emerged from among the world’s bleakest locations. Perhaps, then, the critical reflection on this history can contribute to eliminating the ongoing tragedy of American imprisonment.