Title: Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
Author: Dan Berger
Year of Publication: 2014
Thesis:
Dan Berger argues that one can neither adequately study the Civil Rights Movement, nor the Black Power Movement (he puts these into the envelope of the "Black Freedom Struggle") without looking at the centrality of prison organizing. Organizing inside and outside of prisons and jails has been a key feature of the Black Freedom Struggle. His tellin begins in 1955 as NOI recruited from the prisons and King, et. al successfully transcended the shame of arrest and imprisonment and turned it into a site of community building. Berger focuses much of his attention on George Jackson, who correctly identified the prison system as designed to incapacitate the Black community. Jackson and others critiqued not only the conditions of the prisons but also a "rights-based" system from which prisoners were completely ostracized.
- Prison is hidden & most violent form of state power, organized primarily by race, then other categories
- Side argument is that 'rioting' is a form of seeking visibility
- Prison organizing was fluid with the CRM and black power movements.
- Focus on movement vs. stasis - how did people organize themselves given these constraints
Time: 1955-1980
Geography: U.S.
Organization:
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction- Folsom Manifesto as a model document (& prisoner strike) - actually began in San Quentin
Chapter 1 - The Jailhouse in Freedom Land
Chapter 2 - America Means Prison
- BP movement / Jail as a splace of freedom (reminds me of Anne Moody)
Chapter 3 - George Jackson and the Black Condition Made Visible- Prison organizing
Chapter 4 - The Pedagogy of the Prison"incapacitation"/hard labor vs. "rehabilitation." This is is where Jackson's profound and prophetic critique of prisons comes through; he correctly identifies them as places to incapacitate people whose work is no longer valued.
Chapter 5 - Slavery and Race-Making on Trial
Chapter 6 - Prison Nation- Print culture as an attempt to organize
- 4-6 GJ influence on later organizing
Epilogue - Choosing Freedom- Monopoly on violence also carried out through wars on drugs, poverty, etc. Super interesting.
- Technologies of control have made rebellions even more rare
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Type:
Methods: Uses oral histories and voices from Black prisoners, which brings into sharp relief Black agency and resistance that blurred the concrete boundaries of the prisons.
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Freedom with violence
- The apparent paradox (similar in Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom)
"Freedom, as an idea and as a practice, has been an enduring paradox ofthe United Stales from its origins to the present. Freedom and the various principles it is said to encompass have been encoded into the national origin story of the United States through genocide and enslavement. Violence does not just undermine the goal of American freedom; it is one of its central tenets. As a result, violence and freedom have together constituted the American experience." (268)
Freedom through violence
- The state uses violence by freedom fighters to legitimate freedom with violence.
"Practitioners of freedom through violence have described their efforts as attempting to interrupt the greater violence of state-enforced invisibility and abuse. As an insurgent philosophy, such violence has always paled in compari son to that ofthe state. The ability ofthe oppressed to exact the kind ofretrib utive violence such a freedom dream mandates has been limited to small-scale expressions. Its violence has always been more performative, rhetorical, and even philosophical than it has been physical." (271)
Freedom from violence
A humanistic approach/affirmation of life. See Assata Shakur's poem "Affirmation" (272)
Themes:
Critiques: While this study does offer a gendered critique, the sources centered in male prisons lends a sharper focus to the actions of male prisoners.
Questions:
Quotes:
The American Paradox
"I am interested in what imprisoned intellectuals might teach us about the great American paradox—the coexistence of the mutually exclusive categories of freedom and racism, democracy and confinement—while recognizing the limitations placed on them by their environment." (xiv)
Rights-based frameworks
"While prisoners were a central element of the civil rights and Black Power movements, their organizing was less a claim to expand rights than it was a critique of rights-based frameworks." (3)
"...racism itself as the structural reproduction of rightlessness." (7)
International movement
"Around the world, prison organizing spoke a shared language of humanity and socialism rooted ln an antiracist critique of colonialism." (3)
13th Amendment
"The abolition of chattel bondage was the birth of prison bondage: passed in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as punishment for a crime."[11] The amendment provided the legal rationale establishing the prison and the wider criminal justice system as institutions central to sustain ing racial oppression." (5)
Resistance to create visibility
"Riots, writing, and collective rituals were the building blocks of prison radicalism, and they were orchestrated to make the prison and especially its captives visible to people around the world." (6)
Resistance
"Indeed, the history of black radicalism can be thought of as a long opposition to confinement." (6)
Prison as site of resistance pedagogy
"More notable was the way in which black activists turned prisons into, as a common refrain of the lime put it, schools of liberation: training grounds and battlegrounds in larger struggles against racism in the form of state violence." (7)
Prisonhood and nationalism
"...prisoners spoke of captivity as itself constituting nationality." (9)
Gender & masculinity
"The passionate declarations of masculinity that accompanied such uprisings gave the false impression that men were more resistant than women." (10)
Prison as dynamic, not static
"These connections were both tangible and idealized, lived and imagined. Rather than yield to the prison’s attempt to impose stasis, radical prisoners emphasized movement and migration." (11)
Revolutionary violence
“The ability of the oppressed to exact the kind of retributive violence such a freedom dream mandates has been limited to small-scale expressions. Its violence has always been more performative, rhetorical, and even philosophical than it has been physical.” (271)
Notes: