Prisons, Prose & Protest - #29
Rants, Musings and More
For the past few weeks, I’ve been planning an anticriminalization Communiversity with a small group of people in NYC. We need many more local spaces where we can learn together in low-pressure ways. As we do so, we may begin to build trust and connection to engage in local struggles for more justice. Registration is now open for our Communiversity workshops and courses. I am really looking forward to seeing who signs up and who attends. This is an experiment and I know that we will learn a lot as we proceed.
One of my favorite bookstores, Bluestockings Cooperative, is working hard to keep its doors open. I have a goal of collecting 2500 books for their shelves. Drop off or mail your gently used or new books to Bluestockings. All details are in these fliers.
Relatedly, please stop by Bluestockings for “Abolitionist Toyery” on Sunday, August 10, from 1:00 to 6:00 pm. You can drop off books then too. Learn more and register here. ALSO, I am seeking volunteers to support the event!
Sojourners for Justice Press (SJP) will be tabling at the Chicago Zine Fest on July 19. Stop by! I’ll be there part of the day.
New zines in my Archival Activations series are available as a bundle through Booklyn.
Giving Circle Update: In June, some of you donated $2621 [after fees] to the Giving Circle. I donated $2606.28 to 10 projects/people. 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 this newsletter on this site, so if you want to support it, please feel free to join the Giving Circle.
In this issue of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I give a short history of the US government’s use of immigration and passport control to punish well-known Black activists for their political speech. I recommend two excellent new abolitionist podcasts, several good recent articles, and more…
Prisons, Policing, and Surveillance
When can we classify a nation as totalitarian? One powerful sign, according to Hannah Arendt, is when a country strips its own people of citizenship.
By this metric, the current situation in the US looks grim. Donald Trump’s administration has targeted international students who oppose the genocide in Gaza for deportation. Columbia University graduate student and permanent resident Mahmoud Kahlil was arrested, jailed, and threatened with deportation because, he says, he was involved in peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Masked agents arrested Turkish Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk on the street. Her pro-Palestinian op-ed in the student newspaper apparently led to her being targeted.
Free speech experts warn Trump is testing the waters by targeting legal immigrants and may come after US citizens next. Trump himself has said the same; in April 2025, he boasted about illegally kidnapping and deporting immigrants to prisons in El Salvador, and added, “the homegrowns [or citizens] are next.” The Trump administration has also tampered with the passports of citizens; it unilaterally changed the gender marker on the passport of Zaya Perysian, a trans woman. Trump is currently threatening to denaturalize the Democratic nominee for NYC Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
This is not the first time in US history, of course, that the government has used its control of passports and immigration to silence critics or restrict free speech. During the 1950s, the United States stripped passports from leading Black freedom and civil rights activists and other leftists in retaliation for speech the government considered dangerous or “un-American”. The two highest-profile targets were singer, actor, publisher and activist Paul Robeson and writer, sociologist, historian and freedom fighter W. E. B. Du Bois.
Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson was a hugely successful singer of opera, folk music, and popular songs. He left the United States in 1928, in part to escape racial persecution, and traveled globally for eleven years. He lived in Europe and performed many times in the Soviet Union. Robeson saw Communism as a powerful force with which to fight Jim Crow as well as racism, and capitalism in the US and around the world.
Robeson returned to the US in 1939. After World War II, the US and the USSR were global rivals in the Cold War. America’s poor treatment of Black people hampered its propaganda battle against the Soviet Union. Rather than embracing civil rights, though, the US tried to address this weakness by silencing Black critics.
When Paul Robeson attempted to renew his passport in 1950 so he could perform abroad, he was told he had to sign a statement saying that he was not a member of the Communist Party and was loyal to the US. Robeson refused and sued. The legal process took five years, but in 1955, a judge ruled the State Department was justified in blocking Robeson’s passport because of his speech.
In 1956, in a hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Robeson declared, “Whether I am or not a Communist is irrelevant. The question is whether American citizens, regardless of their political beliefs or sympathies, may enjoy their constitutional rights.”
In 1958, the Supreme Court agreed with him. The court ruled in Kent v. Dulles that “the right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.”
