The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes.
1. Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates, 64; Frank Browning, “Organizing behind Bars,” in Atkins and Glick, Prisons, 132–39. The full manifesto is reprinted in Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates, 183–86, and Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 65–74. The version in If They Come in the Morning lists twenty-nine demands; Berkman lists thirty-one yet redacts two demands concerning freedom for “condemned prisoners, avowed revolutionaries, and prisoners of war” as well as for certain “celebrated and prominent political prisoners.” Those two demands, 16 and 19, appear in Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 72.
2. Quoted in Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 74.
3. Katsiaficas, Imagination; Prashad, Darker Nations.
4. David Johnson, interview.
5. Reprinted in Joy James, New Abolitionists, 303–10. The title bridged the Folsom demands, titled an “Anti-Oppression Platform,” with the Republic of New Afrika’s “Anti-Depression Platform.”
6. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog; Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Cacho, Social Death.
7. There is, as far as I know, no global comparative history of imprisonment and its relationship to either colonial regimes or social movements, though Harlow takes up this question in regard to literature in Barred. For other interdisciplinary examples of different national studies that address this subject, see Feldman, Formations of Violence; Buntman, Robben Island.
8. Whitman, Harsh Justice.
9. Caleb Smith, Prison and the American Imagination; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.
10. Henry Bibb and Fountain Hughes quoted in Camp, Closer to Freedom, 13.
11. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog; Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
12. For overviews, see Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name; Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness.
13. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 16; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 12, 701. For the carceral experiences of enslavement, see Paton, No Bond; Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 74–95; O’Donovan, “Universities of Social and Political Change.”
14. Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy.
15. Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 210; Lubiano, “Black Ladies,” 352.
16. Beth Ritchie argues in Arrested Justice that such metaphors are explicitly suited for black women’s engagements with domestic violence and state violence.
17. Angela Y. Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 47.
18. Baker, “Critical Memory.”
19. Kelley, Freedom Dreams; Moten, “Uplift and Criminality”; Harney and Moten, Undercommons; Wagner, Disturbing the Peace.
20. Larry Weiss, interview.
21. Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 7.
22. Rodríguez, “‘Social Truth’”; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Cacho, Social Death.
23. “San Quentin 6: David Johnson . . . a Letter,” The Conspiracy, June 1972, 6, NLGC, Oversized Box 8.
24. Lubiano, “Black Nationalism.”
25. Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent; Gaines, Uplifting the Race; Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents; Joy James, Transcending the Talented Tenth.
26. See Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, especially 265–314.
27. Attica Brothers, “The Five Demands,” quoted in Wicker, Time to Die, 401.
28. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 20.
29. Ibid.; Raiford, “Photography.”
30. One of the first scholarly histories of prison protest, which is still widely cited, is Cummins, Rise and Fall. Cummins conducted valuable research but remains troublesomely antagonistic to prison activism. He sees the prison movement as a violence-obsessed phenomenon premised on naive white fascination with dangerous black criminal men. Such a one-sided view separates prison organizing from other social movements of the time period and plays into a range of problematic assumptions about black criminality and antiracist mobilization. It is also historically insufficient, for he ignores the centrality of print culture to later prison radicalism and neglects its connection to other social movements at the time and outside of California. My work is indebted to a growing, interdisciplinary body of scholarship studying prison radicalism. In addition to works already cited, see Lee Bernstein, America Is the Prison; Bissonette, When the Prisoners; Burton-Rose, “War behind Walls”; Chase, “Civil Rights”; Chase, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt”; Chard, “SCAR’d Times”; Chard, “Rallying for Repression”; Gómez, “Resisting Living Death”; Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil; Jacobs, “Prisoners’ Rights Movement”; Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Hames-Garcia, Fugitive Thought; Samuels, “Improvising on Reality”; Larry E. Sullivan, Prison Reform Movement; Thompson, “Blinded”; Joy James, States of Confinement; Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals; Joy James, New Abolitionists; Joy James, Warfare.
31. My analysis here differs from several scholars who argue for the South’s central role in explaining the rise of the carceral state generally and mass incarceration in particular. Robert Perkinson argues that Texas is the worst purveyor of imprisonment in the country and claims that the nation’s reliance on incarceration can be explained through Texas history. While his is the strongest such claim, others argue for a distinctly Southern view of carceral expansion. The popularity of describing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim Crow would seem to provide a colloquial extension of this claim to the South’s explanatory power. Others locate the rise of the carceral state either in the penitentiary model of the colonial era or, for reasons that will be made clear later in this chapter and book, see it as a product of California and the particularities of Sunbelt power. Current scholarship on the carceral state seeks to trace its emergence through one of three prominent pathways: the plantation, the penitentiary, and the political economy of post-1968 global capitalism, especially in Sunbelt states of the South and West. I remain eclectic in my own analysis of its creation. Regional explanations contribute a great deal to our understanding of many key dynamics of the carceral state but they cannot explain its power in toto. For Southern and Sunbelt emphases, see Perkinson, Texas Tough; Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name; Chase, “Civil Rights” (though Chase pursues a Sunbelt argument rather than the Texas exceptionalism that Perkinson demonstrates in his otherwise excellent book). Alexander, New Jim Crow, popularized a metaphor of the southern racial order as an explanatory tool for understanding contemporary mass incarceration. McLennan, Crisis of Imprisonment, is perhaps the best recent exploration of the penitentiary system as origin of contemporary U.S. prison politics. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, is the best example of the claim that California led the country into prison expansion. For a literary attempt to synthesize the penitentiary and the plantation, see Caleb Smith, Prison and the American Imagination. For historical studies, see Christianson, With Liberty for Some; Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment.
32. Periodizing the Black Power movement, in space and in time and in relation to the civil rights movement, has preoccupied scholars in what has become known as “new Black Power studies.” Of particular concern has been seeing Black Power in dialogic and dialectic relation to the civil rights movement rather than the aberration that several earlier scholars (and others) described. Some, including Jacqueline Dowd Hall and Nikhil Pal Singh, see Black Power as a subset of a “long civil rights movement,” a view rejected by Sundiata K. Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang for blurring temporal, spatial, and strategic distinctions between civil rights and Black Power; to them, Black Power was a deliberate break from the civil rights movement. An emerging synthesis in the literature, as exemplified in works by Donna Murch and Jeanne Theoharis, among many others, suggests that Black Power was a break from the civil rights movement made by individuals and organizations who, in various ways, could trace their origins to and through the civil rights movement. See, for example, Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour; Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “Long Civil Rights Movement”; Singh, Black Is a Country; O’Dell, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder; Murch, Living for the City; Theoharis, Rebellious Life; Cha-Jua and Lang, “‘Long Movement’ as Vampire.”
33. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 7.
34. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Dayan, Law Is a White Dog; Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy; Shoatz, Maroon; Garland, Culture of Control.
35. More generally on the afterlife of slavery, see Sexton, “People-of-Color Blindness”; Hartman, Lose Your Mother.
36. I am deeply indebted to scholars of California history and politics, most especially Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; HoSang, Racial Propositions; Murch, Living for the City; Widener, Black Arts West. However, as stated above, I am not interested in pursuing a regionalist explanation for the rise and expansion of the carceral state. I see California as a historically significant and historiographically useful staging ground in which to examine larger national dynamics of prison expansion and prison organizing. Regions have their own character, of course, and I do not mean to suggest that California is interchangeable with Maine, North Carolina, or elsewhere. Nor do I wish to elide the fact that a few select states—California chief among them—expanded their prison system at much faster rates than others. I maintain, however, that the carceral state is the result of a convergence of factors that transcend particular states. Part of what I hope to draw our attention to by referring to captivity as a national problem is the way in which carceral control, from policing and surveillance to confinement and execution, is at the core of the American racial state.
37. Widener, Black Arts West, 57.
38. For Oakland migration, see Murch, Living for the City; the statistics cited in the text appear on p. 16. The notion of a “southern diaspora” comes from Gregory, Southern Diaspora. For more on black migration and the remaking of California politics, see also Widener, Black Arts West; Keith Collins, Black Los Angeles; George, No Crystal Stair; Horne, Fire This Time; Wilkerson, Warmth of Other Suns. For the racial politics of Los Angeles, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz; Horne, Fire This Time, especially 3–43; Sides, L.A. City Limits; Avila, Popular Culture; Gaye Theresa Johnson, Spaces of Conflict; Laslett, Sunshine Was Never Enough; Escobar, “Dialectics of Repression”; Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left; Flamming, Bound for Freedom.
39. Quoted in HoSang, Racial Propositions, 1. See also HoSang, “Race and the Mythology.”
40. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 7.
41. Ibid. More generally, see National Research Council, Growth of Incarceration; Gottschalk, Prison; Pew Center, “One in 100”; Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters”; Erica Goode, “Incarceration Rates for Blacks Have Fallen Sharply, Report Shows,” NYT, February 27, 2013, A12.
1. Mills, This Little Light, 61; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake.
2. Quoted in Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 89.
3. Wagner, Disturbing the Peace.
4. There is a growing literature on southern prisons from the end of the Civil War through World War II, with particular emphasis on convict leasing. See Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name; Blue, Doing Time; Chase, “Civil Rights”; Curtin, Black Prisoners; LeFlouria, “Convict Women”; Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’”; Lichtenstein, Twice the Work; Mancini, One Dies; Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”; Perkinson, Texas Tough. For the connection between slave patrols and policing, see Hadden, Slave Patrols. Some of these scholars, Perkinson in particular, provide a regional explanation of mass incarceration, arguing that the U.S. carceral state has its origins in a southern (or, in Perkinson’s case, specifically Texan) system of confinement. While I lean toward Caleb Smith’s meditation on the prison as a combination of both the plantation and the penitentiary—a combination that blended the brutal biological racism of the South with the managerial scientific racism of the North—I am less interested here in the regional roots of mass incarceration than I am in the regional specificities of prison protest as an extension of and contribution to the national and transnational black freedom struggle. See Caleb Smith, Prison and the American Imagination, especially 40–50, 141–71.
5. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 375.
6. Gregory, Southern Diaspora.
7. Murakawa, “Origins,” 237, 236.
8. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; McGuire, At the Dark End.
9. Murakawa, “Origins,” 243.
10. For Alabama and Mississippi, see Woodruff, American Congo; Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale; Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes; McWhorter, Carry Me Home. On police power, see Dubber, Police Power; Wagner, Disturbing the Peace.
11. See the explications in Dayan, Law Is a White Dog; Dayan, Story of Cruel and Unusual; Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
12. My argument here builds on Vesla Weaver’s claims that law and order served as a grander strategy of political realignment—a “frontlash” counterinsurgency instead of a “backlash” reaction. See Weaver, “Frontlash.” See also Murakawa, “Electing to Punish.” See also Schrader, “Local Policing.”
13. For a useful but unsatisfying exception to this absence of historiography, see Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail. See also Barkan, Protesters on Trial; Zinn, SNCC.
14. Quoted in Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 71.
15. Quoted in Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 279.
16. Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail, 75.
17. Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 307.
18. For more on these cases, see Law, “Sick of the Abuse”; Thuma, “‘Not a Wedge.’”
19. Recounting the civil rights movement’s emphasis on direct action and voluntary arrest undoubtedly skews toward a regional and national telling rather than a fine-tuned local history of the movement. The movement’s strategy of filling the jails required people, and those people came from across the country: they were the rank-and-file churchwomen who were the movement’s backbone, the preachers who fancied themselves leaders of the movement, high school and college students from the North and South, and others. In addition to the logistical reality that no one city or town had enough people willing to submit to jail for (potentially) long periods of time to make the strategy effective, the issue of publicity was also relevant. It was far more newsworthy and far less typical to have swarms of activists descend on an area and its jails. This macrofocus, however, does not suggest that “local people” were removed from this strategy. Indeed, by lore and by experience, they were often already acquainted with the local jail or prison. Local residents routinely joined with activists from across the region and throughout the country in their efforts to fill the jails. For all the tensions between local and national, between the sought-after celebrities and the unknown organizers, civil rights activists bonded through a shared engagement with the criminal justice system and a shared understanding that the American prison symbolized a larger system of white supremacy. For the synthesis of local and national organizers in this direct action strategy, see Arsenault, Freedom Riders; Dittmer, Local People; Charles Payne, Light of Freedom.
20. Rodríguez, Forced Passages.
21. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes, 8.
22. Among the women who found themselves facing persecution as part of this Red Scare/race scare era were Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish communist in New York who was executed in 1953 along with her husband, Julius, and Rose Lee Ingram, a black sharecropper in Georgia who was incarcerated with her two sons for killing a man who tried to sexually assault her in 1947. Ingram and her sons were freed in 1959. For an excellent analysis of the defense campaign as discourse and political orientation, with particular attention to the racial and gender dynamics of such efforts, see Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law.
23. For more on these cases, see Carter, Scottsboro; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Gore, Radicalism; Heard, Eyes of Willie McGee; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; McDuffie, Sojourning; Mitford, Fine Old Conflict.
24. See, for example, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights; Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice.
25. Baker, “Critical Memory,” 18–19.
26. The list of civil rights memoirs and biographies is long, but many of them treat the jail experience as a central and pivotal point in the narrative. For a partial sampling, see Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution; Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart; James Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries; Henry and Curry, Aaron Henry; John Lewis with D’Orso, Walking with the Wind; Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry; Mullins, Diane Nash; Theoharis, Rebellious Life; Manis, Fire; Andrew Young, Easy Burden.
27. Perkinson, “‘Hell Exploded’”; Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began. This process was not without its complications, as the interventions of folklorists—especially the Lomax team—naturalized a connection between race and crime; see Wagner, Disturbing the Peace, 185–237.
28. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 15–16.
29. McGuire, At the Dark End, 100.
30. Branch, Parting the Waters, 174; Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 110.
31. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 65. For similar descriptions, see McGuire, At the Dark End; Branch, Parting the Waters. More generally on the movement’s embrace of imprisonment as part of its political development, see Zinn, SNCC; Halberstam, Children. The photographic iconicity of the movement—its photogenic quality—can be seen in other mug shots of arrested demonstrators. See, for example, Etheridge, Breach of Peace.
32. Rustin quoted in Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 64. See also the description in Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 72–77.
33. For descriptions of this arrest, see, among others, Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 55–56; Branch, Parting the Waters, 160–62. For a longer history of the antilynch mob, see Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law.
34. Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 68; Branch, Parting the Waters, 176–77, 183.
35. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 228.
36. Vaught, “Narrow Cells,” 118–20.
37. Historians have identified the coexistence of Gandhian pacifism with armed self-defense among southern civil rights activists throughout the 1950s and 1960s, owing in part to a long regional history of gun ownership and a high percentage of military veterans. For overviews, see Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; Lance Hill, Deacons for Defense; Strain, Pure Fire; Umoja, We Will Shoot Back; Wendt, Spirit and the Shotgun.
38. As Slate notes in Colored Cosmopolitanism, 203, “Many movement participants were drawn less to Gandhian nonviolence (ahimsa, or non-harm) than to Gandhian nonviolent civil disobedience (satyagraha).”
39. Carson, In Struggle, 11. See also Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights.
40. Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality.
41. Quoted in Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution, 86.
42. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 143.
43. Southern Regional Council, The Delta Prisons, quoted in Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery,” ix.
44. Chase, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt.”
45. Quoted in Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 300, 334.
46. Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 279.
47. In a step in this direction, Joy James anthologizes King’s letter in Imprisoned Intellectuals.
48. For more on the letter, see Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers; Branch, Parting the Waters, 737–46.
49. King, Why We Can’t Wait, 73.
50. Ibid., 16.
51. Ibid., 30.
52. John Lewis with D’Orso, Walking with the Wind, 107.
53. Quoted in Branch, Parting the Waters, 770. On Birmingham, see Branch, Parting the Waters, 708–802; McWhorter, Carry Me Home.
54. Branch, Parting the Waters, 756–78. For more on freedom songs in the movement, see Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing”; Carawan and Carawan, Sing for Freedom. For more expansive considerations of freedom songs, see Redmond, Anthem; Feldstein, How It Feels.
55. Quoted in Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail, 71.
56. Michael Simmons, interview. Simmons was, by that point, a part of SNCC’s Atlanta Project. For more, see Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid.
57. Quoted in Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail, 48.
58. See, for example, Kosek, Acts of Conscience; Tracy, Direct Action; Bennett, Radical Pacifism; Cornell, “‘For a World’”; Cornell, Oppose. For more on Gandhi’s influence on a longer arc of black activism, see Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism; Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet.
59. Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 204. Scholars have identified a more abiding political rather than tactical or philosophical connection between the southern civil rights movement and the Indian struggle for independence. See Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism; David L. Lewis, King. Slate notes that earlier generations of black activists took more inspiration from Gandhi as a strong, determined anticolonial leader than as an apostle of nonviolence.
60. Branch, Parting the Waters, 550–53.
61. Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution, 210; the strike is described on 206–11. See also Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 304–81.
62. Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail, 50. Later, however, Colley makes the untenable claim that “white male civil rights workers generally faced the greatest danger in going to jail” (101).
63. Ibid., 93–94. See also McGuire, At the Dark End.
64. Cagin and Dray, We Are Not Afraid.
65. French journalist Régis Debray first wrote of the foco theory in Revolution in the Revolution? Elements of its approach can be heard in Guevara, Che Guevara Speaks. For one of many critiques, see Saldaña-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination.
66. See, for example, Crespino, In Search; Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy; Lassiter, Silent Majority; Sokol, There Goes My Everything. Although they exclude black journalists and others from their study, Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, note the critical role played by white southern racial moderates at several regional newspapers, among them the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
67. Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 364; Branch, Parting the Waters, 726; O’Dell, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder, 145–59.
68. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes, 44.
69. Branch, Parting the Waters, 242–43; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 108–9.
70. Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 257.
71. For more on events in Albany, see Arsenault, Freedom Riders, 468–76; Branch, Parting the Waters, 524–62; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 173–230.
72. Sargent, Civil Rights Revolution, 63; Vaught, “Narrow Cells,” 133.
73. Quoted in Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 399. Within an earlier generation of civil rights scholarship, Carmichael’s widely quoted speech has been typically described as the origin of Black Power as well as of the division of the civil rights coalition.
1. Willie Sundiata Tate, interview. Unless otherwise noted, the rest of this section comes from my interview with him.
2. It is difficult to track the extent of violence in prisons, as many incidents are not reported or documented. Further, the reputations of different institutions are best grasped through those who have experienced it. I rely therefore on oral history testimony not only to document the extent of the violence at DVI but also to understand the reputations of that and other facilities. Several people I interviewed used the phrase “gladiator school,” suggesting that it was a common understanding for people incarcerated there.
3. Among an impressive and growing body of literature, see Goldstein, Poverty in Common; Katznelson, Fear Itself; Mantler, Power to the Poor; Nelson, Body and Soul; Sugrue, Sweet Land.
4. The phrase “carceral landscape” comes from Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 209–43. Johnson uses it to describe nineteenth-century chattel slavery.
5. Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?; Sugrue, Origins; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.
6. Banfield, Unheavenly City; Clark, Youth in Revolt; Clark, Dark Ghetto.
7. Lenin, Nationalism. For elaborations within a Black Power context, see Cruse, Crisis; Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?; Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power.
8. James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966, available at http://www.thenation.com/article/159618/report-occupied-territory; Frank Van Riper, “‘Our Ghettoes Are Concentration Camps,’” New York Sunday News, December 29, 1968, 4–6; “Harlem Activist: Kenneth Bancroft Clark,” NYT, June 15, 1964, 32.
9. Robert Blauner, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” in Still the Big News, 64–81 (originally published in Social Problems in 1969); Barrera, Muñoz, and Ornelas, “Barrio.” For an overview, see Pinderhughes, “Toward a New Theory.”
