Greetings, everyone! Happy New Year!
In this month’s edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share some background about an artifact in my collection. I recommend a podcast about family policing and several good recent articles, and much more….
At the end of last month, Project NIA, an organization that I founded and directed for over 14 years, sunsetted. I am grateful to everyone who contributed to our work over the years. I am proud of the seeds that we planted. This retrospective audio collage created by my friends and comrades Tom Callahan and Arda Arthman makes me cry and fills me with so much love.
I am currently at the start of a chrysalis year. What does this mean? I am blessed to take this year to focus on myself and on the projects I’ve been excited about but haven’t had the time/capacity to pursue. This is a real blessing and I do not take it for granted. I’m 52 years old and I’ve been working relentlessly for years. After the past few years of personal and societal challenges, I knew that I needed to find a way to break from my work-related routines and patterns. So I am taking a sabbatical of sorts. I’m excited to have more spaciousness and to unplug from the urgency of the daily grind.
What will I be up to this year? Well, a few different things. I’ll travel a bit, I’ll try to reverse years of insomnia to sleep more, I’ll write this newsletter monthly, I’ll delve into some artistic and curatorial projects, I’ll keep organizing around public libraries with comrades, I’ll co-organize a couple of convenings and events that I’ve been working on, I’ll focus more intently on Sojourners for Justice Press, I’ll read some of the many books that I haven’t had time to read, I’ll take part in year two of our reading group, I’ll have brunches, lunches and dinners with my friends and family, and who knows what else. What I will definitely NOT do is focus on the presidential election in the US. I will also be taking an extended break from all forms of media, including social.
When I’m back in 2025, I hope that I’m refueled and renewed for the ongoing struggle. Wish me well.
To kick off 2024 in a good way, I am raffling three copies of the gorgeous 2024 Transformative Justice Calendar with art by Olly Costello that I created to fundraise for REBUILD. Sign up here for the raffle, it’s free.
In solidarity,
Mariame
P.S. I have decided not to move ahead with a paid option on Substack given that they continue to platform Nazis and transphobes. I was planning to use the funds from paid subscriptions to support grassroots efforts for social change. But I don’t want to contribute any funds to the site, and they take a 10% cut on subscriptions. I will figure out a different platform for this newsletter in the coming weeks. But for now, I’ll be posting here with no paid option.
Prisons/Policing
Over the years, I’ve purchased several items in my collection(s) from auctions. I mostly focus on ephemera, manuscript, and rare book auctions. If anyone’s curious, the Rare Book Hub compiles a yearly list of the top 500 prices paid at auction for book and paper items. In perusing the list, you’ll see that a Mickey Mantle baseball trading card sold for $4.5 million dollars at auction last year. At the top of the list is Codex Sassoon, the earliest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, created circa 900, which sold for $38,126,000. Of course, I can’t compete with these high-end collectors! Back in 2021, however, I found an item at auction that I immediately knew I had to bid on.
It was a three-by-two-inch printed ticket with a black border. The ticket was an invitation to the execution of Edward Webb on May 31, 1878, at 12:00.
The name was unfamiliar. Who was Edward Webb? I did not know, and I decided not to Google his name. The artifact spoke to me. I wondered why they printed tickets to attend his execution. Was this a common occurrence in the 19th century? I bid, and after some back and forth, I won the item. Finally, I decided to learn about Mr. Webb.
Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the North largely abandoned its fledgling efforts to push back against Southern racism and the re-subjugation of formerly enslaved Black people. The abandonment of white antislavery idealism wasn’t just confined to the South, though; it also led to an increase in anti-Black racism and anti-Black violence in the North. The execution of Edward Webb in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1878 is a bleak example of the post-Reconstruction status quo.
Webb was probably born in the 1840s to an enslaved family in Tennessee; he spent his early life in forced labor in Alabama. Like many enslaved people, he escaped during the Civil War and fled to Cincinnati. There he is believed to have enlisted in the 5th US Colored Regiment, which saw extensive service in the war. After the war, he worked as a blacksmith.
In December 1877, Webb was accused of murdering William S. Finney, a white man, in Finney’s home during an attempted robbery. Webb maintained his innocence, but the court convicted him and sentenced him to death by hanging.
People treated Webb's execution as a festival. Newspapers breathlessly recorded the arrival of the scaffolding and even wrote stories about the rope and its origin. The organizers arranged special round-trip excursion tickets from nearby Ashland (four miles away) for 60¢ apiece (about $18 in 2024 dollars). The sheriff quickly sold out of tickets he was offering to see the event up close, and they were scalped for as much as $50, equivalent to about $1500 today.
Worried about the escalating build-up, the sheriff wired Governor Richard Bishop and asked for 60 military guards to buttress the 22 volunteers and officers from the Mansfield Police. It wasn’t enough; execution day itself quickly descended into chaos. By 11 a.m., there were at least 10,000 people in the crowd. A wooden fence meant to keep people away from the scaffold was trampled flat; the crowd took weapons from the guards.