The government reinstated the passport of painter Rockwell Kent, the named plaintiff in the case, who had been accused of Communist sympathies. It also restored Robeson’s passport. The eight-year ban he had endured on international travel, however, severely restricted his income and damaged his reputation. He spent a few more years traveling abroad, and retired in the 1960s. The FBI continued to investigate and harass him until his death at 77 in 1976.
W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois, like Robeson, was an activist, organizer and later a Communist. His lengthy history of advocacy for Black rights and for peace had long made him a target of threats and harassment from the federal government.
In 1950, Du Bois, then 82, became chairperson of an antiwar organization called the Peace Information Center (PIC). To halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the PIC distributed the Stockholm Appeal, an antinuclear petition circulated by Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist and Communist.
Many notable figures, including artists Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso and novelist Thomas Mann, signed the petition; 2.5 million Americans eventually signed as well. However, the US government insisted the Appeal was a subversive document intended to undermine US security. They charged Du Bois and other board members of the PIC with being unregistered agents of a foreign power because the petition originated overseas. If convicted, Du Bois faced up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Du Bois went on a massive public speaking tour to raise funds; he also placed ads in papers arguing his case. He got support and character witnesses from international figures like poet Pablo Neruda and physicist Albert Einstein. A federal judge ruled in Du Bois’s favor—but not before the trial had badly damaged his reputation and livelihood. He was blacklisted from most work and ended up struggling to buy food, barely able to stay out of poverty.
The government’s persecution of Du Bois continued. In 1952, the State Department revoked Du Bois’s passport. The immediate excuse for the action was to prevent Du Bois from traveling to Canada for a peace conference. The government also wanted to prevent him from seeking asylum elsewhere.
In 1958, the same Supreme Court case that restored Robeson’s passport also restored Du Bois’s. Now able to travel, he and his wife Shirley Graham left the United States in 1961 to settle in a newly independent Ghana. There, the US targeted him for one final spiteful punishment, revoking his passport, and effectively his citizenship. Ghana responded by making Du Bois a citizen. He died there in 1963 at 95.
Using the State Department as a Tool of Authoritarian Rule
The US government has a great deal of power to regulate who comes into and out of the country. In the past, it has sometimes used that power to harass and try to silence critics of US policy—especially Black critics on the left.
Today, Trump is also trying to silence free speech and target marginalized people by revoking legal residency, tampering with passports, and creating a climate of fear at customs entry points. The experiences of Du Bois and Robeson remind us that this sort of racist, reactionary weaponization of the immigration system is not new. It also suggests that Trump will not confine himself to attacking immigrants or critics of Israel. In an increasingly totalitarian US, everyone’s passport, and everyone’s rights, are at risk.
Publishing
I have been interested in Joan Bird and have been collecting ephemera about the Panther 21 for over 20 years. Joan Victoria Bird was a revolutionary and a key member of the New York Black Panther Party. She worked to provide community-based healthcare in Harlem and spoke against the abuses of police. Along with Afeni Shakur, she was one of two women arrested as part of the Panther 21 in 1969. Following her acquittal in 1970, she withdrew from public activism. In my zine Searching for Joan, I share a small part of Joan Bird’s story to introduce her to a new generation that may not know of her and her contributions to our ongoing struggle for freedom and liberation. The publication was designed by Neta Bomani, codirector of Sojourners for Justice Press. You can pick up a copy in person at upcoming zine fairs in Chicago and Detroit. You can have a look at the publication on Instagram and at the printing process here.
Prose
While I was in New Orleans last month, I was blessed to spend some time with my comrade jackie sumell, who showed me some of the Solitary Gardens that she has helped to establish. This article about the work that jackie and her incarcerated and outside collaborators have been doing is a great introduction. This one is a good reflection about 10 years of Solitary Gardens.
A really stunning essay about a career fair for ICE and other similar agencies and the banality of evil.
This excerpt from Anand Pandian’s new book Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down explores how people in the US can do the critical work of coming together, something so often deprioritized by our ways of life.
An update on Leonard Peltier’s life four months after his release from prison to home confinement. As he says, “I beat the bastards” who “expected me to die in prison.”
In this short essay, Dan Grote, who is currently incarcerated in a federal prison, manages to touch on the deep, intentional inadequacies of prison libraries, the rich history of public libraries in the US and abroad, and the ingenuity he and his incarcerated comrades brought to the problem of circulating books behind bars.
