I’ve written before about Coretta Scott King and argued that she should be considered as a consequential activist in her own right. Continuing with that theme today, I want to highlight her solidarity work with Cesar Chavez and her support for union organizing. This is particularly relevant as workers in Walmarts across the country are on strike today during “Black Friday.”

In December 1970, Coretta Scott King visited Cesar Chavez while he was jailed in Salinas, California. He had been incarcerated for refusing to end a strike against Bud Antle lettuce. He spent 20 days in jail. After her visit with Chavez, Mrs. King addressed two thousand farm workers in a speech. Below is an excerpt that remains relevant today (in light of stories like the Twinkies bankrupcy and Walmart):

“Those who control the billion dollar economy have said Blacks and Chicanos do not have the right to a decent life or to human dignity. They must live on the crumbs from the tables groaning with food.

Coretta King and Cesar Chavez in 1972

For more than thirty years farm workers were thought to be unorganizable and so powerless they could not demand and achieve security and dignity. But Cesar Chavez challenged the tyrants, organized the working poor and became a threat, so they have jailed him. But as my husband so often said, “You cannot keep truth in a jail cell.” Truth and justice leap barriers, and in their own way, reach the conscience of the people. The men of power thought my husband was a powerless man with grandiose ideas. He had nothing but an idea that people at the bottom could be aroused to fight for dignity and equality.

The power structure became alarmed when his ideas were transformed into marching millions and the right to vote, the right to use facilities, the right to jobs, and the right to private dignity were won.

Read more »

Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.

To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven

Luck by Langston Hughes

On this Thanksgiving day, I am thinking again about the truth that all humanity is interconnected. I am also thinking today of the millions of people across the U.S. who are locked behind bars.

I am cooking this morning for about 20 people. I have taken a short break to write. A young prisoner who I correspond with sent me a letter a couple of weeks ago. In it, he mentioned that he is “always hungry” in prison. He can’t get filled up. He meant this literally and metaphorically. The food in prison, as I have written about before, is mostly terrible. So prisoners are in fact often physically hungry. But that is only one type of hunger. The young man wrote of his hunger for attention too. He had frayed relations with his family prior to being incarcerated. Those ties have only become more tenuous now that he finds himself in prison. He is profoundly lonely.

On this Thanksgiving day, I hope that you will spare a thought for the millions of people imprisoned across the U.S. I hope that you will send them positive energy. I hope that you will recognize that their fate is inextricably linked to yours.

On this day of Thanksgiving, I am grateful for the knowledge that my humanity is inexorably bound to that of prisoners across the world. When they are harmed or dehumanized, so am I and so too are those who are carrying out that harm. I make sure to remind myself and others of this every day.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

I am still trying to get back into the flow of life since I went down with pneumonia for over two weeks. As such, my posting will be more sporadic in the coming days.

Today, I wanted to share a terrific “map of connections” that my friend and Black/Inside exhibition collaborator Billy Dee just finished. It features a set of black political prisoners that we present in some way or another in the Black/Inside exhibition. I hope that you find it informative. Once again, my profound gratitude goes out to Billy who continues to speak to me even after a set of recent collaborations 🙂 You are welcome to share this map with others but please make sure to credit Billy and Black/Inside. You can click on the image itself to view it in a larger format.

It’s worth remembering given how much the F.B.I. has been in the news this week regarding the Petraeus sex scandal that the organization used to routinely assassinate American citizens…

On Saturday, I led a bus tour in partnership with my friend Mia Henry of Freedom Lifted, LLC. One of our stops was the People's Law Office where we were privileged to spend time listening to the great Flint Taylor. Flint shared his recollections of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and also gave us some history about the Chicago Police Torture cases. I am so grateful to have been able to learn from Flint. This visit was a timely one because in just a couple of weeks, it will be the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Fred Hampton.

On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton was murdered while he was sleeping in his bed. He was shot in the arm, shoulder, and twice through the head. He was just 21 years old. Mark Clark was also killed that morning. Right after the shootings, State’s Attorney Hanrahan called a press conference where he announced that the Black Panthers had organized a “vicious, unprovoked attack” on the police who had appeared at an apartment at 4:45 that morning to supposedly search for illegal weapons. Seven survivors of the targeted murder, including Hampton’s fiance Deborah Johnson who was 8 months pregnant, were arrested and charged with attempted murder. After 13 years of litigation, Flint Taylor, Jeffrey Haas, and other lawyers at the People’s Law Office were able to prove that the shootings were actually assassinations organized by the F.B.I. as part of its Cointelpro program.

Read more »

This week, the Detention Watch Network identified the 10 worst immigration detention centers across the U.S. in a new report. The report suggests that:

At all ten of the facilities, people reported waiting weeks or months for medical care; inadequate, and in some cases a total absence, of any outdoor recreation time or access to sunlight or fresh air; minimal and inedible food; the use of solitary confinement as punishment; and the extreme remoteness of many of the facilities from any urban area which makes access to legal services nearly impossible.

Detention Watch Network calls for the immediate closure of these facilities. One of these detention centers is the Tri-County Detention Center which is the only privately-run immigrant detention center in Illinois. You can read a summary of the terrible conditions at Tri-County HERE (PDF).

Read more »

Nice Day For A Lynching
by Kenneth Patchen

The bloodhounds look like sad old judges
In a strange court. They point their noses
At the Negro jerking in the right noose;
His feet spread crow-like above these
Honorable men who laugh as he chokes.

I don’t know this man.
I don’t know these white men.

