In this Book
- Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State
- Book
- 2020
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Series: Justice, Power, and Politics
summary
Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.
By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.
By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- List of Illustrations
- pp. ix-xii
- Introduction
- pp. 1-15
- Chapter Two. Shades of Mississippi
- pp. 50-84
- Chapter Three. Whose Law and What Order?
- pp. 85-119
- Chapter Five. The State the State Produced
- pp. 151-182
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 189-192
- Bibliography
- pp. 243-256
Additional Information
ISBN
9798890857392
Related ISBN(s)
9781469653815, 9781469653822, 9781469653839, 9781469653846, 9798890857385
MARC Record
OCLC
1128823253
Pages
272
Launched on MUSE
2020-01-10
Language
English
Open Access
No