Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era by Dan Berger (review)

Confinement behind prison walls and the constrictions that have shaped American society were closely related in their carceral qualities. Or, as Malcolm X stated, “That’s what America means—prison” (49). For African Americans, whose daily realities were enmeshed with the legacy of enslavement and seemingly ever-present racial terrorism, Malcolm X’s words exhibited a poignant observation about the structures that shaped life in America. Dan Berger explores the connections between incarceration, constructions of race, and freedom, focusing on those who have the most insightful perspective on these issues, prisoners. In Captive Nation, he focuses on revolutionary nationalism in prisons during the 1960s and 1970s. Honing in on the various ways African American activists utilized prisons as spaces of freedom and transformation, Berger argues that they developed “a strategy of visibility” to fight back against prisons’ most effective weapons, physical isolation and sociopolitical invisibility. In focusing on black prisoners, Berger uses the US criminal justice system as a catalog of sociopolitical injustice as well as the unique organizing position of black prison activism that sought to challenge and undermine that system.

Berger’s left-oriented analysis is mainly thematic, though with significant attention to chronology. He begins with the civil rights organizing in the Deep South to introduce the manifold ways activists challenged racial oppression through critiques of conceptual and real black captivity. Besides setting up the “roots” of the prison organizing that cohered as a Black Power project in the late 1960s, Berger sets up the major themes that endure through each chapter. Most significantly, he reveals how sites of incarceration became spaces of liberation and personal transformation as they served as a metaphor for confrontations with the American state and provided space for individuals and collectives to evaluate the conditions that precipitated black captivity. He also introduces the use of hypervisibility (of prisoners and prison conditions) that formed the major strategy and goal of many prison and imprisoned activists. On this note, Berger carefully demonstrates the gendered assumptions that informed this approach to organizing; they often privileged males even as they depended on “women’s work” and women activists (in and outside of prison) to be effective.

Even as civil rights activists fought for full inclusion in America, they exhibited traces of nationalism that guided the critiques of the US prison system. Embedded were critiques of black criminalization and certain middle class values that eschewed and ignored incarceration. A “subversive respectability” allowed for Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and others to begin destroying the stigma around incarceration and challenging the assumption that African Americans were inherent criminals. Berger’s chapters on George Jackson and the events that began with his violent demise clarify the long-term consequences of the activism from the early 1960s. A litany of prisoners endeared to leftist activists become the dots that connect Berger’s analysis of the struggle for visibility and the expansion of the opposing law and order logic that perpetuated the equation of blackness with criminality and led to the explosion of mass incarceration. This he explores most in the chapter “Prison Nation,” which introduces readers to Black August, and the epilogue, “Choosing Freedom,” that connects 1970s prison activism with current efforts to challenge mass incarceration.

For much of the book, Berger hones in on the written and spoken word of political dissidents, including an array of letters, prison literature, autobiography, poetry, and news sources (e.g., KPFA). Combining media and literary analysis with the broader historical reconstruction of prison activism clarifies how imprisoned intellectuals like Jackson and Angela Davis used a range of talents to refocus attention away from individual “crime” to structural violence inherent in American society and detrimental to African Americans. This is especially clear in chapter 5, “The Pedagogy of Prison,” and chapter 6, “Slavery and Race-Making on Trial.” In these chapters Berger’s own talents become most apparent and effective as he demonstrates how prison activists...