10. Quoted in Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 176.
11. Sugrue, Sweet Land, 327–32. More generally, see Tullis, “Vietnam at Home”; Rodríguez, “Terms of Engagement”; Wagner, Disturbing the Peace; Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law.
12. Murch, Living for the City, 63–64.
13. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness; Jacobson, Whiteness; Tucker, Science and Politics.
14. Wacquant, “New ‘Peculiar Institution’”; Satter, Family Properties; Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation; Hicks, Talk with You; Kali Gross, Colored Amazons; Bookspan, Germ; Geoff D. Ward, Black Child Savers. For earlier efforts at the racialization of unruly, specifically immigrant, populations through policing political and sexual expression, see James Green, Death in the Haymarket; Shah, Stranger Intimacy.
15. For more on confinement and counterinsurgency, see Khalili, Time in the Shadows (which draws on Foucault, Security, Territory, Population); Donner, Protectors of Privilege; Schrader, “Local Policing”; Siegel, “Cold War Connections.” See also Flamm, Law and Order; Weaver, “Frontlash.” Many black women in particular protested the punitive gaze of case workers policing their sexual relationships and determining whether women deserved to receive benefits. See Chappell, War on Welfare; Kornbluh, Welfare Rights; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors.
16. Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, interview by Naison.
17. Losier, “ . . . ‘For Strictly Religious Reason[s]’” and “Prison House”; Christianson, With Liberty for Some, 250–58; Acoli, “Updated History,” 143–44.
18. C. L. R. James, “Black People in the Urban Areas of the U.S.,” in C. L. R. James Reader, 378.
19. Gregory, Southern Diaspora. True to Gregory’s thesis, this southern diaspora could be found not just among the black prisoners but also, as my interviews with Ericka Huggins and Bato Talamantez anecdotally confirmed, among the white police officers and white prisoners.
20. Murch, Living for the City, 15.
21. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism; Evanzz, Messenger; Gardell, In the Name; Marable, Malcolm X.
22. Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates, 51–52.
23. Losier, “ . . . ‘For Strictly Religious Reason[s],’” 28–29.
24. Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates, 51.
25. Horne, Fire This Time, 122–26; Marable, Malcolm X, 205–9; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice; Tibbs, From Black Power, 3–25.
26. Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates, 50–70; Tibbs, From Black Power, 15–21.
27. Quoted in Tibbs, From Black Power, 19.
28. Quoted in Losier, “ . . . ‘For Strictly Religious Reason[s],’” 19.
29. Gottschalk, Prison, 175.
30. Jacobs, Stateville, 52–70; Losier, “‘If You Are Black’”; Christopher E. Smith, “Black Muslims”; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 63–92; Pallas and Barber, “From Riot to Revolution.”
31. This chronology builds on Marable, Malcolm X, 70–99; Marable and Felber, Portable Malcolm X Reader, 34–70.
32. Malcolm X, End of White World Supremacy.
33. Malcolm X, Autobiography, quoted in Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates, 51.
34. An audio recording of one such speech, “Black Nationalism Can Set Us Free,” is available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/malcolm-x/we-have-no-freedom.mp3.
35. See Malcolm X, Malcolm X, 23–54. For a critique of Malcolm’s house-slave/field-slave metaphor and its long-ranging implications, see Reed, Stirrings.
36. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 58.
37. Eldridge Cleaver, “Prisons: The Muslims’ Decline,” in Ramparts and Browning, Prison Life, 10–103; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 50–63; John Clutchette to author, December 19, 2012.
38. For more on Chessman, see Hamm, Rebel and a Cause; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 33–62.
39. This trope can also be found in another contemporary autobiography, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. The site of Brown’s transformation, however, is not prison but a reformatory school, which he likens to prison, including through several escape attempts (some of them successful). See Rolston, “Conversion”; Douglas Edward Taylor, “Hustlers, Nationalists, and Revolutionaries”; Vaught, “Narrow Cells.”
40. Ashanti Alston, interview; Sugrue and Goodman, “Plainfield Burning.” More generally, see Sugrue, Sweet Land; Horne, Fire This Time; Thompson, Whose Detroit?; Mumford, Newark.
41. Quoted in James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 666. For more on Watts, see Horne, Fire This Time.
42. Murakawa, “Origins,” 245.
43. Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 195; Tullis, “Vietnam at Home.”
44. Dulaney, Black Police; Pihos, “Black Police.”
45. Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 177. In 1971, Detroit police established an undercover unit called Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS); during the unit’s first ten months of existence, its officers killed ten people (nine of them black) and arrested more than fourteen hundred (Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 81–102, 145–58).
46. Flamm, Law and Order, 53.
47. Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, 81–86; Weaver, “Frontlash.”
48. D’Arcus, “Protest, Scale, and Publicity.”
49. Black, Richard M. Nixon, 537.
50. Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?
51. Sugrue, Sweet Land, 347–48.
52. Ahmad, We Will Return; Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 60–109; Kelley, “Stormy Weather”; Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao.”
53. Murch, Living for the City.
54. Ronald “Elder” Freeman, interview; Hakim Ali, interview. See also Ahmad, We Will Return; Shoatz, Maroon.
55. Murch, Living for the City. See also Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 207; Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes; Ahmad, We Will Return; Murch, “Campus and the Street.”
56. Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 70–71.
57. Black Panther platform and program, March 19, 1972, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 4, GL; Ashanti Alston, interview.
58. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 246. For scholarly analyses of this claim, see Singh, “Black Panthers”; Austin, Up against the Wall; Lazerow and Williams, In Search; Yohuru Williams and Lazerow, Liberated Territory.
59. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 99. Genet’s ambivalent relation to the political uses of spectacle shares something with those who castigate Black Power or other expressions of radicalism through spectacular acts. For example, Reed (Stirrings, 72) argues that Black Power was little more than a media event, and Gitlin (Whole World Is Watching) challenges the white New Left for courting media attention, which then led activists to embrace grander and more foolish tactics. Payne (Light of Freedom) presents the ostensible “spectacle” of Black Power in direct contrast to the “organizing tradition” of the civil rights movement. Genet, however, remained more loyal to the Panthers, seeing such spectacles as necessary if inevitably limited—more, he believed, by the forces of racism and state violence than by media routines. Indeed, he argued that “the Panthers were heading for either madness, metamorphosis of the black community, death or prison. All those options happened, but the metamorphosis was by far the most important, and that is why the Panthers can be said to have overcome through poetry” (Prisoner of Love, 100).
60. Jean Genet, “May Day Speech,” in Declared Enemy, 39.
61. Newton was driving with a friend in his girlfriend’s car when police stopped him, perhaps because the car was one of many whose license plate number was a “known Panther vehicle” and because the car had unpaid parking tickets. Newton’s arrest and trial are a mainstay of Panther histories; see Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 101–5; Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 205–40; Jane A. Rhodes, Framing, 116–33, 152–80. For the antiwar movement generally, see Foley, Confronting the War Machine. My interview with Karen Wald was illustrative on the connections between Stop the Draft Week organizers and the Oakland Black Panther Party.
62. This discussion of Newton’s arrest and the campaign for his freedom builds on Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 205–40.
63. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 2, 3.
64. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 212; Richardson, Bomb in Every Issue, 68–74; Austin, Up against the Wall, 72–74; Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 74–79; Tibbs, From Black Power, 75–98.
65. Cleaver remains one of the most controversial of the major Panther leaders. Several former members of the Oakland branch of the party attribute the split in the organization to Cleaver’s aggression and desire for violent revenge. They allege that he used his experience in prison to bolster his leadership, with disastrous results. Given his subsequent embrace of Christianity and the Republican Party, some observers have questioned the sincerity of his commitment to radicalism. In Living for the City, Donna Murch comes to similar conclusions based on her extensive interviews with Oakland Black Panthers. Others see Cleaver as a charismatic spokesperson for a larger current of insurrectionary politics, arguing that the split in the party resulted from a battle of two equally ego-driven men, Newton and Cleaver. Further, the differences in the party extended beyond individual leaders, even though certain people epitomized these differences at key moments. For the experience of individual Panthers, see Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide; Assata Shakur, Assata; Kathleen Cleaver’s introduction to Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero. For scholarly accounts of Cleaver’s complexity within the party, see Austin, Up against the Wall; Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire; Jane A. Rhodes, Framing.
66. James Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 526. See also Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks’”; LeBlanc-Ernest, “‘Most Qualified Person.’”
67. Eldridge Cleaver, introduction to Genius of Huey P. Newton.
68. Eldridge Cleaver, “Affidavit #1, I Am 33 Years Old,” in Eldridge Cleaver, 8.
69. Edward P. Morgan, “Media Culture.”
70. See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 3–17, 60–63, 97–111.
71. Rainwater and Yancy, Moynihan Report. See also James T. Patterson, Freedom.
72. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 201.
73. Ibid., 59.
74. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour, 212.
75. Quoted in Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 137. More generally, see Jane A. Rhodes, Framing.
76. This perspective saturated the efforts to defend Newton. See, for example, American Whites for the Defense of Huey P. Newton, “Who Is Huey P. Newton?,” ca. 1969, and Black Panther Ministry of Information, Bulletin, nos. 1 and 2, both in NLC, Box 56, Folder: Black Panther Party.
77. See, for example, Newton’s essays in Foner, Black Panthers Speak, 39–75.
78. The mandate is reprinted in Major, Panther, 294–95.
79. The quotations are from Scheer, introduction to Eldridge Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver, xxxi. For more on Newsreel, see Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power, 145–83.
80. Jane A. Rhodes, Framing, 152. This statement likely referred not only to his incarceration but to his public battle with Reagan over whether Cleaver would be allowed to teach an experimental sociology course at the University of California at Berkeley.
81. Scheer, introduction. FBI documents show that the bureau was, in fact, afraid of the two men’s popularity and of how much their philosophies of Black Power resonated with others. The claim had additional weight with Cleaver, given that the California parole board had repeatedly threatened to return him to prison on a parole violation should he continue to speak publicly on behalf of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver described having to choose between playing dead or going back to prison. See Eldridge Cleaver, “Affidavit #1,” 7.
82. Eldridge Cleaver, “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” in Eldridge Cleaver, 67. For a compelling analysis of how this “projection of sovereignty” marked the Panthers as an organization, see Singh, Black Is a Country, 174–211. See also Lake, “Arm(ing) of the Vanguard.”
83. For more on the Panther community programs, including a gendered analysis of them, see especially Murch, Living for the City; Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire; Nelson, Body and Soul; Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution; Robyn Ceanne Spencer, “Engendering”; Huggins and LeBlanc-Ernest, “Revolutionary Women”; Ericka Huggins, interview by Thompson. My own interviews with former Panthers, including Ashanti Alston and Ericka Huggins, were also instrumental.
84. My interviews with two former Los Angeles Panthers, Ronald “Elder” Freeman and Ericka Huggins, were instrumental on this point, as were Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire; Widener, Black Arts West.
85. Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression; Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers; Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here; Schultz and Schultz, It Did Happen Here; Donner, Protectors of Privilege. I thank Trevor Griffey for many enlightening conversations on the topic as well as his prodigious work navigating the archives of state secrets.
86. The Garvey-inspired title is one measure of the ways the book reflected the more heavily nationalist tenor of black politics in New York City. For more on the city’s history of black radicalism, see Biondi, To Stand and Fight.
87. Ronald “Elder” Freeman, interview; Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 6–7; Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 144–46; Judson L. Jeffries and Foley, “To Live and Die.”
88. Ronald “Elder” Freeman, interview; Ericka Huggins, interview; Ericka Huggins, interview by Thompson; Judson L. Jeffries and Foley, “To Live and Die.”
89. Haas, Assassination; Murder of Fred Hampton; Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression and COINTELPRO Papers.
90. See Angela Y. Davis, Autobiography; Elaine Brown, Taste of Power; Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 216–25.
91. Theoharis, Rebellious Life, 223–24; Berger, “‘Malcolm X Doctrine.’”
92. Biondi, Black Revolution; Bradley, Harlem vs. Columbia University.
93. See Heins, Strictly Ghetto Property. Los Siete were represented by Black Panther attorney Charles Garry. The case, along with that of Newton and later George Jackson, was a touchstone of Bay Area prison radicalism in 1969–70.
94. Hoffman in Chicago 10. See also Hoffman, Autobiography; Raskin, For the Hell of It.
95. Richardson, Bomb in Every Issue, 168.
96. See Seale, Seize the Time. Dave Dellinger, the oldest and least theatrical of the Chicago 8 defendants, was the only one who tried to place his body between Seale and the bailiffs after the judge ordered Seale gagged. The other defendants protested but did not physically intervene; Dellinger was, of course, unsuccessful in stopping the bailiffs from carrying out the judge’s order.
97. For more on the New Haven case, see Yohuru Williams, Black Politics. The primary variation to this drawing is one of Seale bound but not gagged, strapped into an electric chair. Both versions appeared in several left-wing publications and flyers used in the campaign for his release.
98. Eldridge Cleaver, “Affidavit #1,” 9.
99. Hampton in Murder of Fred Hampton.
100. Black Student Revolution Conference, May 15, 1970, press release, Harlem Black Panther Party Papers, Folder 21, SC.
101. The demands are printed in National Strike Information Center Newsletter 8 (May 12, 1970): 1. The number of strikes adhering to the demands appears in 12 (May 22, 1970): 2–4. That issue also included two and a half pages of material about the Panthers to bolster the solidarity dimension of the strike. Both issues can be found in Harlem Black Panther Party Papers, Folder 22. The strike demands were formulated in New Haven, where Seale, Ericka Huggins, and seven other Black Panthers were then facing trial. More generally on the student strike, see Katsiaficas, Imagination, 117–74.
102. Newton, To Die, 220.
103. Yoruba, “Huey’s Out to Stay!,” Palante 2:9 (August 15, 1970): 10.
104. On the transformations in U.S. urban political economy, see Beauregard, Voices of Decline; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Wilhelm, Who Needs the Negro?; Garland, Culture of Control; Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?; Sugrue, Origins; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. I thank Robin Kelley for bringing Wilhelm’s book to my attention.
105. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 103–4. See also Booker, “Lumpenization”; Douglas Edward Taylor, “Hustlers, Nationalists, and Revolutionaries.”
106. See Rossinow, Politics of Authenticity; Moten, In the Break.
107. These include Assata Shakur, Nehanda Abiodun, Willie Lee Brent, Eldridge Cleaver, and Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, among others. Puerto Rican nationalist Guillermo Morales also fled to Cuba after escaping from prison in 1979. For more on the radical international imagination, see Wu, Radicals. Regarding Cuba, see Latner, “Irresistible Revolution.”
108. Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 2–4. For personal anecdotes from antiwar activists who were involved in these missions, see Dellinger, From Yale to Jail, 237–56, 402–7; Hayden, Reunion, 220–41. See also Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice.
109. Boggs, Racism, 39–50.
110. Black Panther, November 1, 1969, Harlem Black Panther Party Papers, Folder 1.
111. Zayd Shakur, “America Is the Prison,” 274.
112. Prison Solidarity Committee, From Soledad to San Quentin (San Francisco, ca. 1972), 3, Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
113. Soledad Brothers Defense Fund and Soledad House, “The Soledad Brothers” (flyer), ca. 1970, NLC, Box 41, Folder: Soledad Brothers.
114. Scheer, introduction to Eldridge Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver, xxix.
115. This quotation serves as the epigraph to Lockwood, Conversation.
116. Eldridge Cleaver, “Playboy Interview,” in Eldridge Cleaver, 148–49.
117. For more on the Panther split, see Murch, Living for the City; Self, American Babylon; Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour; Charles E. Jones, Black Panther Party Reconsidered; Kathleen Cleaver and Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party; Yohuru Williams and Lazerow, Liberated Territory; Judson L. Jeffries, Comrades. For partisan accounts, see Elaine Brown, Taste of Power; Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory; Assata Shakur, Assata; Bukhari, War Before; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide; Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero. My interviews with former party members have also been helpful in understanding its impact.
118. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 116–17. Cummins quotes several people, including both prison officials and former prisoners, who said The Outlaw garnered little respect or trust inside.
119. The Outlaw, reprinted in BB 6:4 (January 26–February 1, 1968): 8–9, JMP, Box 44, Folder 1.
120. James A. Schreiber, “San Quentin Cons to Strike,” BB 6:4 (January 26–February 1, 1968): 1.
121. Ibid.; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 118.
122. James A. Schreiber, “San Quentin Cons to Strike,” BB 6:4 (January 26–February 1, 1968): 8.
123. James A. Schreiber, “Barb Scribe Zaps ‘Big Red,’” BB 6:7 (February 16–22, 1968): 1.
124. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 117–18; “San Q Rocks—Freemen Back Cons as Prison Seethes,” BB 6:6 (February 9–15, 1968): 1.
125. Cummins, Rise and Fall, viii.
126. The Outlaw, July 1, 1968, 1, JMP, Box 44, Folder 1. In the 1970s, the California Prisoners Union called its newspaper The Outlaw in partial tribute to the crude San Quentin mimeograph. This subsequent iteration of The Outlaw also preached interracial unity against the prison regime, specifically in regard to its efforts to organize unions of prison laborers to press for redress.
127. James W. L. Park, “‘Power to the People,’” December 1968 speech, 2, JMP, Box 36, Folder 2, 7–9. Three years later, Park still pointed to the underground press to “see how the techniques of the militant radicals are now being used against the prison system.” As evidence, he pointed to rock bands playing concerts at San Quentin’s gate. See Kenneth Lamott, “The San Quentin Story: The Prisons Are Getting a Tougher Class of Convicts,” NYT Magazine, May 2, 1971, 83.
128. Park, “‘Power to the People,’” December 1968 speech, 2, JMP, Box 36, Folder 2, 2.
129. Ibid., 3.
130. Ibid., 6–7.
131. For more on the Alcatraz occupation, see Strange and Loo, “Holding the Rock”; Paul Chaat Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane; Troy R. Johnson, American Indian Occupation.
132. Paul Chaat Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 71.
133. Ibid., 24, 34. For a general overview of the occupation, its demographics, and its downfall, see sources cited in note 131.
134. Support for Alcatraz Indians, flyer, SPC, Reel 23.
135. Rafter, Shots in the Mirror.
136. Streissguth, Johnny Cash, 41. Musicians often played prison shows in the 1950s and 1960s. While imprisoned in Leavenworth, Raúl Salinas wrote for the prison newspaper about some of the concerts that occurred there. See Salinas and Mendoza, raúlrsalinas, 54–60, and files in RRSP.
137. For more on Catonsville, see Berrigan, Catonsville Nine. For the Columbia unrest, see Avorn, Up against the Ivy Wall; Bradley, Harlem vs. Columbia University.
138. Hayes, “Man of Sorrow.” Cash’s attempt to connect himself to the prisoners was mitigated by the corporate structures that turned his concert into a commercial product. Appealing to prevailing stereotypes of prisoners as violence-crazed men, Columbia Records added applause in the postproduction editing to what became one of Cash’s most famous lines, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” However, radio station officials thought that the line was too violent in the context of Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassinations and edited it out before broadcasting the song (Streissguth, Johnny Cash, 89, 137–38). More generally on the album’s success, see Tom Dearmore, “First Angry Man of Country Music,” NYT, September 21, 1969, 32.
139. In the liner notes to the 2000 edition of the album, Cash writes that he gave the cameras the finger because they crowded him on stage (Johnny Cash, “The Bird,” in At San Quentin, liner notes, 8).
