Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Dan Berger

In this pathbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux. Showing that the prison was a central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s through the 1980s, Berger traces the dynamic and dramatic history of this political struggle.

The prison shaped the rise and spread of black activism, from civil rights demonstrators willfully risking arrests to the many current and former prisoners that built or joined organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Grounded in extensive research, Berger engagingly demonstrates that such organizing made prison walls porous and influenced generations of activists that followed.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Theory, Social Justice, Sociology

402 pages, Hardcover

First published November 14, 2014

Reviews

[Black Bibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has almost all of the information you need to really understand the nexus of prison organizing among Blacks and Latinos. It stretches over several decades as well. It took me a while to finish, but it was well worth it.

Read it.

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

i could (and probably will) write a multitude of papers analyzing the arguments that berger structures within the realm of prison organizing and the catalysts of the carceral state. i found that my eyes were opened to new ways of viewing prisons as a systematic means of oppression. i was introduced to landmark cases and historic events that immensely shaped the Black Power and Prison Rights movements. while berger’s analyses can sometimes be as dense as a white frat boy in a sociology class, i truly loved reading his perspective (and intentional depictions of George Jackson, Angela Davis, and other within the Black Power movement).

with all of that said, there’s always room for critique. while Angela Davis was graced with a (shared) section on her works and contribution, the representation of women is laughable. berger left out an entire demographic of women that were monumentally responsible for the copious number of progressive victories that were won in this era.

furthermore, the way he depicts Davis is interesting to me. i found that he was intentional in depicting the juxtaposition of Ruchell Magee and Davis’ trial. she was written as a calm and poised woman, paralleled to Magee as a flamboyant, disruptive defendant. i believe this was due to the prejudice of intersectionality that Davis faces by being a Black woman on trial for all america to see. i’d like to think berger did this with purpose; however, he never mentions the term intersectionality or delves into the gender roles that confine women (especially women of color).

the book concludes in the epoch where the country was at this height of activism. however, shortly after there is a push away from rehabilitation into the era of law and order (causing the large support for activist groups to disperse into mere whispers).

overall, highly highly recommend this read. it’s also slightly pessimistic to find that the perils of the prison state are still abundantly present today, with little progress being made.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berger argued that Black Power prison organizing arose as part of the general Civil Rights movement, and became a focal point both for radicalization and organizing. He traced the unleashing of the carceral state in the South, which had been refined during slavery, upon Civil Rights activists in the 50s, which was intended to frighten, discipline, and shame, to the rise of Black Power groups within prisons, especially California. In California, where the carceral state rapidly expanded as migrants from the South arrived, groups saw prisons as a place for explicit organizing, including Malcolm X who first encountered Nation of Islam while in prison. The Black Panther Party’s membership was targeted for prison terms, much of which turned out to be bogus, especially people like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Prisoners like George Jackson became radicalized, who famously wrote Soledad Brother, after his brother Jonathan was killed after taking judges hostage in a courtroom. A year later, George Jackson himself was killed during an uprising and attempted breakout. Other leaders such as Angela Davis, Rucell Magee, and the San Quintin 6 faced public trials which helped build their cause of black self determination. Berger links prison struggles of the past with today’s fights to battle mass incarceration.
Key Themes and Concept
-Berger states that the prisoner organizing arises as the state explicitly denies liberty, freedom, dignity, and justice.
-Prisons are both a metaphor for the black experience and an instution of black life, as more and more are incarcerated as a method of control.
-Prisons are raw state power, yet are largely invisible and guarded from the public. Prisoners sought to challenge that invisibility with large protests, organizing, sometimes violence, and trials that exposed what happened behind prison walls. Regimes jail their dissidents, and sometimes the target of that control are large populations of racial minorities, reframed as criminals.
-Black radical consciousness sought to reframe prisons as structural and historical as opposed to individual and cultural actions.
-Prisoners in San Quentin and Folsom prisons build multiracial alliances which helped organize strikes against the prison system for improved conditions and access. These alliances cut through antagonistic racial lines, even if short lived.
-Black radical activists often had conservative gender politics, where women’s work was expected from women supporters as well as access to sex. Black radical prison activism was often framed as reclaiming masculinity, though tempered in the case of women’s prisons or women like Angela Davis.
-Berger approaches the history as intersectional.

[Leah Montange · Rating 5 out of 5]

why is this book so solid? solid as a rock.

[Alan Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Berger does an excellent job of connecting the broader struggle for civil rights in the period of the 50's through the 70's. As civil,rights activists went to prison, the horrors of jails and prisons in the south were exposed to national attention, and prison became a place to organize, not just a place of punishment. As blacks began to assert their humanity on the outside, so too did blacks on the inside begin to rebel against a racist, violent system. As the government switched from battling against civil rights, and re-labelled its efforts as "law and order" more and more people were sent to prison who were heavily politicized BEFORE they went to prison. This lead to a symbiotic relationship where organizers on the outside worked closely with politically aware prisoners on the inside.

Berger focuses heavily on the Black Panther Party, with so many of its members sent to prison, and George Jackson, the prisoner who became a party member from the inside. While the Black Panther Party is crucial to (and often left out of) the story of radical challenges to authority in the 1960's and early 1970's, Berger's focus on California distorts his analysis. Two big prison uprisings, Attica and the Pontiac riots of 1978, are given a few paragraphs each, but no attempt is made to weave these stories into the larger narrative, nor is the role of the Panthers (or any other organization) examined in connection with either of these massive uprisings.

In the last chapter, Berger compresses the period from 1980 to the present into a few brief pages, which is terribly unsatisfying as it fails to explain why Michelle Alexander's book caught fire, nor why organizing inside was so successful that about 1/2 of all California prisoners declared a simultaneous hunger strike.

In sum, really useful addition to the history of both the civil rights movement and the fight against mass incarceration. But the broader story still needs to be told.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simultaneously a detailed history of George & Jonathan Jackson and Angela Davis, a wide-ranging overview of prison's central role in black national identity and resistance organizing of the 60s and 70s, and a strong case for the revolutionary marxist view of black power / black nationalist movements. Left in my head a lot of the powerful analogies these groups used to connect prison to the general black experience; between colonization and incarceration (in migration, resistance, nations-within-nations); with prison and judicial changes/legitimacy as Jim Crow laws receded and black-as-criminal took their place, both in black expressions of self-determination and white expressions of law-and-order. Berger ends on a strong discussion of state violence under neoliberalism and the state-empowering militarizing effects of attempting to achieve freedom through violence.

[Mills College Library]

365.60899 B4961 2014

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Finished" is a loose word but oh well. Really good! Very engaging, especially for somewhat academic writing!