Prisons, Prose & Protest - #25

Rants, Musings and More

It’s Women’s History Month and I’m sharing a few relevant resources that I co-created.

I am interested in maps even though I know that, as Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory.” Mapping has always fascinated me and when I was a child, I used to love to read books at the public library that featured various kinds of maps. I still pick up books about maps today—I can’t help myself. Two favorites focused on New York City are Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, and Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers by Becky Cooper.

I recently learned of Karen Wynn’s fascinating mapping work. I think that part of why I am drawn to creating walking tours is that they involve mapping, too. Twenty years ago, when I was living in Chicago, I started mapping key sites associated with Black women. I moved back home to NYC in 2016, and in 2017, I considered abandoning the project for many reasons. So I got on FedBook to whine about that and a few months later, through the support of my comrade Dr. Natalie Bennett, I ended up in a room with about a dozen Black women to discuss the project. It was during that gathering that my friend Essence McDowell made the grave error to say that she’d be interested in helping me to complete the project. Famous last words!

Together, we embarked on a yearlong self-publishing journey and put out our first and second editions of the Lifting as They Climbed guidebook in 2018. In 2020, we spoke with Haymarket Books about an expanded version of the guidebook that included sites on the West Side of Chicago as well as the South Side. We published the expanded version of Lifting As They Climbed in 2023. We created a great website too. Check out some photos from our 2018 bus tour based on the book taken by my sister-friend Sarah of Love and Struggle Photos. Lifted is one of my favorite projects and it’s been a collective one.

In 2019, when I was a researcher in residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, I worked with Asha Futterman, who was then a student at Barnard College, to create a Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour. I usually facilitate the tour once a year as a fundraiser for a good cause and it’s always a lot of fun to do. This is a lovely article about the tour.

I spent the past few years developing a new walking tour about Black women in Greenwich Village history. I debuted it at Jane’s Walk NYC last year. As an exclusive to subscribers of this newsletter, you can read the guide that I made to accompany the tour. If you come to our Black Zine Fair on May 3, I’ll have some hard copies of the guide for sale. Finally, if you’re in NYC, consider submitting a walking tour proposal for this year’s Jane’s Walk festival.

If you’re in Chicago or New York City, I invite you to take some time to explore the cities using any of the guides I’ve shared.

Giving Circle Update: In February, some of you donated $1658.82 [after fees] to the Giving Circle. I donated $1600 to 6 projects. Documentation of the groups that received funds is here. Thanks to everyone who has donated in lieu of a paid subscription for this newsletter. I don’t intend to monetize the newsletter on this site, so if you want to support it, please feel free to join the Giving Circle.

My comrade Stevie Wilson was denied parole because the system is bullshit. He will serve out his sentence and be out in 2026. Please consider supporting his ongoing leadership and organizing work. The Giving Circle donated $250.

In this issue of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I discuss a campaign for justice for two important Black radical political prisoners and share a primary source from my personal collections. I recommend a podcast episode about community-led overdose response, several good recent articles, and more…

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Prisons and Policing

In 2012, I wrote on my former blog that Martin Sostre is "a name that should be more well-known." Later, I wrote a short post about him. Fortunately, since then, more and more people have become aware of Sostre—a revolutionary organizer who opened three Black radical bookstores in Buffalo before he was framed by a police informant who planted drugs on him following the city's 1967 rebellion.

Less known, however, is his codefendant Geraldine Pointer (then Robinson), who ran one of the bookstores and was arrested with Sostre that summer. After Sostre was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to 31–41 years, Pointer continued to fight for his freedom as a member of the Martin Sostre Defense Committee (see photo 3) and to staff the Afro-Asian Bookshop-in-Exile (see photos 1 and 2) while raising her five young children (see photo 4).

In 1969, she finally went to trial and was also convicted by an all-white jury, becoming one of the first Black women of the Black Power era to become a political prisoner. She lost custody of her children before being reunited with them after two and a half years of imprisonment. She is now 81 years old and calling for her conviction to be vacated.

Last summer, on the 57th anniversary of their frame-up, Pointer and her family filed a joint application with the Sostre family requesting that the Erie County District Attorney's Office revisit this case and exonerate her and Sostre once and for all. Organizers with the Justice for Geraldine and Martin campaign are circulating a petition, which they will be delivering to the DA's office on Sostre's birthday, March 20. I encourage you to sign the petition, follow their efforts on Instagram, and learn more about Pointer's life on the Martin Sostre Institute website.

Garrett Felber has written an excellent new biography about Martin Sostre, A Continuous Struggle, that is available for preorder and will be released in May. For every copy of the hardcover preordered either direct from AK Press or from Burning Books in Buffalo, the publisher will send a free copy of the paperback Incarcerated Readers' Edition to an incarcerated person.

Primary Sources: An ongoing newsletter series?

I incorporate documents and artifacts from my personal collections into my zines through my Archival Activations series. From time to time, I’ve shared relevant artifacts in this newsletter. This month, I’m sharing a primary document I recently acquired and offering an invitation for you to explore it. Here are some questions to consider [thanks to the Schomburg Center curriculum project for these questions]:

1. What’s the first thing that you notice about this primary source document?

2. Who do you think created it?

3. When do you think it was created?

4. Is this a letter, a journal entry, an official court document, or something else?

5. What else do you want to know?

In April 1968, Tony Platt co-founded the Community Legal Defense Organization to provide bail money and legal defense to Black Chicago residents arrested during the civil unrest following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. This document dated April 11 is a duplicate of Tony Platt’s papers and lists the categories of arrestees with the highest priority. I acquired the leaflet because I think that it’s important to understand the nuts and bolts of how social movements work. This document offers a window.