140. Streissguth, Johnny Cash, 156–57. At Folsom remains a more respected album, however, and ultimately sold more than six million copies (Streissguth, Johnny Cash, 160). It also anchors the 2006 biopic of Cash, Walk the Line.
141. Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment, 226–27.
142. Streissguth, Johnny Cash, 162–64.
143. Quoted in ibid., 42.
144. Quoted in ibid., 20.
145. Gottschalk, Prison, 178–79.
1. “Soledad Brother Party: Champagne Flows Outside Quentin,” IJ, October 16, 1970, 21.
2. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 33, 25.
3. Ibid., 14.
4. Ibid., 146.
5. Gottschalk, Prison, 178–79. These numbers are echoed in Useem and Kimball, States of Siege, 18. It is likely, however, that these are low estimates in part because of the difficulty of defining what constitutes a “riot” and officials’ ability to limit public access to facilities and thereby to control at some level what news gets out. Prisoners certainly engaged in far more acts of collective action, both violent and peaceful, in that period and throughout the 1970s. My conversations with Dan Chard, a historian of Maine’s prison movement, have been instrumental in helping me rethink the official record on prison riots.
6. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 26.
7. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 42; George Jackson to NYT, November 16, 1970 (draft), PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 22.
8. HoSang, “Race and the Mythology.”
9. John Clutchette notes that the martial arts were especially useful, since guards used pick and axe handles to beat prisoners on the knees, elbows, and arms; knowing how to block such attacks or even disarm the attacker could prevent serious injury or death (John Clutchette to author, December 22, 2012). This biographical portrait draws largely from my interviews with Stephen Bingham, John Clutchette, David Johnson, Kiilu Nyasha, Luis Bato Talamantez, Willie Sundiata Tate, Karen Wald, and Larry Weiss.
10. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 112–13.
11. Ibid., 311.
12. This account builds on many sources, including my interviews with several people who knew Jackson (cited in note 9 above) as well as the autobiographical sketch he provides in Soledad Brother and several published sources: Jessica Mitford, “A Talk with George Jackson,” NYT Book Review, June 13, 1971, 30–35; Begel, “Interview,” 179; Lester Jackson, “Dialogue”; Yee, Melancholy History; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?
13. Angela Davis, “18 page letter,” n.d., Angela Davis Papers, MCLIR, Carton 39, Folder: Letters to George Jackson.
14. Prison Action Project, Freedom, in author’s files, courtesy of Tony Platt. Indeterminate sentencing and parole were notable features of the twentieth-century rehabilitative school of penology; they went in tandem with calling prisons “training facilities.” See Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 304–8. More generally, see Simon, Poor Discipline.
15. Chávez-García, States of Delinquency; Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest.”
16. I thank Bato Talamantez for explaining the structure of the AC over several interviews and discussions. Other details come from my interviews with David Johnson and Willie Sundiata Tate.
17. Yee, Melancholy History; Blue, Doing Time; Bookspan, Germ.
18. Yee, Melancholy History, 126; “George Lester Jackson (Deceased),” November 16, 1971, FBI memo, Jonathan Peter Jackson, Federal Bureau of Investigation file 157-20544. See also James Carr, Bad; William F. Buckley Jr., “The Real Line on George Jackson,” Washington Star, September 22, 1971, A12. Jackson was not always pursuing weapons, however. Tate recalled finding shotgun shells in a police car brought into the body and fender shop at San Quentin. He “sent word to George to see if he wanted them,” but Jackson demurred.
19. Willie Sundiata Tate, interview; John Clutchette to author, December 19, 2012; “George Jackson: Teacher & Organizer—Interview with Jimmy Carr,” in War behind the Walls, September 1971, 3. War behind the Walls was a single issue of prison-related news, printed by Red Family and People’s Press in San Francisco; it is archived in Prison Newspapers, DOC001, FA.
20. Quoted in The San Quentin Six, ca. 1974, 8, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12.
21. Karen Wald, interview.
22. Eric Schlosser reports that “the number of inmates in California had declined by more than a fourth, despite the state’s growing population” between 1963 and 1972 (“The Prison-Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, December 1998, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/).
23. Heiner, “Foucault,” 331. For Pratt’s involvement with Jackson, see “Interview with Geronimo,” Babylon, ca. 1971, 12, ECP, Oversize Box 2, Folder 6: Black Panther Party.
24. The best overview of this incident can be found in Yee, Melancholy History, 29–68. For the lawsuit by the families of Edwards, Miller, and Nolen, see Zohrabi, “Resistance and Repression.”
25. Yee, Melancholy History, 70.
26. Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson? In his confessional memoir The Dragon Has Come, Armstrong claims that Jackson confessed to the killing.
27. Armstrong, Dragon Has Come, xii; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 165; Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, “Soledad Brothers” (pamphlet), Soledad Brothers Defense Committee Vertical File, TL.
28. Yee, Melancholy History, 83–84; John Clutchette to author, December 19, 2012.
29. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 180–82; Prison Solidarity Committee, From Soledad to San Quentin (San Francisco, ca. 1972), 5, Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
30. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence.
31. John Clutchette to author, December 22, 2012.
32. Fay Stender, introduction to Pell, Maximum Security; John Clutchette to author, December 22, 2012. My interviews with Lincoln Bergman, Stephen Bingham, Karen Wald, and Larry Weiss were also helpful in providing a portrait of Stender.
33. KPFA programs that regularly covered prison issues during the 1970s included Real Dragons and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, the hosts and correspondents of which frequently interviewed or covered a wide variety of prisoner struggles. My conversations with two KPFA journalists during those years, Lincoln Bergman and Claude Marks, as well as the prodigious archives of prison-related material held by both Pacifica Radio and the FA confirm this point.
34. “Soledad Brothers Defense Committee,” Southern California Library, L. A., 20th Cent. Organizational File, Box 38, Folder 9: Soledad Brothers Defense Committee.
35. Yee, Melancholy History, 133–41; Black Caucus Report, “Treatment of Prisoners at California Training Facility at Soledad Central,” July 23, 1970, JMP, Box 49, Folder 3. The report was authored by Dymally and Miller after their visit. Dymally’s office also compiled news articles about prison conditions into a packet, “Prisons—A California Crisis,” March 22, 1971, JMP, Box 55, Folder 6.
36. For a longer arc history of this phenomenon, see Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law.
37. Jessica Mitford to Benjamin Spock, May 21, 1970, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9.
38. John Clutchette to author, December 24, 2012; Bettina Aptheker, interview.
39. Angela Y. Davis, Autobiography, 150–279.
40. Jack V. Fox, “A Collision with UC Regents,” San Francisco Examiner, July 16, 1971, 6. Working covertly in the Communist Party, FBI informant William Divale wrote in July 1969 that the University of California was employing a communist; conservative journalist Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Examiner unmasked Davis as the person in question and pursued her dismissal, as did then governor Ronald Reagan. Aware of this controversy as well as Davis’s prison activism, Ruchell Magee wrote to Davis via her lawyer, claiming to have details of a high-level conspiracy against her (Ruchell Magee to John McTernan, July 3, 1970, MCLIR, Carton 37, Folder: Section VI, Doc. 3, Items Turned Over in Discovery, People v. Angela Y. Davis, 404–504). This collection also includes seven folders of hate letters that Davis received during this time period.
41. Angela Davis to George Jackson, June 10, 1970, MCLIR, Carton 39, Folder: Letters to George Jackson.
42. My argument here builds on Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, especially 265–314.
43. Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 193. For a sampling of the ways prison informed a variety of movements of the 1970s, see the essays in Berger, Hidden 1970s.
44. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 117; Western and Pettit, “Incarceration.” California figures cited in Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 267; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 91.
45. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; see also the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Plata, case no. 09-1233, May 2011, available at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/09-1233.ZO.html. The court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment, especially regarding the large number of people in prison suffering mental or physical problems that were exacerbated by conditions inside. The court ruled that California needed to reduce its prison population by 46,000 people, more than one-quarter of the 156,000 prisoners it then held, within two years. The state has appealed the decision and proposed a variety of alternatives to decarceration—including an expansion of the jail system that would merely shift rather than shrink the number of people in prison.
46. Father Earl A. Neil was rector of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland and an active supporter of the Black Panthers. He officiated at the funerals of both Jonathan and George Jackson. See “George Jackson Funeral,” audio file PM 067, FA.
47. Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis”; Wacquant, “Class, Race, and Hyperincarceration.”
48. See Bantam Books and Coward-McCann, press release announcing publication of Soledad Brother, September 2, 1970, and Fay Stender to Jessica Mitford, June 23, 1970, both in JMP, Box 48, Folder 9. For Newton’s and Stender’s involvement, see Rosenbaum, “Whither Thou Goest,” 86–88, 92, 174–76.
49. Karen Wald, interview.
50. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 332.
51. See White, Genet, 496–598; Genet, Declared Enemy, 49–70, 81–90; Laroche, Last Genet; Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 189–92.
52. Genet, Declared Enemy, 91.
53. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 335.
54. Ibid., 336–37.
55. Sundiata Acoli, interview.
56. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 204.
57. Jonathan Jackson, postscript Angela Davis to George Jackson, June 22, 1970, MCLIR, Carton 39, Folder: Letters to George Jackson.
58. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 6.
59. Ibid., 28.
60. Ibid., 208.
61. George Jackson to Jessica Mitford, March 4, 1971, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9. In a June 2, 1971, letter to Gregory Armstrong, Jackson expresses a similar sentiment: “At this stage, I think I have more confidence in people than you tho I care much less for any individual life” (PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 37).
62. George Jackson to Gregory Armstrong, September 20, 1970, PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 38.
63. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 234.
64. For more on black memory, see David Scott, “On the Archaeologies.”
65. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 4.
66. Ibid., 174, 283, 298–99.
67. Ibid., 110.
68. Jackson’s father apparently agreed; see Lester Jackson, “Dialogue.” Joy James suggests that the title for Jackson’s posthumous volume, Blood in My Eye, also came from Georgia (introduction to Warfare, 15).
69. See, for example, the books he requested (Soledad Brother, 294) and the list of books seized from his cell after his death; comments by several of his friends and associates verify his broad range of reading topics. See N. R. Snellgrove, “Books Taken from Cell of George Jackson,” September 3, 1971, www2.pslweb.org/site/DocServer/George_Jackson_s_books.pdf?docID=3661.
70. Michael Simmons, interview; H. Bruce Franklin, interview.
71. James Carr, Bad, 123–24.
72. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 269.
73. Suzannah Lessard, “Beyond Cleaver,” Washington Monthly, November 1970, 63.
74. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 266.
75. Jessica Mitford, “A Talk with George Jackson,” NYT Book Review, June 13, 1971, 33.
76. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 222; Ellison, Invisible Man, 275; Du Bois Souls.
77. Rolston, “Conversion.”
78. For Jackson’s objections to the arrangement of the book, see the sources cited in notes 98 and 99 below.
79. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 16.
80. Jessica Mitford, “A Talk with George Jackson,” NYT Book Review, June 13, 1971, 31.
81. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 86. More generally, see Cummins, Rise and Fall, 4–5, 24–32; Sweeney, Reading.
82. A review of Soledad Brother in the NYT describes Cleaver rather than Jackson as “the greatest writer of us all” because Cleaver confronts his “criminal disposition” whereas Jackson evades it. The reviewer notes that Jackson’s letters demand attention not because they are compelling but because they are disturbing (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Books of the Times: ‘From Dachau, with Love,’” NYT, November 20, 1970, 39).
83. Cummins, Rise and Fall, viii.
84. Jessica Mitford, “A Talk with George Jackson,” NYT Book Review, June 13, 1971, 34.
85. L. H. Fudge, State of California Memorandum, Subject: In-Service Training Recommendations, November 4, 1970, JMP, Box 44, Folder 4.
86. L. S. Nelson, California State Prison, Subject: Inmate Activity Programs, March 22, 1971, JMP, Box 44, Folder 4.
87. “Selected Books of the Year in Nonfiction,” NYT, December 6, 1970, National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, Box 6, Folder 1, SC.
88. Suzannah Lessard, “Beyond Cleaver,” Washington Monthly, November 1970, 63.
89. American Library Association, press release, January 20, 1971, PPSB, Carton 2, Folder 22.
90. Colin McGlashan, “Slender Bullets,” New Statesman, March 26, 1971, 30; A. Sivenandan, “Ghettos of the Mind,” New Society, April 1, 1971, 54; advertisement in The Bookseller, January 30, 1971, 282, PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 22.
91. Jessica Mitford, “Kind and Usual Punishment in California,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1971, 52.
92. Tony Platt, cited in notes by Jessica Mitford, JMP, Box 36, Folder 2.
93. These include leftists Daniel Berrigan and Rosenberg codefendant Morton Sobell; poets Etheridge Knight, Miguel Piñero, and Raúl R. Salinas; and Jack Henry Abbott as well as anthologies such as Pell, Maximum Security, and a slew of pamphlets about various prisoners. For overviews, see Franklin, Prison Writing; Franklin, Victim as Criminal; Lee Bernstein, America Is the Prison. For examples of Black Power on television, see Acham, Revolution Televised.
94. Armstrong, Dragon Has Come, 170.
95. Julius Lester, “Black Rage to Live: Soledad Brother,” NYT Book Review, November 22, 1970, 293.
96. Gregory Armstrong to William DuBois, November 17, 1970, and Gregory Armstrong to Frances Brown, both in PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 22.
97. George Jackson to NYT, November 16, 1970 (draft), PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 22.
98. Fay Stender to Greg Armstrong, n.d., PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 47; Fay Stender to Frances Jackson, November 2, 1970, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9; “About Soledad Defense . . . ,” BB, August 13–19, 1971, 3; George Jackson, “Top Secret Legal Manifesto,” January 11, 1971, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 4, Folder 16; Pat Gallyot, “George Jackson: A Beautiful Black Warrior,” SR, August 28, 1971, 2; Jessica Mitford, “A Talk with George Jackson,” NYT Book Review, June 13, 1971, 30–35; Yee, Melancholy History, 117–56; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 113–14, 158–59, 203–4.
99. George Jackson to Gregory Armstrong, September 20, 1970, PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 38.
100. Quoted in Yee, Melancholy History, 170.
101. Quoted in Associated Press, “Marin Kidnap Youth’s Story,” SFC, August 14, 1970, 1.
102. Bill X. Jennings to author, January 10, 2014; Kiilu Nyasha interview; Angela Y. Davis, Autobiography; George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye.
103. Major, Justice, 12–13; Oakland Tribune, August 17, 1970, in Jonathan Peter Jackson, Federal Bureau of Investigation file 157-20544, Folder 3.
104. In an Esquire article, journalist Ron Rosenbaum intimates that Magee rather than McClain may have been responsible for the attack (“Whither Thou Goest,” 176). Either way, McClain maintained and was trying to prove his innocence when Jonathan Jackson entered the room.
105. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 180–82; Prison Solidarity Committee, From Soledad to San Quentin (San Francisco, ca. 1972), 5, Anthony Platt, Private Collection; Major, Justice, 88; “1970,” 15, ADLDF, Box 6, Folder 3; Alexandra Close, “The Trial of Ruchell Magee,” 5, JMP, Box 49, Folder 6. Other prisoners involved in the Billingslea effort included Jeffrey Khatari Gaulden (later of the Black Guerrilla Family), David Johnson, Luis Bato Talamantez, and Willie Sundiata Tate (all later of the San Quentin 6 case). See “The San Quentin Six” (flyer), San Quentin Six Defense Fund Vertical File, TL.
106. Alexandra Close, “The Trial of Ruchell Magee,” 4, JMP, Box 49, Folder 6.
107. Ruchell Magee Defense Committee, By Any Means Necessary (newspaper), ECP, Carton 4, Folder 21. See also Major, Justice, 77–122; Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 239–48.
108. This description draws from multiple accounts, including coverage in the IJ and the SFC; Yee, Melancholy History, 157–73; Liberatore, Road to Hell, 81–92; and the transcripts of the Angela Davis trial found in the Angela Davis Papers, Boxes 2 and 3, GL, and the MCLIR Subseries 2.5. Thomas maintained that he killed all the men inside the van, and he did seize a pistol from the men. But the San Quentin guards killed the three men and paralyzed Thomas when they opened fire on the vehicle. Haley’s face was torn off as a result of a blast from the shotgun that the prisoners taped around his head when they took him hostage, though he was also shot in the chest from outside the van. See Angela Davis trial transcript, 2858–2938.
109. Earl Caldwell, “Courthouse Shootout Linked with Radical Movement and Killing of Black Inmates,” NYT, August 24, 1970, 40; Angela Y. Davis, “An Appeal,” in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 148.
110. Bantam Books and Coward-McCann, press release announcing publication of Soledad Brother, September 2, 1970, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9. See also the back cover and inside front cover of the original paperback version of the book.
111. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 329.
112. Ibid.; Tim Findley, “A Brother’s Doubts on Plot,” SFC, August 15, 1970, 3; George Jackson to Jessica Mitford, March 4, 1971, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9. Huey Newton echoed Jackson’s description of his brother and William Christmas; see “Jonathan Jackson Funeral,” audio file PM 008, FA.
113. Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black, 121–45.
114. Liberatore, Road to Hell, 93–97; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 127–57; Danny Meyers, “Marin Shootout: Was It a Set-Up?,” SR, July 5, 1975, 6; Paul Avery, Jim Brewer, and Rick Carroll, “Marin Shootout—New Disclosures,” SFC, June 23, 1975, 1. My interviews with several people in or close to the Oakland and Berkeley Black Panther chapters during this time period confirmed that Newton had backed out of the plan to support Jonathan Jackson.
115. Yoruba, “Huey’s Out to Stay!,” Palante 2:9 (August 15, 1970): 10.
116. Angela Davis to George Jackson, June 22, 1970, Angela Davis Papers, MCLIR, Carton 39, Folder: Letters to George Jackson. Not everyone agreed with proclaiming prisoners leaders of a coming revolution. Two prisoners objected to this approach in an article published in the Guild Practitioner, JMP, Box 36, Folder 2: “The view from behind bars is this: If the free (relatively speaking) people look to us as the vanguard of the movement, what does this say about the condition of the movement?”
117. Davis, her associates in the Che-Lumumba Club, and some of the younger communist militants described August 7 as a prisoners’ revolt akin to a slave rebellion (which is not to say that they necessarily endorsed it, as Magee and his supporters did). The Communist Party leadership, however, viewed August 7 as the desperate act of a foolhardy youth. It was caused by the system’s cruelty, stressed party chair Henry Winston, but it was a disastrous and misguided move by Jonathan Jackson. Some party members feared a McCarthyist reprise and wanted to distance or even expel Davis. See Winston, Meaning; Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 245. See also the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, memorandum, October 14, 1970, Soledad Brothers Defense Committee Vertical File, TL.
118. The first song appeared on a KPFA program about the Soledad Brothers, in “Interviews with Soledad Brothers,” audio file PM 058, FA. The lyrics for “Jonathan” can be found in HPNFP, Series 2, Box 41, Folder 2.
119. Quoted in “How the Panthers See It,” IJ, August 13, 1970, 4.
120. Quoted in Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 370.
121. “Angela Davis on FBI List,” IJ, August, 19, 1970, 1.
122. Mann, Comrade George, 42.
123. Prisoner Solidarity Committee, Prisoners Call Out: Freedom (New York City, 1971), 39, in Prisoner Solidarity Committee Vertical File, TL.
124. Major, Justice, 122. Magee also argued that yesterday’s sword was today’s gun and appealed to a warrior Jesus found in the bible (Matthew chapter 10, verse 34): “I come not to send peace but the sword,” in By Any Means Necessary (newspaper, ca. 1971), 2, ECP, Carton 4, Folder 21: Black Panther Party Ruchell Magee Defense Committee.