Amid the mass protests that emerged last month in defense of immigrant communities facing fascist violence, Kelly Hayes and I decided to publicly share Chapter 6 of our book Let This Radicalize You. The chapter explores the discourse of “violence” in social movements and the ways it is weaponized to neutralize radically liberatory projects.
Writing for Them magazine, my friend Dean Spade offers excellent advice on how to build the trust and communities we desperately need right now to help each other survive in the face of terrifying state violence.
It is so important to read and share about the nuts and bolts of successful organizing projects; this essay in the pilot edition of the renewed Abolition Journal by the members of Philly Breathes gives an excellent and energizing overview of the formation’s work. The link will take you to the top of the edition; search the file for “Everyday Acts of Disabled Resistance & Care” to find the article.
WIRED magazine published an article titled “Social Media Replaced Zines. Now Zines Are Taking the Power Back” highlighting the Black Zine Fair in Brooklyn and the power of independent publishing under fascism.
Happy 100th birthday to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a priceless institution. If you’re in New York, you can visit the exhibition honoring the anniversary, 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity, through June 2026. And everyone should check out the beautiful new zine by center staff, 100 Years of Art & Artifacts at the Schomburg Center.
Podcast
I spoke with Deana Lewis along with my good friends Shira Hassan and Erica R. Meiners for the “Chicago” episode of Creative Interventions’ Stories for Power podcast. We each discussed how our work—and the work we undertook together—fit into the landscape of abolitionist feminist organizing in Chicago between the early 2000s and the early 2010s.
I’m looking forward to showing up in a future episode of Dean Spade’s new podcast Love in a F*cked-Up World, elaborating on his book of the same name. In the meantime, please listen to the first episode, with adrienne maree brown, and the first mini-episode, with Morgan Bassichis; both are wonderful.
Poem
It is so easy to feel alone in these terrifying times. “Belonging” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer reminds me that there is power and solace in being “alone together.”
Potpourri
One Million Experiments: The Film is now available to watch on Apple TV and YouTube TV, and it is well worth your time.
I’m very excited about this Interrupting Criminalization/One Million Experiments summer political education curriculum for youth and community programs. It’s chock-full of activities that I and others have made over many years. Thanks to Eva for compiling.
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, July 27. This is for people already engaged in some form of activism and organizing. Space is limited: sign up here.
For those in NYC, the Black Reading Room presented by Black Zine Fair and hosted by Secret Riso Club in Brooklyn runs through July 14 and is free and open to the public. “Installed in celebration of Juneteenth, the space uplifts Black freedom traditions through a curated collection of zines, books, and films that embrace Black publishing as an underground choir of memory, refusal, and drafts of other possible worlds.”
Those near Brooklyn can also experience Freedom Time: Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls at Recess through August 9. Both the exhibition and the space itself are worth reading about even if you can’t attend.
If you’re near the University of Delaware, please go visit this exhibition before it closes on August 8 and take some photos for me.
If you are in Columbus, Ohio, stop by my friend and collaborator Rachel Wallis’s new creative reuse store.
Pete Quandt’s short film Weekend Visits documents a child spending time with his incarcerated mother in a special on-site house designed for such visits at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women.
I had an Art-O-Mat machine in my hotel in New Orleans and I got a lot of art.
Listen to my uber-talented comrade Gioncarlo Valentine’s words about art, photography, care and love.
Thinking of the salience of the cartonera movement for our times.
2025 SolidarityIs Cohort Applications are now open!
“How to Find a Loved One After a U.S. Immigration Arrest”: This guide from the National Immigration Law Center will “help you look for someone who was taken by immigration officers and may be facing deportation.” Available in multiple languages.
This looks like a great resource from Muslims for Just Futures (MJF) and the Undocublack Network (UBN): Toolkit: Organizing Against Trump’s 2025 Travel Ban.
Cool Library Thing of the Month
The Chicago Public Library has hired a DJ scholar-in-residence for a 12-week residency as part of its efforts to make its archival collections about Black history more accessible. The library announced in May that the residency will be held by Chicago DJ, artist, and cultural programs producer Rae Chardonnay Taylor.