Prisons, Prose & Protest - #14
Rants, Musings & More
I can’t believe that we’re in April already. Time has been completely warped for me during these pandemic years. I’ve heard from family, friends, and comrades that they’ve been experiencing a similar time warp. Spring is here and we didn’t really have a winter in New York City. I worry that we are not at all prepared for climate change.
April kicks off the walking tour season in the Northeast and also the book/zine fair season. I hope to pilot a new walking tour that I’ve been working on during Jane’s Walk in May but I’m not yet sure it will be ready on time. I will be participating in several zine fairs over the coming weeks. I really enjoyed my time at the NYC Feminist Zine Fest this past weekend & raised $850 from zine sales to donate here.
In this month’s edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share some thoughts about a long-term project that I’ve been working on about the Anguilla prison massacre. I share a new publication, I recommend a podcast, several good recent articles, and much more….
Prisons/Policing
About 15 years ago, I undertook a rigorous independent study focused on histories of the lynching of Black people in the United States. In the course of my reading and research, I stumbled upon a reference to the Anguilla Prison Camp massacre.
“July 11.—Eight Negro prisoners in the Anguilla Stockade, Brunswick, Georgia, were mowed down by pistol and rifle fire. The men were part of a group of twenty-seven that had refused to work in a snake-infested swamp land without boots. Back at the camp Warden W. G. Worthy became enraged with the men, opened fire and was joined in the massacre by four other guards. Two other Negroes were wounded.” [in We Charge Genocide (1951)]
I was curious and have spent a dozen years since gathering clues and information. I’ve been slowly piecing together and trying to understand what happened.
I’m struck by the many opposing ‘realities’ the story holds. Anguilla was a massacre and a lynching. It was a violent response to a labor action. It was egregious. But it was also quotidian anti-Black violence. It was routine. There was public attention paid and also it is an example of impunity. There was organizing and activism in response. But almost no one remembers the incident in 2024.
The convict camp (a euphemism for a prison) closed after the massacre. The current owner of the land recently discovered what happened despite the silences. I’m not sure why Anguilla haunts me, but it does. It’s why I keep returning to the scene of the crime(s).
In 2020, I invited my friend Rachel Wallis to collaborate with me to create art about Anguilla. As the first artist in residence at Project NIA, Rachel, who is a self-taught fiber artist, delved into researching the massacre alongside me. The result of our collaboration is the Anguilla Prison Massacre quilt.
The quilt shows a representation of the murdered men surrounded by a border of chains and snakes, and includes their names: Henry Manson (37), George Patterson (29), Edward Neal (25), James Smith (30), Dan W. Stephens (19), Willie Frank Chambers (36), Willie Amos Wright (26), and Jonah Smith (27). The quilt also features maps and on the back there are archival documents relevant to the incident, including newspaper articles, telegrams and reports.
The quilt made its public debut in July 2022 in Chicago as part of the Stitch by Stitch: Conversations on Quilting, “Healing” and Abolition conference and exhibition. My friend Sarah of Love & Struggle Photos beautifully documented the quilt at the exhibition.
Starting this Friday, April 12, those of you in Santa Cruz and its environs can view the quilt in person as part of the Seeing through Stone exhibition, which runs until January 5, 2025.
From an emailed invitation for the exhibition opening:
“Seeing through Stone invites viewers to see beyond the current global realities of the prison complex, drawing attention to already existing practices of imagining the world otherwise. The exhibition includes more than eighty national and international artists and collectives, sixteen newly commissioned projects, as well as works of video, painting, sculpture, installation, sound and performance. Seeing through Stone opens across three venues this April: Institute of the Arts and Sciences on April 12, Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos on April 18, and San José Museum of Art on April 26.”
We’re honored to have the art included in this wonderful exhibition, which is part of the Visualizing Abolition initiative. If you are in California and do visit the exhibition, I’d love to hear what you think.
For those who can’t visit in person, you can learn more about the Anguilla massacre in this beautiful brand new zine written by me and designed by Lulu Johnson and Devika Sen of Partner & Partners. It was a pleasure collaborating with them again and I am so happy that anyone who is interested can read and download a little piece of my long-term project.
Publishing
As an extension of—and a form of closure to some of—my Anguilla work, I wanted to create a book that would incorporate some of the archival documents and other items from my research. To that end, I am so excited to share that Tash Nikol and I have collaborated on an art book about the Anguilla massacre. Since the quilt can only be in one place at a time, I wanted to create something significant that could travel to a few more places.
Tash is so incredibly talented and it was a joy to collaborate on this project. I encourage everyone to hire them for everything, LOL.
The book is a limited edition (150) and is being printed by Small Editions. I will have a few books available at the NY Art Book Fair where Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP) will be tabling at the end of this month. The book was expensive to produce so it is priced for institutional repositories and collectors. After recouping the costs for making the book, proceeds will be donated to support Survived and Punished NY’s mutual aid fund. I have a major goal to raise $25,000 for the fund this year. The book proceeds will be a start. Those interested in purchasing a copy of the book can email jjinjustice1@gmail.com for now.