125. Sol Stern, “The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee,” NYT Magazine, June 27, 1971, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html; “Jonathan Jackson Memorial,” audio file PM 008, FA.
126. Jonathan Jackson Memorial Service program, PPSB, Box 1, Folder 47; “George Jackson Funeral,” audio files PM 067, 068, FA; “Jonathan Jackson Memorial,” audio file PM 008, FA.
127. Quoted in Cummins, Rise and Fall, 185.
128. The series, an attempt to contextualize the greater visibility prisons had by that time garnered, featured reporters taking temporary jobs as prison guards to describe routines in prison. The stories can be found in JMP, Box 44, Folder 1.
129. Mary Leydecker, “Magee Resists Judge in Quentin Appearance; Shouts ‘This Is Not a Court,’” IJ, September 10, 1970, 1.
130. “Stop the San Quentin Railroad” (flyer), August 1970, SPC, Reel 20.
131. Mary Leydecker, “Court Hearings: A First at San Quentin,” IJ, August 23, 1970, 1.
132. UPI, “Guns Puzzle Mother of Slain Youth,” IJ, August, 12, 1970, 1.
133. Mary Leydecker, “Court Hearings: A First at San Quentin,” IJ, August 23, 1970, 1.
134. Yee, Melancholy History, 35; Stender, “Violence and Lawlessness,” 222. See also the timeline printed in the British journal Soledad Brothers News, May 1972, 12–13, 18–19, Soledad Brothers Vertical File, FA. Immediate physical violence was the most common weapon at the guards’ disposal, but other strategies were used. In one chilling episode, Soledad guards tried to frame a prison psychologist for a 1971 murder after he was fired for refusing to let the administration look at a prisoner’s file. Officials claimed that Dr. Frank Rundle identified too much with the prisoners in his care and tried to get one of them to collaborate in framing him. See Rundle, “Roots”; Don Jelenik, “The Soledad Frame Up,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 22, 1972, 1, 4–7; Yee, Melancholy History, 175–86.
135. “Prison Struggle, 1970–71” in War behind the Walls, September 1971, 14. See also Chard, “Rallying for Repression”; Thuma, “‘Not a Wedge’”; Bissonette, When the Prisoners; Useem and Kimball, States of Siege.
136. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 222.
137. George Jackson to unknown, August 11, 1971, PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 38.
138. George Jackson, “Top Secret Legal Manifesto,” January 11, 1971, 6, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 4, Folder 16.
139. John Clutchette to author, December 22, 2012.
140. Karen Wald, interview.
141. Larry Weiss, interview; “Soledad Brothers Legal Defense Committee” memo, in author’s files, courtesy of Larry Weiss; O. C. Allen et al., v. Evelle J. Younger et al., no. C-71 69. The seven men were O. C. Allen, Alfred Dunn, Jimmy James, Jesse Phillips, James Wagner, Walter Joe Watson, and Roosevelt Williams. The prosecution ultimately dropped the charges against four of the men, and the remaining three were acquitted in 1972. The suit brought by Jackson, Talamantez, and the Soledad 7 was dismissed in March 1971.
142. George Jackson, interview.
143. Larry Weiss, interview.
144. See Huey Newton, “Hidden Traitor, Renegade Scab: Eldridge Cleaver,” HPNFP, Series 2, Box 42, Folder 1; San Quentin Black Panther Party, “Tell It Like It Is!,” HPNFP, Box 42, Folder 2; Kiilu Nyasha, interview. See also Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 295–96, 335, 379–80.
145. See George Jackson will, March 11, 1971, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 45, Folder 6.
146. See FBI report, “Burial Service of George Lester Jackson,” September 2, 1971, Jonathan Peter Jackson, Federal Bureau of Investigation file 157-20544; Grenada TV documentary, FA.
147. Steve Weissman, “Occupy This: Crazy Tom the FBI Provocateur,” Reader Supported News, November 27, 2011, http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275–42/8619-occupy-this-crazy-tom-the-fbi-provocateur. See also Citizens Research and Investigation Committee and Tackwood, Glass House Tapes; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?; Yee, Melancholy History. Bennett was killed on suspicion of being a police informant, though others claimed that it was because he was having an affair with the wife of a leading Panther. Durden-Smith claims that both Carr and Bennett were police informants.
148. See Betsy Carr, afterword to James Carr, Bad, 198–225; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 122–25; Fanya Carter, “Former Bodyguard to Newton Killed at San Jose Home,” Oakland Post, April 13, 1972, 1; Jerry Cohen, “Theft of Angela Davis Funds Linked to Slaying in San Jose,” LAT, April 8, 1972, 1. Carr was alleged to have stolen money from the Angela Davis defense committee.
149. For more on the “pants pocket letter,” see Yee, Melancholy History, 250–53; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 99–101; and the district attorney’s closing statements in People of the State of California v. Stephen Mitchell Bingham, case no. 4094, June 9, 1986, 3374–79.
150. Mancino’s affidavit quoted in Yee, Melancholy History, 255–56.
151. Pinell’s affidavit is included in George Jackson FBI File, 44-HQ-47984. See also The San Quentin Six (pamphlet), ca. 1973, 10, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12.
152. Jo Durden-Smith, “Who Killed George Jackson?: The Difference between Deaths,” Village Voice, September 30, 1971, 15, 22.
153. Larry Weiss, interview.
154. Tad Szulc, “George Jackson Radicalizes the Brothers in Soledad and San Quentin,” NYT, August 1, 1971, SM10, 16. Jackson’s friend Karen Wald, who had arranged the interview with Szulc and was present during it, remembered that Jackson was bothered by Szulc and wanted to get a rise out of him (Karen Wald, interview).
155. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 209.
156. John Clutchette to author, January 17, 2013.
157. N. R. Snellgrove, “Books Taken from Cell of George Jackson,” September 3, 1971, www2.pslweb.org/site/DocServer/George_Jackson_s_books.pdf?docID=3661. I thank scholar Gregory Thomas for finding and making public this document, which lists ninety-nine books.
158. Hugo A. Pinell, “Disciplinary Report,” included as part of his Cumulative Case Summary, Mark Merin, Private Collection, Spain v. Procunier Files; Luis Bato Talamantez and Sue Martinez, “The Epic Trial of the San Quentin Six,” Sedition, March 1976, 11; “The San Quentin Six” (flyer), San Quentin Six Defense Fund Vertical File, TL; Luis Bato Talamantez, interview; Larry Weiss, interview.
159. Gibson and Justice were accused of killing officer Leo Davis as he stood guard over Herman Johnson, a prisoner who had been hospitalized after an attack by other prisoners. Johnson had testified for the prosecution in the Soledad 7 case. While that case garnered a lot of attention and ended in victory for the defendants, Gibson and Justice were ultimately sentenced to life in prison for the death of Davis. See Cummins, Rise and Fall, 185; “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win,” The Anvil 1:1 (April 1973): 3; Fred Lowe, “Two Black Men Accused of Murder in Prison Get Help,” Los Angeles Free Press, December 29, 1972, 5.
160. Willie Sundiata Tate interview; Luis Bato Talamantez interview; David Johnson interview.
161. Anderson is a mysterious character in this case. Bingham and Anderson had never met before, and she provided the tape recorder that Bingham brought into the prison. Further, he only brought the recorder in at the guard’s suggestion after Anderson was denied access. Anderson disappeared after Jackson’s death: she was never listed as a person of interest or questioned in the case, much less indicted as a defendant alongside Bingham and the others. Conservative journalist Ed Montgomery interviewed her in the mid-1970s in Texas: at that time, she distanced herself from Jackson and the Black Power movement more generally, but she never testified at either of the trials stemming from the case. It is not known whether, as some allege, she was a police informant or what accounts for the government’s lack of interest in her role in the events of the day. For a larger but no more conclusive set of speculations about her, see Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 41–84.
162. My account of Bingham’s visit comes from several sources: Stephen Bingham, interview; the closing statements of People of the State of California v. Stephen Mitchell Bingham, case no. 4094, June 1986, 3265–3737; “Time Chart, San Quentin Six, August 21, 1971,” KFAP, Folder: San Quentin, 1971–72.
163. Several published sources on the case, including Liberatore’s Road to Hell and Tibbs’s From Black Power, echo the government’s version of the case: during his visit with Bingham, Jackson removed a gun, a wig, and some ammunition that had been hidden in Anderson’s tape recorder, perhaps without Bingham’s knowledge, and then used the gun to take over the AC. The KRON-TV documentary on the case, Day of the Gun, also takes this perspective. Subsequent trials, however, called into question or disproved key elements of this story but offered no satisfactory alternative explanation. Other sources, including Yee’s Melancholy History and Durden-Smith’s Who Killed George Jackson?, describe the government’s case and criticize its weaknesses and contradictions but fail to provide a substantive counternarrative. Still others, including Rodríguez’s Forced Passages and the Prisons on Fire documentary as well as a myriad of articles by Jackson’s friends and supporters in a variety of left-wing magazines, insist that Jackson was set up and murdered by the state though they do not provide evidence of their own to definitively support this claim. See, for example, San Quentin to Attica: The Sound before the Fury (New York: National Lawyers Guild, ca. 1972), RRSP, Box 8, Folder 3.
164. Yee, Melancholy History, 216; Stephen Bingham, interview and trial transcripts.
165. I review Jackson’s plans and the prison system’s disgust for him elsewhere in the text. However, it is worth commenting on the suddenness of the AC takeover. Jackson did not believe in spontaneous action, telling one supporter that there “is no such thing as a spontaneous revolution, there will be no spontaneous uprising and sudden seizure of power by the people” (Pat Gallyot, “George Jackson: A Beautiful Black Warrior,” SR, August 28, 1971, 2). If he planned to escape, it certainly was not to have taken place on August 21, 1971.
166. Luis Bato Talamantez, interview.
167. David Johnson, interview; Talamantez quoted in Prisons on Fire audio documentary (San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2002). My telling of these events is indebted to my interviews with three people who were in the AC that day—David Johnson, Luis Bato Talamantez, and Willie Sundiata Tate—as well as my interviews with Nyati Bolt, then a prisoner at San Quentin but not in the AC, and Stephen Bingham. For published sources, see especially Cummins, Rise and Fall, 209–10; Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?; Liberatore, Road to Hell, 136–58; Yee, Melancholy History, 201–58.
168. Several prisoners who were there that day, however, allege that Jackson was shot more than twice, including perhaps once at close range. Yee recounts their doubts in Melancholy History; several of my interviewees expressed similar views.
1. Unless otherwise noted, the material in this section comes from my interviews with Luis Bato Talamantez and Larry Weiss and from the Spain v. Procunier files provided to me by Mark Merin.
2. The “eerie quiet” quotation is from John Clutchette to author, November 2, 2013.
3. Willie Sundiata Tate, interview.
4. David Johnson to author, December 24, 2013; Luis Bato Talamantez to author, December 24, 2013.
5. Rubiaco’s comment is recorded in Yee, Melancholy History, 227. It reflects the state of war that governed California’s prison system not just on that day but in those years. Johnson recalls that Rubiaco had been involved in the death of a black prisoner, William A. Powell, during a cell extraction at Soledad Prison in 1969. Powell’s death is described in Yee, Melancholy History, 32–33.
6. Luis Bato Talamantez, interview.
7. David Johnson, interview.
8. This description, supported by other published accounts of the day, draws largely from my interviews with John Clutchette, David Johnson, Luis Bato Talamantez, and Willie Sundiata Tate.
9. “Time Chart, San Quentin Six, August 21, 1971,” KFAP, Folder: San Quentin, 1971–72; Andrews, Black Power, 166; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 225; Luis Bato Talamantez, interview; David Johnson, interview. The song demonstrates the counterinsurgent aims of policing: the goal was not just restraint but changing the mental and psychological makeup of the insurgent population. This impromptu song suggests that the guards wished to instill docility in prisoners, to use the death of Jackson to highlight the impossibility of any social or political change in prison.
10. Mann, Comrade George, 132–44.
11. George Jackson People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic and Don Williams, “Facts about Black Genocide, Sickle Cell Anemia, and Glucose-6 Phosphate Dehydrogenase Deficiency,” HPNFP, Series 2, Box 17, Folder 17; Black Panther Party Quiz, 1973, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 4, Folder 3; George Jackson Prisoner Contact Program flyer, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 10, Folder 11. Other Panther chapters as well as organizations such as the Young Lords also named their counterinstitutions after martyred prisoners. See Bloom and Martin, Black against Empire, 189. More generally, see Nelson, Body and Soul.
12. Vincent Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 4.
13. Rodríguez, “Forced Passages.”
14. Many historians associate the term “social death” with Orlando Patterson’s influential but flawed 1982 study, Slavery and Social Death. They reject his usage of the term for the ways it forecloses the agency of those said to be socially dead as well as the abstract and totalizing (and for some ahistoric) power he attributes to social norms. That Patterson’s subsequent work has been so neoconservative only adds to the disagreement. However, my use of the phrase draws from alternate literature—specifically, from scholars working in critical legal and ethnic studies. These scholars ground their usage of “social death” in studies of law and concrete modes of political-economic violence that render people without access to rights or other mechanisms for grievance and redress. To them, and for my purposes here, social death is a productive way to make sense of abjection and subjection by the state. In other words, I am interested in the subjectivities that form amid the limitations of the law. In so doing, I am following the lead of imprisoned intellectuals, who often write of death. My thinking on social death is especially indebted to Cacho, Social Death; Dayan, Law Is a White Dog; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life”; Rodríguez, “(Non)Scenes of Captivity”; Gordon, “Methodologies”; as well as conversations with Chandan Reddy.
15. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Forgotten Places.” See also Marilyn Buck’s introduction to Rossi, State of Exile.
16. John L. Jackson Jr., Racial Paranoia, 7.
17. “George Jackson Funeral,” audio file PM 067, FA.
18. “Huey Newton on George Jackson,” audio file PM 065, FA. See also “Huey Newton, eulogy for George Jackson,” audio file PM 068, FA; “Huey Newton on George Jackson,” audio file PM 092, FA.
19. “Revolutionary Memorial Service for George Jackson,” ECP, Box 4, Folder 20: BPP–George Jackson.
20. “Outbursts Mark Burial of Jackson in Illinois,” LAT, August 30, 1971, 17.
21. Guevara, Che Guevara Speaks, 159.
22. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 224–27.
23. Major, Justice, 307–8; George Jackson Tribunal flyer, July 14, 1975, Mark Merin, Private Collection, Spain v. Procunier Files.
24. The affidavit is reprinted in San Quentin to Attica: The Sound before the Fury (New York: National Lawyers Guild, ca. 1972), RRSP, Box 8, Folder 3.
25. Philip Hager and Daryl Lembke, “Newsmen Touring San Quentin Discount Maltreatment Claims,” LAT, August 28, 1971, A1. See also “Deaths at San Quentin,” audio file PM 025, FA.
26. For more on organizing at Attica prior to the rebellion, see Thompson, “Black Activism,” Blood in the Water, “All across the Nation,” “Blinded,” and “Empire State Disgrace.” Attica prisoners had been working to improve their conditions for quite some time before Jackson’s death.
27. Tom Wicker quoted in The Struggle Inside conference booklet, n.p., Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
28. Rockefeller had the full support of President Richard Nixon; see Sam Roberts, “Rockefeller on the Attica Raid, from Boastful to Subdued,” NYT, September 12, 2011. Audio file excerpts of their conversation can be heard at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/nyregion/rockefeller-initially-boasted-to-nixon-about-attica-raid.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
29. For more on the retaking of Attica and its implications, see Wicker, Time to Die; Attica; San Quentin to Attica: The Sound before the Fury (New York: National Lawyers Guild, ca. 1972), RRSP, Box 8, Folder 3; and the Thompson articles cited in note 26 above.
30. The attempted cover-up of Attica is described by the special prosecutor hired to investigate the rebellion and its aftermath in Bell, Turkey Shoot. The fact that government officials first said that prisoners had castrated the hostages suggests that part of the dramatic violence the state used in retaking Attica was intended to restore its masculine authority. It suggests, in other words, that the prison functions to shore up the state’s patriarchal authority and that reinforcing its rule needed to restore the gendered balance of power. At least it suggests that masculinity was the symbolic terrain on which prison functioned. Further, the extreme shock-and-awe violence New York officials displayed in retaking Attica provides a needed corrective to those who insist that the spectacle of left-wing radicalism destroyed the social movements of the era. (Such ideas especially characterized earlier generations of scholarship on the 1960s, including Cummins, Rise and Fall; Gitlin, Whole World Is Watching; and Charles Payne’s otherwise stellar history of the civil rights movement, I’ve Got the Light.) The government’s response at Attica, among other such incidents, demonstrated that however much some leftist radicals speculated about the power of spectacle, the state always had a much stronger belief in as well as capacity for spectacular violence as a form of power.
31. Quoted in Franklin, Victim as Criminal, 235.
32. McKay, Harlem Shadows, 53.
33. Leon X. Bates, “George, in the Tradition of Malcolm,” Black Pride 28 (May 18, 1972): 7, 14, RRSP, Box 6, Folder 30.
34. San Quentin to Attica: The Sound before the Fury (New York: National Lawyers Guild, ca. 1972), 14, RRSP, Box 8, Folder 3.
35. Statement quoted in Foucault, von Bülow, and Defert, “Masked Assassination,” 152.
36. Angela Y. Davis, Autobiography, 317.
37. Gregory Armstrong in George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, xix.
38. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 17.
39. For examples of prisoners in anticolonial or antiracist movements around the world, see Buntman, Robben Island; Feldman, Formations of Violence; Harlow, Barred; Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs.
40. Weather Underground, “George Jackson: San Francisco, August 30, 1971,” in Dohrn, Ayers, and Jones, Sing a Battle Song, 175.
41. Quoted in Mann, Comrade George, 135.
42. Ed Mead, interview; Mark Cook, interview; Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA; Burton-Rose, Creating a Movement. Mead was a founding member of the brigade; Cook was a Black Panther who had organized a prison chapter and joined the brigade. For the George Jackson Brigade at San Quentin, see “From the George Jackson Brigade,” Babylon 1:4 (January 15, 1972): 9, NLC, Box 49, Folder: RPCN.
43. “George Jackson/Communiqués Post George Jackson Assassination,” audio file PM 013, FA.
44. Tim Findley, “‘Guerrilla’ Group Claims Oakland Copter Attack,” SFC, October 10, 1973, 3; Tim Findley, “New Note from ‘Guerrilla’ Group,” SFC, October 12, 1973, 6; Nancy Dooley, “New Questions in Oakland Copter Crash,” SFC, December 9, 1973, 5; Bill Friedmann, “SQ Six Silent on Aug 7 Band,” BB, October 12–18, 1973, 3. The communiqués were reprinted in BB, October 12–18, 1973, 3.
45. For more on the Symbionese Liberation Army, see Les Payne and Findley with Craven, Life and Death; Cummings, “End of an Era”; Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA. Begun as a Chicano organizing group, Venceremos became a multiracial organization involved in prison work. In 1972, several of its members were involved in a badly botched prison escape led by Ronald Beatty, a Chino prisoner who subsequently cooperated with authorities against his onetime comrades. See Cummins, Rise and Fall, 147; H. Bruce Franklin, interview. For how these dynamics played out in Maine and New York, respectively, see Chard, “Rallying for Repression”; Fortner, “Carceral State.”