Prose

Manal Shqair writes in Vittles magazine about the many ways the Israeli occupation of Palestine has targeted the traditional lifestyles and foodways of Masafer Yatta, a region in the southern West Bank that is home to seminomadic herding communities.

I’m so happy that Leonard Peltier has been released to home confinement. Congratulations to all of the organizers including his family for making this possible. The state wanted him dead and it did not succeed. That’s a miracle to be celebrated.

Lauren Carasik has written an essential run-down of Trump’s attack on immigration and what will be necessary to resist it.

I love this story about regular people organizing to patrol Southern California neighborhoods for ICE vehicles and alerting residents when they spot them.

A beautiful reflection on where the lefts need to look for grounding and orientation “in the face of overwhelm,” by Asha Ransby-Sporn.

One key of orienting our movement(s) is understanding what animates opposing movements. Alberto Toscano writes about the personalization of power as a key to understanding modern authoritarians like Trump and Musk, and reminds us that “merely challenging executive power is toothless unless it confronts the dictatorial and personalized power of capital as well.”

Another key to orienting the lefts is understanding how to structure ourselves in ways that build real, grassroots power. Emma Tai’s recent essay in Convergence brings together the lessons of three recent books on politics and organizing.

A look inside California’s powerful movement to close prisons rather than “reform” them.

This is an interesting excerpt from a new book about Michael Stewart, a young Black street artist and model who died after being brutally beaten by NYC transit police in 1983. The first protest I attended with a friend was after Stewart’s murder.

Cheryl Rivera has put together a gorgeous audio essay about what it felt like to be based in NYC and working in the movement against the genocide in Gaza (and interconnected abolitionist movements) during the summer of 2024.

If I recommend a lot of writing by my friend and comrade Kelly Hayes, it is because they are speaking to the spiritual needs of this moment in a consistent & coherent way.

I enjoyed Akané Okoshi’s review of Catherine Gund’s documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here. The film profiles two incredible Black radical artists—Faith Ringgold and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter—and traces the relationships between their work and mass incarceration. I saw this documentary and highly recommend it.

Podcast

This episode of This American Life—about three people connected to one call on the Never Use Alone overdose-response hotline—is really well done. I especially appreciated learning about the hotline and its harm-reduction ethos. Note: this episode includes a real-time audio recording during which someone experiences a heroin overdose.

Poems

Impossible to argue with “A Contribution to Statistics” by Wislawa Szymborska, as translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.

Potpourri

Prisons Must Fall has its first review and it’s a good one. Thanks to the reviewer. You can preorder the book, which comes out in April, here.

March 6-9: Beyond the Bars (Center for Justice at Columbia University) is an annual conference to support movement building to end mass incarceration. My friend and co-director Andrea Ritchie and I will be facilitating a workshop, “Abolitionist Organizing Under Authoritarianism,” on March 9 at 2:15 pm. Register for the conference here.

March 12: I’ll be in Chicago for a couple of days to speak at a UIC event with my friend and touchstone Dr. Beth Richie. All are welcome to attend.

If you are seeking a space where you can reflect individually and with others on your ongoing activism and organizing, feel free to join me on the last Sunday of every month through December on Zoom from 4 to 6 pm ET. The next drop-in session is on Sunday, March 30. This is for people already engaged in some form of activism and organizing. Space is limited. Please only sign up if you are sure you want to drop in.

With input from organizer comrades, I created a document for a session I facilitated in late January for new activists. The session was focused on helping new activists to develop personal organizing plans. My friend and coworker Eva Nagao made the document into a zine/workbook that can be freely downloaded. Please feel free to use it and to share it with others who you think might be interested.

Sojourners for Justice Press kicked off a new short video series called Paper Trails From the Archives that focuses on Black women and publishing.

Some of my zines are available at Printed Matter and nowhere else.

Watch this documentary by JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey about extraordinary feats of organizing inside California prisons that led to 2011 and 2013 hunger strikes against conditions in the state’s highest-security facilities. This review captures some of what makes the film so important.

This is an excellent series of know your rights videos in multiple languages.

I’ve been collecting books and ephemera for many years. I love this interview about collecting with collector and archivist Lisbet Tellefsen.

Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics, the companion book to the Museum of the City of New York exhibition of the same name, is open access. It looks at the history of protest in the city beginning in the 17th century and ending with Occupy Wall Street.

This makes me smile.

I appreciate how the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI)’s States of Incarceration report offers a useful visualization of the massive per capita incarceration rates of US states and the US as a whole as compared to other nations of the world.

This Surveillance Self-Defense Toolkit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation is excellent.

I appreciate this zine about unions and how to organize your workplace. It’s only $6.

Lizzie No is terrific.

Cool Library Thing

This short film about the concept of the “library economy”—a way of living in community inspired by today’s libraries—is smart, information-packed, and beautiful to look at. By writer, artist, and YouTuber Andrew Sage.