Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation

Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series

by Lisa M. Corrigan

Winner of the 2017 Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the African American Communication and Culture Division's 2017 Outstanding Book Award, both from the National Communication Association

In the Black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Lisa M. Corrigan underscores how imprisonment―a site for both political and personal transformation―shaped movement leaders by influencing their political analysis and organizational strategies. Prison became the critical space for the transformation from civil rights to Black Power, especially as southern civil rights activists faced setbacks.

Black Power activists produced autobiographical writings, essays, and letters about and from prison beginning with the early sit-in movement. Examining the iconic prison autobiographies of H. Rap Brown, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur, Corrigan conducts rhetorical analyses of these extremely popular though understudied accounts of the Black Power movement. She introduces the notion of the “Black Power vernacular” as a term for the prison memoirists' rhetorical innovations, to explain how the movement adapted to an increasingly hostile environment in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

Through prison writings, these activists deployed narrative features supporting certain tenets of Black Power, pride in Blackness, disavowal of nonviolence, identification with the Third World, and identity strategies focused on Black masculinity. Corrigan fills gaps between Black Power historiography and prison studies by scrutinizing the rhetorical forms and strategies of the Black Power ideology that arose from prison politics. These discourses demonstrate how Black Power activism shifted its tactics to regenerate, even after the FBI sought to disrupt, discredit, and destroy the movement.

Genres: Race, Politics, History

208 pages, Hardcover

Published November 4, 2016

Reviews

[Shannon Heaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book well enough, but it read much like a master's thesis. Undoubtedly the three writers and activists for Black liberation are important in the struggle, but I didn't catch the prison connection so much as the writers' connection, particularly with respect to Assata Shakur. It's a difficult subject, though, and an important start.
The cover of the book, also, was baffling. There were photos of, presumably, as many as eight White inmates. If the book tracks three prisoner writers, why not just them? What were the others there for? Presumably, yes, arrestees for civil rights, fair play, but why were any of the others on the cover.

[Mat Freimuth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text is most useful as an engaging telling of the history of the Black Power movement in the US. As an academic text, its goal is mostly as a rhetorical analysis of various Black liberation texts, focusing mainly on those of H. Rap Brown, Mumia Abul Jamal, and Assata Shakur. I didn't find the communications aspect of it particularly useful, but definitely pick this up if you only have cursory knowledge of the Black Power movement and want to understand it better.