46. In 2012, journalist Seth Rosenfeld revealed in Subversives that Richard Aoki, an Asian American radical and member of the Black Panther Party, was an FBI informant. Aoki had no known connection to Jackson or the prison movement, and Rosenfeld’s style of breaking the news was sensationalistic. Still, the fact that such a high-profile party member was an FBI informant and that his actions remained secret for forty years is startling. It points to how much we have yet to learn about law enforcement infiltration and disruption of leftist organizations during those years. Questions certainly remain about the role of informants and provocateurs in the case of Jackson—Who brought him and Johnny Spain the supposedly explosive vials of liquid? Who asked Stephen Bingham to accompany Vanita Anderson, and who was she really working for? What were the intricacies of the ostensible guerrilla training ground in the Santa Cruz Mountains?
47. Brothers and Black Panthers Landon and Randy Williams were Vietnam veterans involved in the party’s military capacity. Landon purchased the gun in March 1969 and was arrested in June of that year, when he was charged with participating in the grisly murder of a Black Panther in New Haven (charges on which he and other defendants were acquitted). Prior to his arrest, Landon had given the gun to Randy, who was arrested in April 1970. See Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 89, 109–10, 167; Yee, Melancholy History, 244–45; Yohuru Williams, Black Politics.
48. Quoted in Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 266.
49. Quoted in George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, x.
50. “Coincidence . . . or Genocide,” Up against the Bench (newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild) 1:5 (September 1972): 4–5, NLGC, Carton 57, Folder: Chapter Newsletter—Chicago, BL. More generally, see Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Nelson, Body and Soul, 133.
51. Quoted in Mann, Comrade George, 144.
52. Ossie Davis, preface to William L. Patterson, We Charge Genocide, v. I thank David Stein for bringing this reprint to my attention.
53. Willhelm, Who Needs the Negro?, 257. The literature on race and neoliberalism is vast. See, for example, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Melamed, Represent and Destroy; Singh, “Racial Formation.”
54. Diawara, In Search, 100. Postcolonial theorist Ania Loomba said that learning about Jackson and Davis as a teenager in India was also part of her initial thinking regarding race and gender (introduction to Angela Davis keynote lecture at the Critical Refusals conference, University of Pennsylvania, October 28, 2011, author’s notes).
55. Diawara, In Search, 103–4.
56. Walter Rodney, “George Jackson: Black Revolutionary,” November 1971 http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodneyjackson.html.
57. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law, 296. For more on the influence of the American prison movement on French society, especially through Davis, see Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 177–221.
58. See Heiner, “Foucault.” See also Foucault, “Michel Foucault on Attica.” For more on GIP, see Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 45–103, especially 79–95; Derrida, Negotiations, 41–45, 125–29.
59. Foucault’s conclusions in Discipline and Punish, including both racial and historical blind spots, have been widely criticized; see Joy James, Resisting State Violence, 24–43; Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 96–107; Heiner, “Foucault.”
60. Heiner, “Foucault.”
61. Foucault, von Bülow, and Defert, “Masked Assassination,” 155. Genet’s introduction is reprinted in Declared Enemy, 91–97.
62. Foucault, von Bülow, and Defert, “Masked Assassination,” 142, 149.
63. Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 68–96; “Pistol and Wig Experiment,” SFC, August 28, 1971, 1; Philip Hager, “Jackson Was Killed by Bullet in Back, New Report Indicates,” LAT, September 22, 1971, 1; Yee, Melancholy History, 236.
64. Foucault, von Bülow, and Defert, “Masked Assassination,” 147.
65. See, for example, Yee’s otherwise excellent book, The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison, which presented and then challenged the state’s theory of what happened on August 21. Even while acknowledging the sequence of events as “the state’s case,” Yee supports that perspective with the depth of his detail—narrating the last words and actions of the guards as they bled to death. Such journalism exemplifies what communications scholar James Carey later described as American journalism’s excessive, obsessive attention to how but its inability to answer why (“Dark Continent”).
66. Ruchell Magee poster, ca. November 1972, Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
67. “A Brother of the 3rd World,” “Be Aware of the Publicity Tricks,” Black Pride, June 1972, 7–8, RRSP, Box 6, Folder 30.
68. Omi and Winant, “Racial Formation Rules,” 324.
69. MS 3:12 (December 1973): 15.
70. Quoted in Michael Spencer, “Tear Down the Walls,” 3, JMP, Box 56, Folder 1. See also Bruce Jackson, “Prison.”
71. Black Mothers United for Action, “Open Letter to Black Officials: Where Is Ruchell Magee?,” August 1971, ADLDF, Box 2, Folder 7. See also Friends of San Quentin Adjustment Center, Letters to Mother from Prison (San Francisco, ca. 1972), Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
72. “Who Is Ruchell Magee? Cinque,” 2, ADLDF, Box 2, Folder 7.
73. George Jackson to unnamed, August 11, 1971, PPSB, Carton 1, Folder 38.
74. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 10.
75. Ibid., 109.
76. Ibid., 29.
77. Ibid., 23, 47, 50.
78. “George Jackson interview,” audio file PM 021, FA.
79. Saleem Holbrook to author, July 18, 2013. More generally, see Graham, Cities under Siege; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Tonry, Punishing Race; Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters.”
80. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 329.
81. Quoted in Gregory Armstrong, preface to George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, xvi. This text was republished approvingly in several leftist venues, suggesting that obsession was an appropriate response to incarceration. See, for example, Friends of Soledad, “Marin: August 7th” (flyer), JMP, Box 49, Folder 1.
82. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 19.
83. Ibid., 42.
84. For overviews, see Heiner, “Foucault”; Cusset, French Theory; Ross, May ’68; Klimke, Other Alliance; Hale, Nation of Outsiders; Katsiaficas, Imagination.
85. Williamson, Rough Guide, 83.
86. Dylan, Lyrics, 273. The other major political song that Dylan wrote during that period was also about a black prisoner. “Hurricane,” first released on the 1975 album Desire, put to music the lengthy travails of black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who many believed had been framed by police for a triple murder at a New Jersey bar. The song was far more popular than “George Jackson”—it adopted the traditions of protest songs (challenging the injustice of someone wrongly accused and around whom a campaign had been launched) at a time when protest songs were far less common and provided a more musically intricate and sophisticated song. I thank Richard Iton for pushing my aesthetic assessment of these songs.
87. See Gil Scott-Heron, “H20 Gate Blues” (1973), included on The Mind of Gil Scott Heron (1978); Gil Scott-Heron, “Pardon Our Analysis (We Beg Your Pardon)” (1975), included on the Midnight Band’s The First Minute of a New Day (1975).
88. Steel Pulse also included a reggae-style cover of Dylan’s song about Jackson on its 2004 album, African Holocaust.
89. John Lennon and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Sometime in New York City. The album features several protest songs, including “Attica State,” about the response to the prison uprising, and a song about the failing educational system, “Born in a Prison.”
90. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby”; Weheliye, “Pornotropes.”
91. Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street.
92. Robinson, “Blaxploitation”; Dunn, “Baad Bitches”; Wallace, Black Macho. One film, Brothers, offered a thinly veiled presentation of the George Jackson–Angela Davis story. It was a sympathetic, simplistic tale. The film received mixed reviews in the black press and was largely unnoticed in the mainstream. It was too tame by the standards of blaxploitation films and too hackneyed in comparison to other contemporary movies. For reviews, see “‘Brothers,’ a Powerful Motion Picture,” SR, April 14, 1977, 41; Margaret Tarter, “The Movie ‘Brothers’ a Watered-Down Love Tale,” Bay State Banner, June 9, 1977, 18; “Theatrical News: ‘Brothers’ Flick Zooms to No. 25 in First Week,” Tri-State Defender, April 23, 1977, 7.
93. Fay Stender, introduction to Pell, Maximum Security, 13.
94. Quoted in “Entrevista Sobre el Caso de Humberto Pagan,” Palante 1:24 (March 1–15, 1972): 12. The interview originally appeared in La Hora.
95. Mel Watkins, “The Last Word: The Late George Jackson,” NYT, September 19, 1971, BR55.
96. Pat Halloran and Free Our Sisters Collective, “Free Our Sisters!,” The Anvil 1:3 (August–September 1971): 7, ECP, Carton 4, Folder 33.
97. Thomas E. Gaddis, introduction to Trupin, In Prison, xvii.
98. Ronald Reagan, “We Will All Become Prisoners,” NYT, October 7, 1971, 47. See also AP, “Nobody Cares about Guards, San Quentin Widow Laments,” LAT, August 25, 1971, A1.
99. William F. Buckley Jr., “The Real Line on George Jackson,” Washington Star, September 22, 1971, A12.
100. Rosenbaum, “Whither Thou Goest,” 77, 79.
101. For more of a textual analysis of these various books, see Berger, “We Are the Revolutionaries,” 197–208. Horowitz’s article is discussed in Pell, We Used to Own, 190–91. Collier and Horowitz included a larger critical analysis of Stender and the prison movement in their book Destructive Generation, 25–66.
102. Irwin, Felon; Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil. For a discussion of the intellectual history of the prison in those years, see Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 149–90.
103. Katz, Undeserving Poor; Katz, Underclass Debate; Reed, Stirrings, especially 479–96.
104. Larry Weiss, interview. See also Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 4
105. David Johnson, interview.
106. My notion of care work builds on several sources, including Federici, Revolution; Gould, Moving Politics.
107. Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law.
108. “San Quentin 6 Indicted,” The Guardian, November 3, 1971, special insert on George Jackson’s death, 4, Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
109. Ruchell Magee to Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford, March 5, 1971, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9.
110. Author’s interviews with Kalima Aswad, Shujaa Graham, Phyllis Prentice, Mark Merin, Fred Hiestand, and Luis Bato Talamantez were helpful on this point. See also Pell, We Used to Own, 161–92.
111. Shujaa Graham, interview; Phyllis Prentice, interview.
112. See Graham and Allen Defense Committee materials, “Justice for Graham and Allen” pamphlet and “Prison Murder Conspiracy” flyer, Coalition against Police Abuse Papers, Box 17, Folder 25: Political Prisoners, Southern California Library, Los Angeles. Because of his association with the Black Guerrilla Family, however, Graham remained a police target after his release. Police raided his house and intimidated his neighbors, ultimately sending him back to prison for four months in 1983. He remains an anti-death-penalty activist (Shujaa Graham, interview).
113. Shujaa Graham, interview.
114. The Struggle Inside (conference booklet), n.p., Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
115. “The Struggle Inside: Prison Action Conference” (flyer), Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
116. See, for example, Roger Boberg, Jaan Laaman, Richard Williams, and John Yancey, “Prisoners in Revolution: Response to the Weather Underground,” letter from the New Hampshire State Prison, February 11, 1975, and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee Prison Project, “Why Do Prison Work?,” January 1976, both in San Francisco PFOC FBI File, 100-77975.
117. David Stein, “Spectre”; Shank, “Looking Back.” Tony Platt has written several articles about the Berkeley critical criminology school, many of them published in Social Justice (most recently “Legacies”), with others in such venues as Oppenheimer, Murray, and Levine, Radical Sociologists. In addition to the Crime and Social Justice journal, the short-lived radical Berkeley School of Criminology was responsible for two impressive anthologies of the era: The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police (1975) and Punishment and Penal Discipline: Essays on the Prison and The Prisoners’ Movement (1980). Both volumes were collectively authored, sharing an analytical as well as logistical similarity with what was perhaps the most enduring critical text of the era dedicated to the study of policing and state power in late capitalism, Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (1978). Other key figures in this intellectual renaissance of critical criminology include Erik Olin Wright and Gary Marx in the United States and Stanley Cohen and Jock Young in England.
118. Harriet Tubman Prison Movement pamphlet, ca. 1973, Anthony Platt, Private Collection. Such imagery was not limited to prison radicalism; in Boston, for example, the black feminist-socialist Combahee River Collective named itself after an 1863 escape of 750 slaves from South Carolina under Tubman’s leadership. The collective became one of the most well-known radical black feminist organizations. With its 1977 political statement, the group provided an influential articulation of an intersectional approach to oppression of race, class, gender, and sexuality. And a Chicago-based successor to Students for a Democratic Society called itself the Sojourner Truth Organization.
119. Dorsey Nunn, interview.
120. Ashanti Alston, interview. For prisoner literacy, see Sweeney, Reading.
121. Hakim Ali, interview; Rodríguez, Forced Passages, 75–112.
122. Ashanti Alston, interview.
123. For books by imprisoned authors in the 1970s, see Bruchac and Witherup, Words; Atkins and Glick, Prisons; Pell, Maximum Security; Leinwand, Prisons; Norfolk Prison Brothers, Who Took the Weight?; Ramparts and Browning, Prison Life; Knight et al., Black Voices from Prison. Knight became a well-known poet and voice of prison dissent. For a critique of this overreliance on personal narratives, see Joan Scott, “Evidence of Experience.”
124. See Thuma, “‘Not a Wedge’”; Díaz-Cotto, Gender; Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy.
125. Kalima Aswad, interview. See also Ruchell Magee to Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford, March 5, 1971, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9.
126. Shujaa Graham, interview; Dorsey Nunn, interview.
127. For more on Maoism’s influence on the leftist movements of this period, see Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao”; Elbaum, Revolution; Fields, Trotskyism; Frazier, “Thunder.”
128. Dorsey Nunn, interview.
129. Hakim Ali, interview.
130. Prison Action Project, Freedom, 25, in author’s files, courtesy of Tony Platt.
1. Donald B. Thackrey, “May Hear MaGee [sic] on ‘Forced Slave’ Rap,” Chicago Defender, June 30, 1971, 4; “New Motions Filed in Miss Davis Case,” NYT, June 29, 1971, 75.
2. This sketch of Magee comes from Major, Justice, 77–122; Sol Stern, “The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee,” NYT Magazine, June 27, 1971, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html; Black Mothers United for Action, “Who Is Ruchell Magee? Cinque” (flyer), ca. 1971, ADLDF, Box 2, Folder 7; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 180–82; Prison Solidarity Committee, From Soledad to San Quentin (San Francisco, ca. 1972), 5, Anthony Platt, Private Collection; Alexandra Close, “The Trial of Ruchell Magee,” 5, JMP, Box 49, Folder 6. More generally on the phenomenon of prisoners who become self-taught legal mavens, see Abu-Jamal, Jailhouse Lawyers.
3. Nelson quoted in People of the State of California v. Stephen Mitchell Bingham, case no. 4094, June 19, 1986, 3655.
4. Soledad Brothers Defense Fund, Soledad Brothers pamphlet, ca. 1970, 7, NLC, Box 57, Folder: Black Power.
5. For studies of colonial prisons, see Paton, No Bond; O’Donovan, “Universities of Social and Political Change”; McLennan, “Crisis of Imprisonment.”
6. Shujaa Graham, interview.
7. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 65.
8. Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 74–95.
9. For earlier notions of the organizing against prison slavery, see Blue, Doing Time; Curtin, Black Prisoners; Lichtenstein, Twice the Work; Perkinson, Texas Tough; Chase, “Civil Rights.”
10. Angela Y. Davis, Autobiography, 250.
11. See Roediger, Wages, 65–87.
12. For the incapacitation of slavery, see Camp, Closer to Freedom; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery. For the incapacitation of prison, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag.
13. My thinking here has been shaped by several sources, including Rodríguez, “‘Social Truth’” and Forced Passages; Rediker, Slave Ship.
14. Interest in slavery as both history and allegory was resurrected during the 1970s in the United States. Marxist-influenced labor historians John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine, Nathan Huggins, Leon Litwack, and others produced a new scholarship on slavery that, in Hahn’s summary, “showed growing and increasingly sophisticated interest in what slaves ‘did’ under slavery, and in how they shaped the institution and hastened its eventual demise.” At the same time, radicals used slave resistance—especially Frederick Douglass’s classic speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”—to challenge the racism that accompanied the American Bicentennial. Most dramatically, Alex Haley’s Roots offered a massive, multimedia depiction of slavery. The book, which quickly became a best seller, traced seven generations of Haley’s family, from eighteenth-century Gambia to twentieth-century America. The much-anticipated book appeared in 1976, although portions of it had first appeared in the Reader’s Digest in 1974. On January 23–30, 1977, ABC broadcast a twelve-hour miniseries based on the book. The program “scored higher ratings than any previous entertainment program in history; its finale is still the third-most-watched (one hundred million viewers) program in television history; it averaged eighty million viewers during its initial network run; some 250 colleges planned courses around the series; the seven episodes that followed the opener earned the top seven spots in the ratings for their week; and 85 percent of all homes with televisions watched all or part of the miniseries” (Lester D. Friedman, “Introduction: Movies and the 1970s,” in Lester D. Friedman, American Cinema, 19). Roots placed slavery at the center of American political culture, even if, as several scholars have noted, the most salient impact of the Roots phenomenon was not so much racial justice as a newfound interest in white ethnicity, multiracial American nationalism, and normative family values. See Hahn, Political Worlds, 108. See also Zaretsky, No Direction Home, 155–56; Jacobson, Roots Too.
15. Dennis Hevesi, “Huey Newton Symbolized the Rising Black Anger of a Generation,” NYT, August 23, 1989, B7; John Kifner, “Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Who Became GOP Conservative, Is Dead at 62,” NYT, May 2, 1998, B8.
16. Yee, Melancholy History, 130–31.
17. Andrews, Black Power; The San Quentin Six (pamphlet), ca. 1974, 6–7, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12. As the title of Andrews’s book makes clear, Spain’s mixed-race background has been particularly tantalizing to journalistic observers. In American Saturday, his true-crime book about the day Jackson was killed, Clark Howard writes that Spain’s background made him an “alien” consumed with anger.
18. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 233.
19. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 10. For a critique, see Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black, 127–28.
20. Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, Soledad Brothers pamphlet, ca. 1970, 6, Anthony Platt private collection.
21. Georgia Jackson quoted in “Unknown Racist Trial in Far Off Salinas,” People’s World, March 28, 1970, 1.
22. George L. Jackson, Soledad Brother, 210.
23. Fleeta Drumgo quoted in “Interviews with the Soledad Brothers,” audio file PM 058, FA.
24. Students for a Democratic Society, “Tape on Ruchell Magee” (flyer), ca. 1972, NLC, Box 56, Folder: Black Panther Party.
25. See Akinshiju, “The Blkprisoner: Criminal or Political Prisoner[?],” Black Pride, March 23, 1972, 3, JMP, Box 56, Folder 3. On the broader usage of this argument in black nationalist politics, see Stuckey, Slave Culture.
26. See Newton, “Black Panthers.” Newton describes the Panthers’ goal as freeing all of humanity from slavery. Prisoner unionists also often described all prisoners as slaves of the state, though with little racial analysis.
27. Major notes, however, that black journalists and spectators abandoned this form of resistance when the verdict in Davis’s trial was ready. Then, he writes, “we were up front” (Justice, 290).
28. For more on working-class militancy of the 1970s, see Brenner, Brenner, and Winslow, Rebel Rank and File; Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; Thompson, Whose Detroit?; Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit; MacLean, Freedom; Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution.
29. John Irwin and Willie Holder, “History of the Prisoners’ Union,” The Outlaw 2:1 (January–February 1973): 1. The “Folsom Prisoners Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform” is reprinted in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 65–74.
30. See, for example, Emanuel Perlmutter, “Prisoners Union Formed Upstate,” NYT, February 28, 1972, 1; Everett R. Hulles, “Convicts Seek to Form a National Union,” NYT, September 26, 1971, 74.
31. Bissonette, When the Prisoners; Ed Mead, interview; Mark Cook, interview.
32. See “Goals of the Prisoners’ Union,” ca. 1972, United Prisoners Union Vertical File, FA.
33. In states without a union tradition rivaling California’s, prisoner unionism did not produce the same cleavages or the same racial tensions among different groups of prison organizers. For the union model in other states, see Chase, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt”; Tibbs, From Black Power; Ronald Berkman, Opening the Gates; Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil; Burton-Rose, “War behind Walls.”