But I know that one of my hands
Is black, and one white. I know that
One part of me is being strangled.
While another part horribly laughs.

Until it changes,
I shall be forever killing; and be killed.

Join us for a conversation with scholar activist Beth Richie and a panel of national and local activists working to end violence against women and prison abolition as a feminist issue. This conversation will be centered on Richie’s new book, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, which shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious. Panelists will explore issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization alongside questions of public policy and gender violence.

Experimental Station
6100 South Blackstone Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637

Conversation with Beth Richie and panelists, 4-6pm
Reception and book signing, 6-7pm

Panelists include Jane Hereth, Mariame Kaba, Erica Meiners, Sharmili Majmudar, Andrea Ritchie, and Mary Scott-Boria. Co-moderated by Rachel Caidor and Alice Kim.

Reserve your spot HERE.

Read more »

Lolita Lebron is a Puerto Rican former political prisoner who was sentenced to 50 years for her part in an armed demonstration in the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, 1954. She was imprisoned for 25 years in the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. She was pardoned under the Carter administration and released in September 1979. She returned to Puerto Rico. During her imprisonment, both of her children died.

Alone
by Lolita Lebron

I’m quiet, like the still water
in the solitude of my cell.
I move serenely towards the sea
with my stillness and my leaping…
Alone. Only the voice of the rain
can console my suffering.
“The rain is Your voice.” I feel
all your kisses and embraces.
the treasures yielded by
the shadows and beams of light
on these walls.

They are my wounded and bound birds,
with hollow flesh, stone-like-calluses
between their terrible fists
and painted mouths gagged
in deafening confinement.

I hear them in the field on Labor Day.
What a tumult!
The tired sun reaches its zenith
as the cloud clears and the worn-out dream
erupts in the back and forth of their laughter…

They drag themselves through
the furrowed dust of talk
and hooch.
They are the very blood and veins
that run through the river of the world.

They are the wound
that the powerful of the earth inflict.
Yet we never see the decayed reflection
of their guns on these walls.

They are the victims of drugs
who have made millionaires of the “pure ones,”
haunting skeletons of doom
that shine like the gold and copper
stolen from us by the Yanqui colonizers.

I recently re-read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and it never gets old for me. As many know, Malcolm X spent nearly seven years locked behind bars and converted to Islam while he was imprisoned. Upon his release, he became committed to the social and political uplift of black people and was an inspiration to millions.

The following is an excerpt from the Autobiography of Malcolm X that recounts some of his experience of captivity and confinement. I included this excerpt in a zine that I developed for the Black/Inside exhibition. You can download the entire publication HERE (PDF). It includes first-hand accounts from black prisoners writing about their experiences of incarceration.

Read more »

This weekend, I led a bus tour of various Chicago landmarks central to the history of black confinement and captivity. The group included youth and adults and I think that everyone learned something new. I will run the tour one more time on Saturday.

As I planned the tour along with the Black/Inside exhibition, I was reminded again about the overlooked chapters of black history. As I was doing my research, I learned of an episode that took place in 1850 in Chicago after Congress passed the Compromise of 1850 and its provisional bill, the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA).

The Fugitive Slave Act denied runaway slaves the right to a trial by jury, authorized federal marshals to call upon bystanders to help them capture suspected fugitives, and imposed stiff fines and imprisonment on any citizen who aided escaped slaves or prevented their capture. Antislavery forces (mainly the Abolitionists) in the North declared the law to be unconstitutional. The law was intended to curtail the Underground Railroad. It had the opposite effect instead galvanizing resistance across the country. For example, abolitionists across the North printed posters warning black people that they were in danger.

In Chicago, the response to the law was swift and dramatic. On September 30, 1850, more than three hundred black Chicagoans gathered at Quinn Chapel, the first black church in Chicago, located on the east side of Wells Street near Washington Street, to protest the Fugitive Slave Act. At the time, the city’s population was about 23,000 people (with only 378 blacks).

John Jones, a free black abolitionist and a leading figure of Chicago’s black community, rose to address the crowd. He read a series of resolutions conceived by himself and fellow black abolitionists, Henry O. Wagoner and William Johnson. Jones spoke out at the gathering:

We who have tasted freedom are ready to exclaim with Patrick Henry, “Give us liberty or give us death”… [and] in the language of George Washington. “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” We will stand by our liberty at the expense of our lives and will not consent to be taken into slavery or permit our brethren to be taken.

To protect its members from “being borne back to bondage,” the group created a vigilance committee consisting of a black police force of seven divisions; each division had six persons who were to patrol the city each night to watch for slave catchers. The group also formed a correspondence committee, modeled on that of the American Revolution, called the Liberty Association, “for the general dissemination of the principals of Human Freedom.”

The committee’s resolutions reveal how Chicago’s black abolitionists viewed themselves and their fellow African-Americans: as a free people, heirs to the rights won by the American Revolution, ready to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, to maintain that freedom. This view of African Americans as rightful citizens of the Republic was central to the abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century and key to understanding the actions of those in Chicago and elsewhere who worked to end slavery.

On October 21, the Chicago Common Council (now called the City Council) formally denounced the Fugitive Slave Act as unconstitutional and nonbinding. By a vote of nine to two, the council resolved that the “Senators and Representatives in Congress from the free States who aided and assisted in the passage of this infamous law…are only to be ranked with the traitors Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.” It also resolved that it would not require the police to assist in the arrest of fugitive slaves. John Jones and the other black people who had resisted the Fugitive Slave Act in Chicago had won something significant.