The yard was so packed there was no path from the jail to the execution site. Drunk and rowdy, many members of the crowd threatened to lynch Webb themselves. The sheriff telegraphed Governor Bishop, hoping to postpone the execution and send the crowd home. But the governor insisted they carry out the sentence. Webb was “Hung Before a Howling Mob of Cutthroats” as one headline put it.
Hangings in Ohio often drew sizable crowds; they were an expected and beloved pastime, like football games today. With Edward Webb, an ex-slave and Union veteran, the celebratory atmosphere was inseparable from a nationwide climate of intensifying racist animosity in which segregation and violence were justified by claims of Black criminality.
That history persists to this day; Black people make up 60% of those on Ohio’s death row, even though Black residents only make up 13% of the state’s population. The carceral state eventually became more professionalized, but it still serves to affirm and perpetuate racist hierarchy and racist violence as it did in Webb’s day. The ticket I won at auction is a grim reminder of this fact. Perhaps now it speaks to you, too.
____
“Execution of Edward Webb Documents,” Ohio Memory Collection, July 3, 2014. https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p267401coll36/id/6749
Eric Foner, “Reconstruction,” Encyclopedia Britannica, updated January 6, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/event/Reconstruction-United-States-history
Andrew Welsh-Huggins, No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics, and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009, p. ix.
“Why Richland County Had One Public Hanging: 1878” Richland Source, May 20, 2017. https://www.richlandsource.com/2017/05/20/why-richland-county-had-only-one-public-hanging-1878/
Publishing
I’ll be publishing many zines and short publications in 2024 and I am so excited about this. I look forward to sharing them with all who might be interested in the coming weeks. Some of the zines will be published through our micro-press, Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP). Publishing is expensive and also hard to sustain. If you are interested, please support SJP by joining our Ko-Fi. We need all of the supporters we can get.
I am always looking for collaborators especially BIPOC graphic designers and artists. Reach out to me if you are interested. Outside of my SJP work, I am also planning to publish a couple of art books this year. One will be based on a long-standing and ongoing project.
Prose
This October New York Times op-ed by Carmilla Floyd and the accompanying photos by Joseph Rodriguez give a harrowing look at the experience of growing old in prison.
I love this reflection from my friend, comrade, and Let This Radicalize You co-author Kelly Hayes about the way collective struggle feeds our souls when the horrors of the world threaten to overwhelm us. As she says, “May we all find the communion and solidarity we need in these times, and may we press on together until the violence ends and Palestine is free.”
This essay by artist Ruth Poor discusses what it felt like to build a 1:1 replica of a prison cell for an exhibition about COVID-19 in prisons put on by Mourning Our Losses. They also narrate the experience of watching exhibition-goers react to the replica on the exhibition’s opening night.
Writing for the New Yorker in December, Sarah Stillman published a deeply reported investigation into the felony murder doctrine, which allows prosecutors to charge a defendant with murder if a death can be linked to the defendant’s commission of a felony. It’s worth the time to read this long-form article, which surveys the history, application, and injustices of the doctrine through the story of Sadik Baxter. Baxter is currently serving life in prison for the murder of two bicyclists who were killed by a reckless driver while Baxter was handcuffed in police custody at a different location.
Podcast
The final episode of Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart podcast makes such a clear case for abolishing the US family policing system. Roberts, the author of an excellent book by the same name, speaks in the episode with community organizer Joyce McMillan about the harms inherent in the family policing system and the impossibility of “tweaking” it through reform. Roberts also speaks with Professor Anna Arons about the way COVID lockdowns created a natural experiment in family policing abolition, both in terms of cutting back on family removals/surveillance and in terms of building police-free community systems of support for struggling families.
Poem
You know I love a good poem about hope. “See More” is a wonderful reminder from Jean E. Taddonio that “surely, we too can bloom / in our brokenness /where we live / and see more.”
Potpourri
Get to know the firearm harm reduction project Stick Talk” - and please donate to their important work.
We’re kicking off year two of our Life Stories of Anti-Slavery Abolitionists reading and discussion group this February. Sign up here.
Youth Public History Institute (YPHI) - Thanks to my friend Rachael Zafer, the YPHI has a new website that includes resources and information for others who would like to organize a similar program in their communities.
Printing in Prisons - I am excited about this project exploring the history of printing at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary.
We need more of this. You can learn more about the People’s Pottery Project, buy ceramics, or donate at their website.
I really like this performance of “I Shall Not Be Moved” by Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi.
Healed People Heal People is a publication developed from Darnell Lane and India Hilty’s Violence Prevention and Trauma Healing course, featuring work from students at Stateville Prison.
Cool Library Thing of the Month:
The Oakland Public Library maintains a fascinating online gallery of items its librarians and patrons find stuck inside library books.