34. Willie Holder, “To Persons Interested in Prisoner Organizations,” March 7, 1973, JMP, Box 40, Folder 3.
35. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 255. Danish photographer Jacob Holdt provides a different, more sympathetic depiction of Jackson on his website, http://www.american-pictures.com/roots/chapter-67.htm.
36. “United Prisoners Union Bill of Rights,” United Prisoners Union Vertical File, FA.
37. Such expressions were common features of Prisoners Union publications. See, for example, The Anvil, newspaper of the California Prisoners Union, and The Outlaw, newspaper of the Prisoners Union.
38. “Goals of the Prisoners’ Union,” United Prisoners Union Vertical File, FA.
39. Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 98–100.
40. See Painter, “Soul Murder.”
41. Wilderson, “Prison Slave,” 28.
42. Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 3.
43. See Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
44. Akinshiju, “The Blkprisoner: Criminal or Political Prisoner[?],” Black Pride, March 23, 1972, 3, JMP, Box 56, Folder 3.
45. Voices from Inside: 7 Interviews with Attica Prisoners, April 1972, 38, Voices from Inside vertical file, TL.
46. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 7.
47. In a similar if more theoretical way than Jackson, Foucault troubled the possibilities of prison “reform” or “alternatives.” See, for example, Foucault, “Alternatives”; Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 1–55. For a seminal account of early abolitionist thought in Norway, see Mathiesen, Politics. For a critique of its ignorance of race, see Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 96–107.
48. Knopp and Reigier, Instead of Prisons.
49. Murton and Hyams, Accomplices; Bruce Jackson, “Our Prisons Are Criminal,” NYT, September 22, 1968, 258; Ronald L. Goldfarb, “Why Don’t We Tear Down Our Prisons,” Look, July 27, 1971, 45–47; Robert Martinson, “The Paradox of Prison Reform,” New Republic, four-part series on April 1 (23–25), 8 (13–14), 15 (17–18), and 29 (21–23), 1972; Sommer, End of Imprisonment; Dodge, Nation without Prisons. For more recent scholarly accounts, see Thompson, “Blinded”; Samuels, “Improvising on Reality.”
50. Bissonette, When the Prisoners; American Friends Service Committee, Struggle.
51. Badillo and Haynes, Bill of No Rights, 171.
52. Goodell, Political Prisoners, 12–13. A high-profile Establishment critic of the Vietnam War, Goodell was appointed in 1968 to take over Robert Kennedy’s senatorial seat but earned the enmity of Richard Nixon and lost to Nixon-backed conservative James Buckley in 1970. Goodell’s book focused on “civil disobedients and victims of repression” (that is, people arrested for their political beliefs or associations). He sidestepped the radical critique of legality, looking instead only at the law’s misapplication. A collection of almost uniformly negative or lackluster reviews of the book and correspondence relating to it can be found in the Charles Goodell Papers, Manuscripts, New York Public Library, New York. The element most consistently noted was Goodell’s dedication of the book to “my friend Richard Nixon—May he do more than listen.”
53. Quoted in Perkinson, Texas Tough, 3.
54. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 113.
55. Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment, 274–325. Waskow’s initial proposal celebrated the civil disobedience of white, primarily antiwar youth as the natural base for a campaign to abolish jails. In private correspondence, Mitford challenged Waskow by pointing out first that prisons incarcerated more people than jails (and that an ethically honest abolitionism would need to remove both institutions) and second that black radicalism lay at the root of prison radicalism more than did “white intellectuals [and] civil disobedients.” The revised version of his proposal appeared in the Saturday Review, January 8, 1972, 20–21. Mitford still called it a false expression of abolitionism since it continued to rely on confining people. Likewise, Mitford called Clark’s take on abolition “shallow and erroneous” (Jessica Mitford to Arthur Waskow, July 20, 21, 1971, JMP, Box 40, Folder 2).
56. On suburbs, see Sugrue, Origins; Lassiter, Silent Majority; Self, American Babylon; Freund, Colored Property. On conservatism, see Weaver, “Frontlash”; Teles, Rise; Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters”; Wilson, Thinking about Crime; Van Den Haag, Punishing Criminals. On urban transformation and policing, see Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty; Fortner, “Carceral State.” Fortner rightly points to tensions within black communities over politics, crime, and safety—some of which lent support to law-and-order campaigns—but he overstates the role that black communities played in the creation and sustenance of mass incarceration.
57. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 118.
58. John Clutchette, “On Prison Reform,” in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 154.
59. Jordan, “Prison Reform,” 786.
60. Rosenbaum, “Whither Thou Goest,” 86–88, 92, 174–76.
61. While no one, himself included, disputes that Magee immediately joined the raid, his precise role in it has been described in dramatically different terms. Yee, quoting two witnesses from the courthouse, writes that Magee “spoke gently” and was the most restrained, convincing his associates not to take a couple and their young baby hostage (Melancholy History, 159). Other accounts, including witness testimony in court, attribute this restraint to James McClain (Frame Up, March 31, 1972, 4, MCLIR, Carton 37, Folder: Section XII, Docs. 30–36, Public Relations).
62. See Major, Justice; Sol Stern, “The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee,” NYT Magazine, June 27, 1971, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html. In a letter to Huey Newton from jail, Davis complained that the media were denying that she supported Magee (Angela Davis to Huey Newton, April 3, 1971, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 41, Folder 15, GL).
63. Major, Justice, 84–85.
64. By Any Means Necessary (newspaper), ca. 1970, ECP, Carton 4, Folder 21.
65. Untitled pamphlet for Ruchell Magee, ca. November 1972, Anthony Platt, Private Collection.
66. Ibid.
67. Students for a Democratic Society, “Tape on Ruchell Magee” (flyer), ca. 1972, NLC, Box 56, Folder: Black Panther Party.
68. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Amistad case upheld that slaves were property of their owners and that where slavery was legal, rebellion against it was not. It found the rebellion justified on a purely technical matter: the Africans aboard the Amistad ship were not legally enslaved because the Atlantic slave trade had been abolished, so they had the right to rebel against their captors. While significant, it was in fact a limited victory on legal rather than moral grounds. See Howard Jones, Mutiny, 188–94; Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 186–237 passim.
69. Cinque (Ruchell Magee), The Barbarian Conspirators (pamphlet), ca. 1972, 7, Ruchell Magee Vertical File, TL; Ruchell Magee, “Letter to Angela Y. Davis,” in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 177.
70. Major, Justice, 77–122; Cinque (Ruchell Magee), The Barbarian Conspirators (pamphlet), ca. 1972, 9, Ruchell Magee Vertical File, TL. Davis’s lead attorney, Howard Moore, was one of the attorneys who argued for the state-first strategy in 1967–68 in the South, and Moore represented Julian Bond in his effort to be seated in the Georgia legislature after winning election in 1965.
71. Nicholas von Hoffman, “Ruchell Magee: Unforgotten Man,” Washington Post, May 14, 1971, B1. See also Nicholas von Hoffman, “‘A Slave May Do Anything,’” Washington Post, May 17, 1971, B1; Nicholas Von Hoffman, “Magee and the Law Factory,” SFC, May 23, 1971, 2.
72. The Metropolitan Applied Research Center files at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library contain hundreds of articles about Clark’s involvement in a variety of racial issues, primarily relating to education and housing inequity. In addition to his publications on schools and ghettoes, Clark edited a book of interviews (that he conducted) with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. See Clark, King, Malcolm, Baldwin. More generally, see Matlin, On the Corner.
73. “Magee Escape Bid Analyzed in Trial,” NYT, February 28, 1973, 12; “Dr. Kenneth B. Clark Testifies for Ruchell Magee” (press release), March 1, 1973, Ruchell Magee National Defense Committee Vertical File, TL.
74. Eldridge Cleaver, “The Land Question and Black Liberation,” in Eldridge Cleaver, 67.
75. For more on Garvey, see Grant, Negro, especially 349–412; Judith Stein, World.
76. See “Notes to and from the Press,” n.d., and Ruchell Magee, “Wake Up Oppressed People (Open Address to the President)” by the San Francisco Venceremos Study Group (San Francisco, 1972), both in NLC, Box 58, Folder: Ruchell Magee.
77. San Francisco Examiner, June 15, 1972, 7.
78. Ruchell Magee, “San Quentin Communique,” MS 2:7 (September 1972): 13.
79. Thomas Siporin, “Nobody May Represent This Man,” People’s Justice 5:1 (January 1973): 13.
80. Major, Justice, 291.
81. Alexandra Close, “The Trial of Ruchell Magee,” 3, JMP, Box 49, Folder 6.
82. See Black Mothers United for Action, press statement, July 30, 1071 [sic], NLC, Box 58, Folder: Ruchell Magee.
83. Angela Y. Davis, “Notes for Arguments in Court on the Issue of Self-Representation,” in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 252.
84. “Angela Davis Talks about Her Future and Her Freedom,” Jet, July 27, 1972, 57; Margaret Burnham, “Ruchell and Angela Want to Represent Themselves,” in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 222.
85. Sol Stern, “The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee,” NYT, June 27, 1971, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html.
86. Such vacillations between the common and the exceptional have characterized the popular visibility of black women since at least the nineteenth century. The response to the Davis trial played out the script developed through Sojourner Truth, an illiterate escaped slave turned itinerant preacher and suffragist in the second half of the nineteenth century. Truth, like Davis a century later, was the subject of various and cross-cutting representations that sought to make her a symbol of resistant black womanhood, a person whose accomplishments surpassed and were surprising in light of her origins. The various descriptions of both women owed as much to the chronicler as to the subject herself. See Painter, Sojourner Truth. I thank Nancy Hewitt for helping me make this connection between Davis and Truth.
87. See Winston, Meaning; Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 245.
88. Aptheker, Morning Breaks; Bettina Aptheker, interview; McDuffie, Sojourning, 193–94.
89. Major, Justice, 138; Frame Up, February 4, 1972, 1, ADLDF, Box 5, Folder 3.
90. James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis,” in Angela Y. Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning, 19.
91. Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 246. Aptheker made her remarks in a speech that was reprinted in the leftist newsweekly National Guardian in October 1970.
92. Associated Press, “Angela Davis Extradited to CA,” Sarasota Journal, December 22, 1970, 1.
93. Ruchell Magee to Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford, March 5, 1971, JMP, Box 48, Folder 9.
94. Joe Walker, “Angela Davis: What’s on Her Mind?,” Muhammad Speaks, January 1, 1971, reprinted as a pamphlet by the Committee to Free Angela Davis, JMP, Box 49, Folder 6.
95. Quoted in Her Fight Is Our Fight (Palo Alto Angela Davis Defense Committee newsletter) 1 (March 1972): 2. See also Diane and Gary Laison, “Angela Davis ‘Prosecuted Like Fugitive Slave,’” Philadelphia Tribune, August 14, 1971, 5.
96. Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power, 187.
97. After making similarly prejudicial comments about Charles Manson and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Nixon conceded that he had overstepped his bounds. See “Nixon Says He Erred on Defendants,” LAT, December 11, 1970, A17; “President Admits Error in Commenting on Three Cases,” Modesto (Calif.) Bee, December 11, 1970, 35; John Abt, “On the Defense of Angela Davis,” speech at the Unitarian Church in Los Angeles, November 22, 1970, SPC, Reel 21.
98. Free Angela (newsletter) 23 (1971): 1–2, SPC, Reel 21.
99. The Presbyterian Church established its Emergency Fund for Legal Aid in 1968 to provide financial assistance to political activists; it had previously given money to the NAACP and to the Panther 21 defense. Some members of the church were rankled by such a hefty donation to a figure as controversial as Davis. The church undertook an independent investigation into why the donation was made, resulting in a churchwide conversation about race, justice, imprisonment, and the church’s responsibility. “Why Angela Davis,” Monday Morning, July 1971, 7, ADLDF, Box 3, Folder 9. The Reverend Charles R. Ehrhardt of Phoenix said that Davis was literally a beloved angel: etymologically, he claimed, “Davis” means “beloved,” and “Angela” means “angel” (The Presbyteer 24:7 [July 1971]: 1, ADLDF, Box 3, Folder 9). Several documents relating to the church discussion, including its independent investigation, can be found in ADLDF, Box 3, Folder 9.
100. Quoted in Milwaukee Committee to Free Angela Davis, Free Angela Davis, ca. 1970, in Angela Y. Davis Vertical File, TL.
101. Dean Paul E. Miller, Washington Sunday Star, February 14, 1971; Milwaukee Committee to Free Angela Davis, Free Angela Davis, ca. 1970, in Angela Y. Davis Vertical File, TL; National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, press release, March 10, 1972, ADLDF, Box 5, Folder 3; Sol Stern, “The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee,” NYT, June 27, 1971, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html; Major, Justice, 105; Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 250.
102. For a sampling, see Linda Charlton, “FBI Seizes Angela Davis in Motel Here,” NYT, October 14, 1970, 1; “Personality: The Fugitive,” Time, August 31, 1970, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876780,00.html; “Can California Convict Angela Davis?: Long, Costly Battle Ahead,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 24, 1970, 1–2; Angela Davis—Like It Is (Folkways, 1971), in Angela Davis Vertical File, FA.
103. Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 271.
104. Major, Justice, 231–32.
105. Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 276.
106. Ibid., 275.
107. The letters can be found in MCLIR, Carton 39, Folder: Angela Davis Papers, Letters to George Jackson. I have been unable to locate Jackson’s note to Davis that, along with a verbal message delivered to her by a mutual friend, caused her such frustration in the final series of letters.
108. The sexual ideology of enslavement allowed white slave owners to sexually assault black women without fear that such violations would be labeled or prosecuted as rape. Rape, as a criminal act of unwanted sexual contact that violated a person’s sense of self, could not apply to those deemed less than human. Bondage defined black sexuality as lascivious, illegitimate yet available. Consent did not apply. For more, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 80–110.
109. See the summaries presented in Aptheker, Morning Breaks; Major, Justice; Timothy, Jury Woman. Timothy was the forewoman of the jury in the Davis trial and became a friend of Davis and to Bettina Aptheker.
110. Angela Y. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader, 126.
111. Ibid., 116.
112. Weinbaum, “Gendering,” 450.
113. Angela Y. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role,” 111–12.
114. Angela Y. Davis, introduction in Douglass, Narrative, 28.
115. Leo Branton, closing statement, June 1, 1972, 7024 court transcript XLIX, Angela Davis Papers, Box 3, Envelope: June 1, 1972, 6972–7142, GL.
116. Ibid., 7015, 7012–13, 7053.
117. Ibid., 7081.
118. Carolyn Anspacher, “Angela Trial Review,” SFC, June 8, 1972, 3; Rick Carroll, “No Juror Cast a Ballot of Guilt,” SFC, June 5, 1972, 2; Associated Press, “How Jury Found Angela Innocent,” Stockton Record, June 5, 1972, 1, in Angela Davis Papers, Box 4, Folder 22, GL.
119. UPI, “Reagan Says Davis Trial Vindicates U.S. Justice,” LAT, June 6, 1972, A23.
120. “Angela Davis’ Fair Trial,” LAT, June 6, 1972, E10. The Davis jury was often described as all-white, but one of the jurors was Chicano and identified as such. Still, because the editorial and most other media, including information from Davis’s defense team and supporters, described the jury as all-white, I offer this quotation in its original context.
121. UPI, “Reagan Says Davis Trial Vindicates U.S. Justice,” LAT, June 6, 1972, A23.
122. Louis Claiborne, “Angela Davis, Farewell,” Intellectual Digest, October 1972, 16 (originally printed in Spectator, June 17, 1972).
123. See, for example, Kevin Leary, “The Joy Outside the Court,” SFC, June 5, 1972, 3; International Art Manifesto for the Legal Defense of Political Prisoners to Angela Davis, August 20, 1972, JMP, Box 49, Folder 7.
124. “Jury Acquits Angela Davis on All 3 Counts,” Globe, undated clipping, Angela Davis Papers, Box 4, Folder 11, GL.
125. For more on the Little case, see Angela Y. Davis, “JoAnne Little,” in Angela Davis Reader, 149–60; Fergus, Liberalism, 132–65; Law, “Sick of the Abuse”; McGuire, At the Dark End, 202–28; Thuma, “‘Not a Wedge.’”
126. No history of the NAARPR has yet been published. Its work can be gleaned from the group’s papers, some of which are housed at the SC.
127. Real Dragons (KPFA), February 10, 1973, audio file, RD 030, FA.
128. Quoted in “Magee,” MS 3:6 (June 1973): 23.
129. UPI, “Mistrial Declared for Ruchell Magee; Jury Split 11 to 1,” LAT, April 3, 1973, 3; MS 3:6 (June 1973): 23; Aptheker, Intimate Politics, 288–91.
130. Associated Press, “Ruchell Magee Pleads Guilty to Kidnapping,” LAT, May 11, 1974, 15; UPI, “Magee Asks Judge to Withdraw Plea,” NYT, May 14, 1974, 20.
131. Evelle J. Younger to Lynn S. Carman, August 22, 1973, 1, Mark Merin, Private Collection, Spain v. Procunier Files.
132. Wald, “San Quentin Six Case,” 171; Major, Justice, 124–25. My interviews with members of the San Quentin 6 case, their attorneys, and activist Kiilu Nyasha, as well as conversations with Claude Marks and Felix Shafer, were also helpful in describing the political background of the San Quentin 6, as were the programs housed in the Prison Movement audio files, FA.
133. Quoted in National Lawyers Guild, San Quentin to Attica: The Sound before the Fury, 12, RRSP, Box 8, Folder 3. More generally, see James R. Bendat, “The San Quentin Six Trial: Do Chains Have a Place?,” LAT, May 22, 1975, E7; The San Quentin Six pamphlet; Wald, “San Quentin Six Case”; “Justice for the San Quentin Six” (flyer) and San Quentin Six Defense Committee, press release, May 2, 1974, both in SPC, Reel 20.
134. San Quentin Six Defense Committee, “San Quentin Six Case: Whose Peers?,” ca. 1971, Pamphlet Collection, Southern California Library, Los Angeles.
135. National Research Council, Growth of Incarceration, 33; Bosworth, Explaining U.S. Imprisonment; Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Harcourt, Illusion; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.
136. Davidson, Chicano Prisoners; Joan W. Moore and Garcia, Homeboys; Díaz-Cotto, Gender.
137. For examples of the San Quentin 6 in Latino media, see “Noticias de la Pinta,” La Raza 1:8 (1975): 32–41. The case was regularly covered in a series of leftist publications, including Sedition, a San Jose radical paper; The Conspiracy, a publication of the National Lawyers Guild; The Guardian, a national leftist weekly; and the Bay Area’s black newspaper, the Sun Reporter.
138. San Quentin Six Defense Committee, fundraising appeal letter, April 1973, JMP, Box 49, Folder 7.
139. Wald, “San Quentin Six Case”; Luis Bato Talamantez, interview; Larry Weiss, interview; Willie Sundiata Tate, interview. For Acosta’s political background and involvement, see Haney-López, Racism on Trial. Acosta was not well liked on the defense team. Talamantez and Weiss described him as disorganized and disrespectful: they recall that he treated women involved with the case inappropriately (in at least one instance he groped a woman’s breast) and tried to bill the court for thousands of dollars in legal fees for work he did not do. According to them, after being fired, Acosta vandalized and burglarized Weiss’s legal office.