Prose
Read this collection of first-hand accounts of Gazan women’s lives before and during the Israeli siege, and read the full special issue of Hammer and Hope on Palestine—it’s excellent.
This Baffler article explores the devastating Israeli destruction of Palestinian cemeteries as an arm of the ongoing genocide. As reporter Nevin Kallepalli writes, “Genocide calls for the destruction of the body. Necrocide calls for the destruction of its shadow.”
I love the perspective on Chicago’s 2017–18 #NoCopAcademy movement offered in this podcast write-up. As Andrew Willis writes, the passionate, skillful organizing feats these young people accomplished continue to influence Chicago politics and strengthen movements around the country, even though the cop academy in question was eventually built. Listen to the full Craft of Campaigns podcast episode on this movement here.
Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix write with such clarity about what successful movements look like. Through a brief history of 20th-century movements, they show how organizing must harness the power of the masses of people who want to build a more just and equitable society but don’t yet have the tools to join the fight. This essay is adapted from their book, Solidarity: the Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea.
This review from The Progressive gives a great introduction to the new essay collection Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement, and to the prison books movement itself.
In this excerpt from the newly published Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South, Laura McTighe and Women With a Vision tell the story of a successful organizing campaign against draconian sex work criminalization policies put in place in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I love this explanation of the collective authorship attribution for the excerpt and the book: “The labor of writing is inseparable from the organizing and theorizing that we are writing about.”
Podcast
I listened to The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island based on a suggestion from Jacqui Shine’s newsletter a few weeks ago. Each episode tells the story of a person buried on Hart Island, a piece of New York City off the Bronx that houses the country’s largest public cemetery. This series finds the stories of eight of the over one million people buried there in mass graves, with only number markers indicating each individual burial.
Poem
The poem I want to share this month is “Reverse: a Lynching” by Ansel Elkins. Every time I read it, it steals my breath. I think it’s appropriate to share given my ongoing work about the Anguilla massacre.
Potpourri
SJP will be at the NY Art Book Fair, April 25–28. Stop by to visit us. We’ll have copies of all of our publications and some additional surprises!
Come to our Black Zine Fair on May 11 and sign up for virtual events leading up to the in-person fair!
If you’re in NYC, go see this exhibit of Gordon Parks’s photographs at Jack Shainman Gallery before it closes on April 20. The exhibit is based on the 1971 book of essays and photographs Gordon Parks: Born Black, A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960–1970, and it is very worth your time.
We’re reading about Sojourner Truth for our next session of the Life Stories of Anti-Slavery Abolitionists book discussion group, happening on April 21. Register here if you want to join us.
The Building Community Not Prisons coalition is fighting the proposed construction of a half-billion dollar, 1,400-bed federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky. Notwithstanding overwhelming public opposition to the prison, the Federal Bureau of Prisons released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) announcing that it plans to move forward with construction. The statement kicked off a 45-day public comment period ending on April 15. Anyone from across the country can submit comments expressing their opposition. Read some background here.
Here’s how to get involved:
Write a public comment directly to the Bureau of Prisons by April 15 challenging this DEIS. Anyone can submit a comment.
Share these social media graphics to let others know how to get involved! Tag @nonewletcherprison on Instagram and @NoNewBOPPrison on Twitter/X.
How to Abolish Prisons by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché was released last week. Watch the launch event here. Pick up your copy here.
Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care, edited by Mimi E. Kim, Cameron Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington, will be released at the end of the month. Pick up your copy here.
I spend entirely too much time on this musical time machine: Radioooo. You can listen to music from different time periods from all over the world. Just choose a year and a country. You don’t need to sign up for an account.
I’m a frequent customer of Tender-Heart Press. They have wonderful letterpress posters made by hand. Check them out!
An interesting remote volunteer opportunity…
Cool Library Thing of the Month
For the past couple of Mother’s Days, I’ve partnered with my comrade Alexis Mansfield and the Women’s Justice Initiative to provide copies of my and Bianca Diaz’s children’s book See You Soon to caregivers incarcerated in the women’s division of Cook County Jail. The caregivers record themselves reading the book and then WJI coordinates sending those recordings along with a copy of the book to a child or children of their choosing. It’s been such a heart-expanding experience. You can read about the project here.
Recently, I was happy to learn about another book project for incarcerated caregivers, this one at San Quentin Prison. Here’s how one of the initiative’s organizers describes it:
"The San Quentin Library hosts a book fair where parents and grandparents, uncles, and residents can come by the library and pick out up to 3 books to send to the kids in their lives....In addition to the books, we provide cards and stickers for residents to send to their families and we provide the mailing for the book packages. The resident library staff basically runs the book fair by handling all the details and labor.
The library is packed during these events and it is very social and fun. We bring in community members and outside librarians to help everyone pick out books and it's just really a community event.”
I think that it would be wonderful to replicate this at other prisons and jails across the country.
So much to explore in here! Thank you as always. Free Palestine ✊️