140. Luis Bato Talamantez, interview; Larry Weiss, interview; Mark Merin, interview; Fred Hiestand, interview.
141. “Johnny Spain Appeals 1976 San Quentin Six Conviction,” Black Panther, May 20, 1978, 3; James R. Bendat, “The San Quentin Six Trial: Do Chains Have a Place?,” LAT, May 22, 1975, 7; Wald, “San Quentin Six Case,” 169; Tate quoted in Alice Yarish, “What It’s Like to Be Free and One of the San Quentin Six,” San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, July 13, 1975.
142. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 259–60; Bill Monning, “San Quentin Six: ‘Justice’ Shackled,” The Conspiracy, May 1975, 3, 13, NLGC, Oversized Box 7.
143. San Francisco Special Agent in Charge to FBI Director, July 1, 1976, HPNFP, Series 2, Box 42, Folder 14; Wald, “San Quentin Six Case”; The San Quentin Six pamphlet, ca. 1974, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12. See also the radio coverage of the case on the program Nothing Is More Precious Than, which originally aired on the Pacifica network and is housed at the FA.
144. Friends of the San Quentin Adjustment Center, “Attend the Hearing of the San Quentin Six” (flyer), SPC, Reel 20. See also The San Quentin Six pamphlet, ca. 1974, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12.
145. For examples of news coverage of the case, see James R. Bendat, “The San Quentin Six Trial: Do Chains Have a Place?,” LAT, May 22, 1975, 7; Wald, “San Quentin Six Case.”
146. Prison Law Collective, “Adjustment Center Challenge by SQ6,” The Conspiracy, April 1974, 13.
147. Luis Bato Talamantez, interview; Larry Weiss, interview; Spain v. Procunier opening brief, no. 76-1095, and appellants brief, both in author’s files, courtesy of Mark Merin.
148. Joel Kirschenbaum and Jae Scharlin, “Indictment Quashed!: The San Quentin Six,” The Conspiracy, February 1974, 5. Zimbardo planned a two-week experiment in which college students were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards. However, he called off the experiment after six days because the guards became “sadistic” and the prisoners “showed signs of extreme stress.” Zimbardo maintains a website about the experiment at http://www.prisonexp.org/.
149. Yee, Melancholy History, 255–56; Eve Pell, “San Quentin Six: Pinell Describes August 21st,” The Conspiracy, March 1976, 3.
150. Citizens Research and Investigation Committee and Tackwood, Glass House Tapes. Other books published at this time dealing with prisons and state violence include Atkins and Glick, Prisons; Ramparts and Browning, Prison Life; Trupin, In Prison; Halperin et al., Lawless State; Sheehan et al., Pentagon Papers; Irwin, Felon; Wright, Politics of Punishment; Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove.
151. For more on Tackwood, see Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson?, 126–62; Citizens Research and Investigation Committee and Tackwood, Glass House Tapes.
152. Wald, “San Quentin Six Case,” 172. In postverdict interviews with members of the San Quentin 6 legal team, several jurors said that they were not sure how much of Tackwood’s testimony was believable. Transcripts of undated interviews in author’s files, courtesy of Larry Weiss. See also Tackwood’s testimony in People v. S. Bingham et al., HPNFP, Series 2, Box 33. My knowledge of the differences within the defense about Tackwood comes from my interviews with David Johnson, Luis Bato Talamantez, and Larry Weiss.
153. The San Quentin Six pamphlet, ca. 1974, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12; Alfonso Zirpoli quoted in Aptheker, Morning Breaks, 296–97.
154. “Post-Trial Memorandum” and Richard H. Fine, “Medical Report: Hugo Pinnell,” April 17, 1974, both in Mark Merin, Private Collection; Thomas O. Hilliard (National Association of Black Psychologists), “Psychological Evaluation of Adjustment Center Environment at San Quentin Prison,” July 8, 1974, in author’s files, courtesy of Luis Bato Talamantez. I am grateful to Talamantez, Merin, and Hiestand for sharing their recollections and their files with me.
155. See Andrews, Black Power, 175–232; Cummins, Rise and Fall, 262. See also The San Quentin Six, ca. 1974, 16, RRSP, Box 7, Folder 12.
156. Press release, October 4, [1972?], National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression Papers, Box 3, SC; “Who Are the San Quentin Six?,” ca. 1975, KFAP, Folder: San Quentin 1971–72. After the acquittal, Talamantez spent time with family outside of California before returning to the state to continue his writing and antiprison activism. As chapter 6 describes in more detail, Drumgo had a difficult time adjusting to postprison life and was shot to death in 1979.
157. Wald, “San Quentin Six Case.” For more on Spain, see Andrews, Black Power.
158. Quoted in Gottschalk, Prison, 175.
159. Thompson, “Black Activism,” 24. More generally on the use of lawsuits as part of a prisoner rights movement, see Chase, “Civil Rights.” See also Jacobs, “Prisoners’ Rights Movement.”
1. Kalima Aswad, interview; Aswad, “Questions”; Aswad, “Coincidences.” Unless otherwise noted, the rest of this section comes from my interview with him as well as these unpublished articles, in author’s private collection.
2. Hakim Ali, interview.
3. Kalima Aswad, interview; Jalil Muntaqim to author, July 14, 2011; Hakim Ali, interview. For more on black Islam in the 1970s and beyond, see Simmons, “From Muslims”; Simmons, “African American Islam”; Sherman A. Jackson, “Preliminary Reflections”; McCloud, African American Islam; Turner, Islam; Curtis, “African-American Islamization”; Curtis, Islam, 107–28. My conversations with Zoharah Simmons, Jalil Muntaqim, John Jackson, Laura McTighe, and Josh Dubler, among others, have also helped me think about black radicals turning to Islam in the 1970s.
4. Keve, McNeil Century, 250–55; Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment.
5. This argument is made most strongly in Cummins’s Rise and Fall, though the influence of this declensionist narrative can be found elsewhere. For other attempts to historicize prisoner print culture, see Chard, “SCAR’d Times”; Thuma, “Not a Wedge”; Winn, “We Are All Prisoners.”
6. My argument here builds on Murch, Living for the City, in which she asserts that political education was central to the rise and ongoing impact of the Black Panther Party. This robust defense of knowledge was a centerpiece of social movements in this era and perhaps of social movements generally. See also Freire, Pedagogy; Eyerman and Jamison, Social Movements. Tracing prisoners’ knowledge acquisition and production as a legacy that continued in (and beyond) the late 1970s shows the inadequacy and inaccuracy of Cummins’s claim (in Rise and Fall) that the prison movement destroyed itself in a violent rage after George Jackson’s death.
7. See Anderson, Imagined Communities; Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments.
8. Thuma, “Within and against the ‘Prison/Psychiatric State.’”
9. Thuma, “‘Not a Wedge’”; Law, “Sick of the Abuse”; McGuire, At the Dark End, 246–78; Fergus, Liberalism, 132–65.
10. Ed Mead, interview; Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 191–224; Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA; Burton-Rose, Creating a Movement.
11. On the original Communist Party position, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Solomon, Cry; Biondi, To Stand and Fight. For more on the communist parties of the 1970s, see Elbaum, Revolution.
12. See Obadele, War in America.
13. For more on Moore, see McDuffie, Sojourning; McDuffie, “‘I Wanted a Communist Philosophy’”; Ahmad, We Will Return, 7–13; Sugrue, Sweet Land, 272–73, 434–35; Naison, Communists, 136, 215; Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, interview by Prego.
14. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie; Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power, 18–52; Ahmad, We Will Return; Kelley and Esch, “Black Like Mao.”
15. For the Black Arts movement, see Widener, Black Arts West; Lisa Gail Collins and Crawford, New Thoughts; Smethurst, Black Arts Movement; Woodard, Nation within a Nation.
16. The group initially used the standard English spelling. See Acoli, “Updated History,” 138. Because the RNA still exists and because people still define themselves as New Afrikans, I have opted to use this spelling throughout, except in quotations. The RNA was not the first to spell Afrika with a “k.” Other black organizations in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s did so, for the same reasons. These include the Los Angeles free jazz performance troupe the Pan-Afrikan Arkestra and Amiri Baraka’s Congress of Afrikan People. Conversations with Daniel Widener, Robin Kelley, and Rebecca Hill were helpful in my thinking on this point.
17. New Afrikan Prisoners Organization, “We Still Charge Genocide,” August 31, 1977, in New Afrikan Prisoners Organization Vertical File, FA.
18. Atiba, “Afrikan P.O.W.’s,” 12.
19. For the Congress of Afrikan People, see Woodard, Nation within a Nation; Frazier, “Congress.” For SNCC members’ evolution to Pan-Africanism, see Carmichael, Stokely Speaks; Carmichael with Thelwell, Ready for Revolution; Berger and Meyer, “Pan-Africanization”; Wilkins, “‘Line of Steel.’” For the African Liberation Support Committee, see Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries, 131–72.
20. For scholarly accounts of the RNA, see Onaci, “Self-Determination”; Berger, “‘Malcolm X Doctrine’”; Berger with Dunbar-Ortiz, “‘Struggle Is for Land!’”; Cunnigen, “Republic of New Africa.” For an interesting insider history of the group and its relation to other efforts at New Afrikan politics, see Chokwe Lumumba, The Roots of the New Afrikan Independence Movement, in author’s files, courtesy of Matt Meyer.
21. See ji Jaga, “Every Nation,” 75. For a more contemporary corollary, see Sanyika Shakur, Monster.
22. See, for example, “Black On Vanguard,” MS 3:11 (November 1973): 15. The group claimed chapters in Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. As with adopting Swahili or Arabic names, such action-oriented articulations of black collectivity were common to late 1960s expressions of radicalism. In particular, as Scot Brown shows, southern California’s US organization chose its name “as a dual reference to the organization and the community its members pledged to serve: us Blacks as opposed to ‘them’ Whites” (Fighting for Us, 38).
23. Black On Vanguards, Ohio and North Carolina, “I Have Seen America,” MS 3:2 (February 1973): 8; letter in support of Assata and Sundiata, MS 3:10 (October 1973): 15.
24. For the raid, see Umoja, We Will Shoot Back, 201–7, The assault on the RNA headquarters used hardware first bought to police the civil rights movement; see Jack O’Dell’s “The July Rebellions and the ‘Military State,’” originally published in 1967 in Freedomways and reprinted in O’Dell, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder, 145–59.
25. Black Pride, JMP, Box 56, Folder 3. See also Gómez, “Resisting Living Death.” Obadele also describes his prison organizing in Free the Land!, 246–82.
26. Obadele, Foundations, 73–106.
27. See, for example, the New Afrikan Creed, in Obadele, Foundations, 153; Obadele, War in America, iii.
28. New Afrikan Prisoners Organization, “We Still Charge Genocide,” August 31, 1977, New Afrikan Prisoners Organization Vertical File, FA.
29. Roxanne Brown, “Stateville Inmate Describes His Lengthy ‘Ordeal by Trial,’” Chicago Defender, December 23, 1978; “Overthrow the Frame-Up: Sayles/Dee Fact Sheet,” ca. 1982, in author’s files, courtesy of Nancy Kurshan and Steve Whiteman.
30. Bradley Abdul Greene to author, January 8, 2010; Lorenzo Ervin, “Build a Mass Prison Movement,” MS 5:12 (October 1977): 10–11. See also African National Prison Organization Solidarity Committee Vertical File, TL. Greene remembers that NAPO members also became part of the BLA and had relationships with several gangs, including the Vice Lords and the Black Gangster Disciples.
31. Atiba, “SPO Discussion Paper No. 1,” December 1976, 15, in author’s files, courtesy of Nancy Kurshan and Steve Whitman. See also “An Introduction to the Words of James Yaki Sayles,” in Sayles, Meditations, 3–40.
32. See, for example, San Quentin News, JMP, Box 44, Folder 2; The Echo (Huntsville, Texas), RRSP, Box 26, Folder 15; James C. Scott, Domination, especially 136–82. For more on Aztlán, see Gómez, “‘Nuestras Vidas Corren Casi Paralelas.’” Copies of the paper are available in RRSP, Series 3, Box 7.
33. Dorsey Nunn, interview.
34. See McMillian, Smoking Typewriters.
35. Harcourt, Illusion; Harvey, Brief History.
36. See Self, American Babylon; McGirr, Suburban Warriors. On Nixon and Reagan, see Perlstein, Nixonland; Schulman and Zelizer, Rightward Bound; McCartin, Collision Course.
37. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Parenti, Lockdown America; Bryan, This Soldier.
38. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors; Alexander, New Jim Crow; Western, Punishment; Frydl, War on Drugs; Provine, Unequal under Law; Tonry, Punishing Race. On Rockefeller, see Kramer and Roberts, “I Never Wanted”; Seigel, “Cold War Connections.”
39. Gómez, “Resisting Living Death,” 59.
40. Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. Problem with overall welfare plan is that it forces poor whites into the same position as blacks. Feels we have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality” (Haldeman Diaries, 53). This passage is often quoted as if to suggest Nixon was speaking about the war on drugs; thanks to David Stein for the full quotation in its proper context. Recently uncovered recordings of Nixon and Rockefeller following the retaking of Attica prison confirm the depths of this line of thinking about the war on crime for both men (Sam Roberts, “Rockefeller on the Attica Raid, from Boastful to Subdued,” NYT, September 12, 2011, A24). For the intervention of conservative public intellectuals in the mid-1970s, see Wilson, Thinking about Crime; Van Den Haag, Punishing Criminals. Recent urban histories have documented the crucial role of suburban politics in fueling the New Right; see, for example, Sugrue, Origins; Freund, Colored Property; McGirr, Suburban Warriors; Kruse, White Flight; Thompson, Whose Detroit?; Self, American Babylon. The rapid growth of the suburbs not only depleted the urban tax base but made it more difficult for black urban neighborhoods to interact with many of the institutions shaping their lives. See Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn?
41. Osman, Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Mike Davis, City of Quartz; Fortner, “Carceral State.”
42. For more on the Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform, see Chard, “SCAR’d Times.” For more on NEPA News, see Bissonette, When the Prisoners. I am grateful to Victor Wallis and to Nancy Kurshan and Steve Whitman for sharing their copies of The Real Deal and CPSB Newsletter, respectively, with me. See also Mark Cook, interview; Winn, “‘We Are All Prisoners.’” In his memoir, former Black Panther Marshall Eddie Conway describes starting a newspaper in a Maryland prison (Marshall Law, 98–101).
43. “Black Movies and Twentieth Century Slaves,” MS 3:10 (October 1973): 17.
44. See issues of Black Pride in JMP, Box 56, Folder 3, and RRSP, Series 3, Box 6, Folder 30.
45. See Black Pride, March 30, 1972, 5–6.
46. “News Briefs,” Black Pride, March 23, 1972, 2; A Brother of the 3rd World, “Be Aware of the Publicity Tricks,” Black Pride, June 1972, 7. The column “Revolution in Sound” by A. B. Spellman appeared in several issues and concerned jazz deemed of political and racial relevance. Articles about Davis and the RNA appeared in multiple 1972 issues of the journal.
47. See, for example, Akinshiju, “Akinshiju Raps on Malik’s ‘Message to the Grassroots,’” Black Pride, May 18, 1972, 4–5, 15, and Leon X. Bates, “George, in the Tradition of Malcolm,” Black Pride, May 18, 1972, 7, 14, both in RRSP, Series 3, Box 6, Folder 30.
48. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, especially 3–17, 205–10.
49. “One Struggle,” Black Pride, April 6, 1972, 6, and Richard Nicholson, “Angela,” Black Pride, April 6, 1972, 7, both in JMP, Box 56, Folder 3.
50. Hassan Siku Sabiku, “Reflections,” Black Pride, March 23, 1972, 11, and “Review,” Black Pride, March 23, 1972, 9, 16, both in JMP, Box 56, Folder 3.
51. Russell Neufeld, interview.
52. Ibid.; Phyllis Prentice, interview.
53. Russell Neufeld, interview.
54. See Berger, “‘We Are the Revolutionaries,’” 330–439.
55. Russell Neufeld, interview.
56. MS 2:7 (September 1972): 1.
57. “Only the Blues Is Authorized,” MS 3:8 (August 1973): 15.
58. “Tribute to George Jackson,” MS 3:9 (September 1973): 9.
59. Jacobs, “Race Relations,” 11. For examples of the increasingly rhetorical components of the newspaper (a product of the prison movement at the time), see National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, “A Luta Continua!!,” MS 5:5 (August–September 1975): 1–3; Benjamin Murdock, “The Midnight Special at the Crossroads: A Progressive Perpsect [sic],” MS 5:7 (December 1975–January 1976): 25; Sandino, “Strategy and Tactics: On Armed Struggle,” MS 5:8 (June–July 1976): 8.
60. See “Midnight Benefit,” MS 5:4 (July–August 1975): 1. See also Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, “Building a Mass Prison Movement,” MS 7:12 (October 1977): 10–11.
61. Major, Justice, 307–8. For the Marion lawsuit, see Gómez, “Resisting Living Death”; Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment, 134, 136, 198–99; files in RRSP and JMP. Scott-Heron’s plea to the United Nations appears in the song “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?,” which is featured on the 1970 album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.
62. William L. Patterson, We Charge Genocide, vii.
63. For more on the Pattersons and the International Labor Defense, see McDuffie, Sojourning; Horne, Communist Front?; Horne, Black Revolutionary; William L. Patterson, Man Who Cried.
64. Acoli, Sunviews, 9, 11.
65. Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 166; Losier, “Prison House.” Kunzel notes that the prison was almost half black in 1953, already well disproportionate to the population.
66. Quoted in “RNA Asks United Nations Help for ‘Prisoners of War,’” Philadelphia Tribune, October 17, 1978, 4. The article notes that Amnesty International considered Obadele to be in prison on charges that were “purely political.”
67. The petition is annotated and described in Hinds, Illusions of Justice; Jalil Muntaqim to author, July 10, 2013.
68. Muntaqim, “Political Prisoner’s Journey,” http://www.freejalil.com/life.html.
69. This biography of Muntaqim and the petition is culled from Muntaqim, “Political Prisoner’s Journey”; Jalil Muntaqim to author, July 14, 2011; Fujino, Heartbeat, 203–4. See also Cummins, Rise and Fall, 255; Jacob Holdt, http://www.american-pictures.com/roots/chapter-67.htm.
70. Jalil Muntaqim to author, July 10, 2013. A brief statement relating to the petition is filed as document E/CN.4/Sub. 2/NGO/75 and can be viewed online at http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=E/CN.4/sub.%202/NGO/75. See also Muntaqim, We Are Our Own Liberators, 49, 271–73.
71. Acoli, Sunviews, 23–28. My knowledge here also comes from interviews with several participants, some of whom asked to remain anonymous on this point. For more on African People’s Socialist Party, see Tani and Sera, False Nationalism, 163–229. For more on PFOC, see Berger, Outlaws of America, 201–2, 225–44; Block, Arm the Spirit.
72. Muntaqim, “Political Prisoner’s Journey,” http://www.freejalil.com/life.html.
73. Kaufman and Kaufman, Presidency, 126, 184; “Vance Says He’s Chastised Young,” LAT, July 13, 1978, B2; “Political Prisoners in U.S., Young Says,” NYT, July 13, 1978, A3. The NYT printed other excerpts from Young’s interview, in which he said the Soviet system was far more repressive, both for the number of people it incarcerated and for the reasons it did so. Young resigned on August 15, 1979.
74. Sundiata Acoli to author, January 30, 2010; Acoli, Sunviews, 4–42; “Revitalizing the Movement: Blacks Seek Unity over Prison Issue,” SR, September 28, 1978, 3, African National Prison Organization Solidarity Committee Vertical File, TL. While ostensibly a coalitional effort, ANPO was ultimately a project of the African People’s Socialist Party, an organization that had limited working relationships with other organizations in a climate of fracturing within the Black Left.
75. Acoli, Sunviews, 39.
76. For more on the BLA, see Muntaqim, On the BLA. This article originally appeared anonymously in AS 9 (October–November 1980): 6–7, 20; an abridged version appears in Joy James, Imprisoned Intellectuals, 107–13. See also Black Liberation Army Coordinating Committee, Message; Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance”; Umoja, “Black Liberation Army”; English, Savage City.
77. Ashanti Alston, interview; Bukhari, War Before. Alston was one of the participants in an April 1974 Tombs escape attempt. Members of the BLA went back to the Tombs four months later and tried to use an acetylene torch to break through the walls of the visiting room and free their comrades. The torch ran out of fuel within inches of breaking through, and the BLA members fled, though they were arrested a few weeks later.
78. Bukhari, War Before; Shoatz, Maroon; Assata Shakur, Assata; Evelyn Williams, Inadmissible Evidence; Castellucci, Big Dance. In addition, my conversations or interviews with Bradley Abdul Greene, Jalil Muntaqim, Herman Bell, Ashanti Alston, and Sundiata Acoli have been helpful in understanding the BLA’s efforts at this time.
79. Black Liberation Army Coordinating Committee, Study Guide, 138.
80. Ibid., 137.
81. Ashanti Alston, interview.
82. Kalima Aswad, interview; Jalil Muntaqim to author, July 14, 2011; Voices from within San Quentin 1 and 2 (1977), in author’s files, courtesy of Kalima Aswad.
83. See “Message from the Editors,” AS 3 (May 1979): 2; George Jackson quoted on the front page of every AS issue, Arm the Spirit Vertical File, FA.
84. Starr, “‘Hit Them Harder’”; Berger, “‘We Are the Revolutionaries’”; Umoja, “Black Liberation Army”; Fernandez, Prisoners; Fernandez, Macheteros; Torres and Velázquez, Puerto Rican Movement; González-Cruz, “Puerto Rican Revolutionary Nationalism.” In AS, see “Que Viva Puerto Rico!,” AS 3 (May 1979): 10–11.
85. Morales tied together bedsheets and went out a window. He fled to Mexico, where police arrested him after a 1983 shootout that left three people dead. The Mexican government nevertheless refused to extradite him to the United States. He was freed in 1988 and took up residence as an exile in Cuba. See “William Is Free!,” AS 4 (August 1979): 4; Selwyn Raab, “A Maimed Terrorist Flees Cell at Bellevue,” NYT, May 22, 1979, A1; Judith Cummings, “Morales Fled U.S., Phone Caller Tells FBI,” NYT, May 26, 1979, 23; Robert D. McFadden, “Fugitive Puerto Rican Terrorist Arrested in Mexico,” NYT, May 28, 1983, 1; Robert D. McFadden, “Extradition of Terrorist from Mexico to Be Sought,” NYT, May 29, 1983, 36; Associated Press, “Move to Extradite Morales Is Pressed,” NYT, June 1, 1983, B3; Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. Recalls Mexico Envoy over Militant’s Release,” NYT, June 29, 1988, A3.
86. National Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Prisoners of War, “Long Live the Heroic FALN! Free the Eleven!,” AS 7 (May–July 1980): 4–5; “Free All Puerto Rican Prisoners of War,” AS 8 (August–September 1980): 4–5; “Puerto Rican Prisoners of War Respond to Sedition Charges,” AS 11 (April–May 1981): 4–5, 9; “Grand Jury Resisters Arrested,” AS 14 (Fall 1982): 5, 22. Issues published after April 1980 featured at least one and often multiple articles about the Puerto Rican independence movement and its most militant sectors. Some articles were written by the eleven arrested FALN members and concerned their legal standing; the paper also printed interviews with Juan Antonio Corretjer, a renowned poet, member of the Nationalist Party in the 1920s and 1930s, and the founder and head of the Puerto Rican Socialist League. Corretjer became something of a spokesman for the FALN on the island.
87. Nonrecognition of the court was a strategy used to varying degrees in subsequent FALN trials, trials involving the Macheteros (another clandestine Puerto Rican group), and trials involving the Black Liberation Army and its allies. For an overview of this “prisoner of war” approach in the 1980s, see Berger, Outlaws of America, 245–64; Berger, Struggle Within; Mutulu Shakur et al., “Genocide”; Buck, “Struggle.” Many of the alleged FALN members were among the Puerto Rican independentistas freed by presidential commutation in 1999.
88. See for example, “BLA under Attack,” AS 4 (August 1979): 8; “Close Marion Control Unit,” AS 4 (August 1979): 15; Marian Reid, “The Situation of African Women in Maryland Prisons,” AS 5 (November 1979): 3; “Free Leonard Peltier and All Native American POWs,” AS 5 (November 1979): 4; “Bobby Garcia Murdered in Prison” AS 11 (April–May 1981): 7; “Our Human Natural Resources Are Being Destroyed,” AS 11 (April–May 1981): 8.
89. Atiba Shanna, “War for the Cities, Part III,” The Fuse 8 (April 1978): 4. The articles originally appeared, unsigned, in the January–February, March, and April 1978 editions of The Fuse. They are reprinted in their entirety in the anthology of Shanna’s collected works, Sayles, Meditations, 43–57. From prison, Shanna retained his concern with the city, especially black Chicago; in 1988, Shanna wrote a “fact sheet” about police raids on Chicago public housing projects that organizers printed and distributed there. The fact sheet is reprinted in Sayles, Meditations, 95–100.
90. NAPO-Pontiac, “A Look at Pontiac Koncentration Kamp,” The Fuse 6 (January–February 1978): 5, Coalition against Police Abuse Papers, Box 17, Folder 25: Political Prisoners, Southern California Library, Los Angeles.
91. Haas, Assassination, 330–34; Lydersen, “Pontiac Brothers”; Tony Sapochetti, “30 Years Later: Memories of Illinois’ Worst Prison Riot,” Pantagraph.com, July 28, 2008, http://www.pantagraph.com/news/years-later-memories-of-illinois-worst-prison-riot/article_632ea54a-f02d-5e39–9d98-b8f3b6fad2bd.html; Pontiac Brothers Support Coalition, “Ill. Prisoners Face Death,” The Guardian, June 4, 1979; Lumumba, Pontiac Case. I am grateful to Nancy Kurshan and Steve Whitman for sharing their files on the Pontiac case, including many documents from the Pontiac Prisoners Support Coalition.
92. Bradley Abdul Greene to author, January 8, 2010.
93. Pontiac Prisoners Support Coalition, “Pontiac Prison Rebellion: A Case for the Church Response,” in author’s files, courtesy of Nancy Kurshan and Steve Whitman; Lyderson, “Pontiac Brothers”; Bruce Shapiro, “Pontiac Brothers,” The Nation, May 30, 1981, 653; Michael Anderson, “Charges Dismissed against Last Pontiac 6,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 2, 1981, 3; “Pontiac Decision Painful but Necessary,” Chicago Sun-Times editorial, June 4, 1981.
94. As scholars are only beginning to unpack, the 1970s witnessed a variety of political transitions. An initial wave of scholarship suggested that the period saw only one conservative ascendance. More recent texts have explored the era as a time of great contingency that included a range of dynamic grassroots movements. For more, see Berger, Hidden 1970s; Brenner, Brenner, and Winslow, Rebel Rank and File; Foley, Front Porch Politics; Zaretsky, No Direction Home.
95. Atiba, “Prison Movement Discussion Paper No. 1,” 16.
96. Duggan, Twilight of Equality?
97. Thompson, “Black Activism,” 9–10.
98. Prison Law Collective, “Lock Downs Set Ups,” The Conspiracy, December 1974, 4, NLGC, Oversized Box 7; Useem and Kimball, States of Siege, 81–84; Perkinson, Texas Tough; Perkinson, “Shackled Justice.”
99. “Defend the August 8th Brigade,” and “Communiqué No. 1,” Breakthrough 2:2 (Fall 1978): 14–15; “New Klan Offensive,” MS 5:12 (October 1977): 3. August 8 was the date of a strike at the prison in Naponoch. A lawsuit about Klan presence among prison guards reached the Supreme Court.
100. In 1974, California officials instituted an unprecedented seven-month lockdown at San Quentin, Folsom, and DVI. See Cummins, Rise and Fall, 232.
101. “Saturday, August 24: George Jackson Day of Unity,” SR, August 24, 1974, 6; Peter Magnani, “Demonstrators Protest Attacks on Black Prisoners,” SR, August 25, 1977, 3; “Black Prisoners Call for San Quentin Demo,” SR, July 27, 1978, 11.
102. Interview by author with anonymous member of the August 21 Coalition. For more on the Peoples Temple, see Rebecca Moore, Pinn, and Sawyer, Peoples Temple.
103. Spieler, Taking Aim, 126–28; Willie Sundiata Tate, interview; Karen Wald, interview.
104. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 246; Collier and Horowitz, Destructive Generation, 21–66. Stender’s condition was frequently discussed in the Bay Area National Lawyers Guild newspaper, The Conspiracy, copies of which are available in NLGC. Edward Brooks was arrested for Stender’s shooting. Brooks had served three and a half years at San Quentin and was identified as a member of the BGF. In 1980, he was sentenced to serve seventeen years in prison for murder, burglary, and two counts of robbery. Collier and Horowitz, Destructive Generation, 56–63; Russell, “Fay Stender,” http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1991spring/Russell_spring1991.php.
105. See Aptheker, Morning Breaks, 287; Fleeta Drumgo funeral program, KFAP, Folder: Davis, Angela. My interviews with several people close to Drumgo confirmed Drumgo’s postprison difficulties.
106. Shujaa Graham, interview; Friends of San Quentin Adjustment Center, Letters to Mother from Prison, ca. 1972, Anthony Platt, Private Collection; “Says Skin Search Clears Him of Stabbing Guard,” Jet, March 25, 1976, 22–23; “Four-Day Railroad: Jeffrey Gaulden Convicted in Sacramento,” Committee for Prisoner Humanity and Justice 2:1, 5. Some observers speculate that Gaulden was deliberately killed as part of an internal feud within the BGF.
107. Shujaa Graham, interview.
108. Willie Sundiata Tate, interview. In an interview, James Carr said he and Jackson had formed a gang, called the Capone Gang, which others say later changed its name to the Wolf Pack and ultimately became the Black Guerrilla Family. Jackson’s prison comrades Sundiata Tate and David Johnson dispute such claims, arguing instead that Jackson’s social networks were more fluid and informal and that a larger grouping of prisoners self-consciously initiated the Black Guerrilla Family as a political project in 1970. See “George Jackson: Teacher & Organizer—Interview with Jimmy Carr,” in War behind the Walls, September 1971, 3.
109. David Johnson, interview; Ronald “Elder” Freeman, interview. In interviews, for example, several people spoke of the BGF and “the prison movement” as interchangeable entities in these years. Given its prison seclusion and clandestine function, the BGF has left a short paper trail. More scholarship on the group is needed.
110. Quoted in Cummins, Rise and Fall, 137; Dorsey Nunn, interview.
111. For an overly sympathetic look at the gang based partly on oral histories with some members, see Barganier, “Fanon’s Children.” Much of what exists is in the form of often-sensationalistic memoirs: Sanyika Shakur, Monster; Stanley Tookie Williams, Blue Rage; Simpson with Pearlman, Inside the Crips. See also Hagedorn, Gangs.
112. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 298.
113. The phrase “organized abandonment” comes from Harvey, Limits, 397. It is taken up in greater detail by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, “Fatal Couplings,” and “Globalisation.”
114. See Acoli, “Updated History”; “Black August Statement,” AS 9 (October–November 1980): 12, 18; Dahariki (Hugo A. Pinell), “Black Prisoners: A Call for Unity,” AS 10 (December 1980–January 1981): 10–13, 19–22.
115. See, for example, Kiilu Nyasha, “Black August 2009: A Story of African Freedom Fighters,” San Francisco BayView, August 3, 2009, http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/black-august-2009-a-story-of-african-freedom-fighters; Gabriel Gonzalez, “Black August: Resist!,” Burning Spear, July 31, 2006, http://uhurunews.com/story?resource_name=black-august-resist; Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, “Black August 2008: Resisting Imperialist Intimidation, Terror, and Displacement from the Gulf Coast to the Continent,” Malcolm X Grassroots Movement Newsletter, Spring 2008, http://mxgm.org/black-august-2008-resisting-imperialist-intimidation/.
116. Black August was also the title of a 2006 independent film about George Jackson based on Gregory Armstrong’s book, The Dragon Has Come.
117. See “The Oath,” 2, included in February 12, 1974, FBI memo to U.S. Secret Service, included in files on Black Guerrilla Family, available on FBI online reading room, http://vault.fbi.gov/black-guerilla-family.
118. Parenti, “Satellites of Sorrow.” More generally, see Haney-López, “Post-Racial Racism”; Espiritu, “(E)Racing Youth”; Bargainer, “Fanon’s Children”; Wallace-Wells, “Plot from Solitary.” I do not mean to suggest that “gangs,” unsanctioned organizations that engage in highly predatory behavior while providing some measure of mutual aid to members, do not exist or are unproblematic. Rather, I wish to mark the ways in which targeting gangs emerged as a policing strategy alongside an official embrace of color blindness. A genealogy of policing might very well go from the political repression of Red Squads and COINTELPRO during the Cold War to the antigang units in the age of mass incarceration.
119. Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 169.
120. See files available via the FBI’s electronic reading room, http://vault.fbi.gov/black-guerilla-family. This large range of potential members suggests that the FBI had limited intelligence on the BGF at this time.
121. SAC San Francisco to Director, FBI, July 30, 1979, http://vault.fbi.gov/black-guerilla-family/black-guerilla-family-part-2-of-3/view.
122. Shujaa Graham, interview.
123. Cummins, Rise and Fall, 249–50.
124. “Prison Demonstration Marks ‘Black August,’” SR, August 23, 1979, 5; “Black August Month: Big Demo at San Quentin,” SR, August 20, 1979, 3.
125. Black August Committee Afrikan Community, Max-B, San Quentin, “Black August 1980,” AS 8 (August–September 1980): 3.
126. See “Build Black August Month” and “Message from the Editors,” both in AS 4 (August 1979): 1–2.
127. The full statement is available in the July 30, 1979, FBI report on the Black Guerrilla Family, 3, http://vault.fbi.gov/black-guerilla-family/black-guerilla-family-part-2-of-3/view. See also Black August flyers, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee Vertical File, FA.
128. Untitled flyer, August 25, 1979, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee Vertical File, FA.
129. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 170.
130. Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, Crisis; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalisation”; Gottschalk, Prison.
131. Wagmiller, “Male Nonemployment,” 100, quoted in Cacho, Social Death, 120.
132. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 91, 111.
133. Widener, Black Arts West, 263; Iton, In Search.
1. For historical attempts to grapple with this contradiction, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery; Hixson, American Settler Colonialism.
2. Reddy, Freedom, 37. See also Melamed, Represent and Destroy; Nguyen, Gift.
3. Reddy, Freedom, 20.
4. See Reddy, Freedom; Melamed, Represent and Destroy; Nguyen, Gift; Harvey, Brief History; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalisation”; Cacho, Social Death; Prashad, Poorer Nations; Goldberg, Threat; HoSang, Racial Propositions; Schmidt Camacho, “Ciudadana X”; Gordon, “Methodologies.”
5. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings”; Robin D. G. Kelley, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-d-g-kelley/nra-stand-your-ground-trayvon-martin_b_3599843.html; Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killing of 313 Black People, April 8, 2013, http://mxgm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Operation-Ghetto-Storm.pdf.
6. Bosworth, Explaining U.S. Imprisonment; Gottschalk, Prison; Western, Punishment.
7. Berger, “Two Prisoners”; Bauer, “Solitary.” Association with Jackson seems to be the main reason that Hugo Pinell, incarcerated consistently since the 1960s, and John Clutchette, released in 1972 but arrested and sent back to prison in 1980, were in solitary confinement as late as 2013. Until January 2014, Pinell was in Pelican Bay State Prison, a prison within a prison and perhaps the most isolating form of solitary confinement in the world. In July 2011, he was one of hundreds of Pelican Bay prisoners who participated in a hunger strike to protest long-term solitary confinement. Until late 2013, Clutchette was in the “Security Housing Unit” of California’s state prison at Corcoran. He remains incarcerated at Vacaville. Ruchell Magee and Kalima Aswad, both in their seventies, are among the other participants of California’s 1970s prison movement who remain incarcerated after more than forty years. They join dozens of other veterans of the black freedom struggle who are incarcerated as political prisoners. For a list of their names and addresses, see www.thejerichomovement.com.
8. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, especially 27–84. Several former members of the Weather Underground, for example, describe their initial preparations for going underground—during which time they engaged in a series of bombastic and ill-fated physical confrontations and protest marches—as “psyching themselves up” for violence. See Berger, Outlaws of America; Varon, Bringing the War Home.
9. From the left, see the Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection. For analyses of right-wing antistatist violence in the form of reactionary political Islam, see Mamdani, Good Muslim; Retort, Afflicted Powers.
10. My thinking about “against and beyond” comes from years of conversations with Andy Cornell and Chris Dixon, among others. For elaborations, see Cornell, Oppose; Dixon, “Building” and Another Politics. For speculations on freedom from violence in the context of women’s lives in the U.S.-Mexico border wars, see Schmidt Camacho, “Ciudadana X.”
11. Robinson, Black Marxism, 168.
12. The poem is printed on the first page of the 2001 edition of her memoir, Assata Shakur, Assata.
13. New Afrikan nationalism is a prominent feature of prisoner writings and uprisings in the early twenty-first century. For examples, see Rashid Johnson, Defying the Tomb; Sanyika Shakur, Stand Up; and articles published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian by Pelican Bay prisoners Mutope Duguma, Kijana Tashiri Askari, Michael Zaharibu Dorrough, and J. Heshima Denham, among others. Working through a multiracial collective, Pelican Bay prisoners organized successive hunger strikes in the California state prison system between 2011 and 2013. At the height of the strike, more than 30,000 prisoners refused food in protest of California’s routine use of long-term solitary confinement. For more, including the five demands that motivated these hunger strikes, see www.prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com; Dayan, “Barbarous Confinement,” NYT, July 18, 2011, A19.
14. This phrase serves as the title of the concluding essay to Abendroth’s book of poetry, Exclosures, 61.
15. Emily Abendroth to author, December 2, 2013.
16. See, for example, Rodgers, Age of Fracture.
17. After his release from prison in the early 1980s, Republic of New Afrika cofounder Imari Obadele became a leading figure in the reparations movement, cofounding the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. More generally, see Biondi, “Rise.”
18. On hip-hop, see Murray Forman and Neal, That’s the Joint!; Kitwana, Why White Kids. On AIDS, see Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy, 225–37; Shabazz, “Mapping”; Schuster, “Sentenced.”
19. In 2005, CR reprinted the 1976 abolitionist primer by Knopp and Reigier, Instead of Prisons. The group also published its own text of abolitionist theory and strategy, CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now!
20. For an overview of early twenty-first-century work against prisons, see Berger, “Social Movements.”
21. For examples of activist attempts to address interpersonal harm outside the criminal justice system, see Color of Violence; Ritchie, Arrested Justice; Chen, Dulani, and Piepzna-Samarasinha, Revolution; Sudbury, “Maroon Abolitionists.”
22. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, xviii.