Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Garrett Felber

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.

By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.

Genres: History, Race, Politics, Islam, Nonfiction, African American, Religion

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 13, 2020

Reviews

[josie · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best books I read this year. make time for it

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up white in America in the second half of the 20th century, I assimilated a negative view of the Nation of Islam that was not dissipated by reading Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X. With Malcolm's face on the cover of this book, I thought it would be more about him than it is. However, it does provide a detailed and thought-provoking history of the activism of the NOI against police brutality and mistreatment of prisoners, well before the most recent wave of similar activism in the last 15 years. It's organized topically rather than chronologically. Even within the chapters, I sometimes found the chronology confusing, as events are brought up when relevant even if it ends up causing the dates to jump around a bit.
Felber is not here to defend the NOI, and he takes as a given that they were an organization nowhere near as violent or negative as their general reputation. Since he does not seriously undertake to persuade you of that viewpoint, you have to take it on faith and absorb the rest of the information he gives. Certainly we know now, if we didn't know then, that any organization that seeks to stand up for people of color and put them first always gets accused of wanting to harm white people, so it's highly likely the worst of their reputation was undeserved. They were definitely victims of racist policing and violations of civil rights. How their members conducted themselves in prison and how they went about asserting their civil rights were ahead of their times.
Felber asserts, without explaining, that the NOI was completely consonant with mainstream Islam, and again it's not his brief here to take that argument on. I know only a little about Islam, and I remember from the Malcolm biography that he did return from Mecca with ideas about the differences between the two. It is true that Malcolm said, There aren't "Black Muslims," there are Muslims and we are black. That's also a topic for other sources.
There have been black feminist critiques of the NOI (I cannot remember where; was there something on this in the Black Woman's History of the US? Sorry!) for the way they subordinated women. In a few places, Felber inserts a few pages disputing or "contextualizing" the assertion that the NOI perpetuated oppression of women, but they read as though they were added after the book was done, in order to say he doesn't avoid the issue, and seem disconnected from the rest of the narrative. His argument seems to boil down to: Black women were not entitled to the same protections white women were in US society, so for black men to speak for them and guard them and so on was an assertion of their value that they usually didn't receive. Maybe; I'm not sold, but I'm white so that may not matter. I'd love to read reviews of this book by black women.
On the whole, worth reading and I'm glad I read it. Black Lives Matter is an assertion that has been necessary long before it was formulated in those words.

[David Lucander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense but brief book, Felber packs a lot into less than 200 pages. His thesis is basically that (1) the Nation of Islam was at the forefront of the prisoner's rights movement, (2) aggressive policing and government surveillance techniques applied to the early NOI were what triggered key riots in the long hot summers, and (3) a combination of racism and Islamophobia influenced how pretty much everyone understood the Nation. I don't agree with all of Felber's analysis, but I can say that this book is totally worth reading. It's very well researched, thought provoking, and the endnotes are very good.

[Daphne · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the greatest books i’ve read all-year — i’m glad I read Black Star Crescent Moon by Sohail Daulatzai first. Daulatzai’s framing of a “Muslim International” breathes throughout Felber’s analysis of the “dialectics of discipline” that Felber analyses between the amerikan state + the Nation of Islam from 30s-70s.

looking forward to Felber’s next monograph on Martin Sostre

[Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating. Couldn't put it down.

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Personal discipline ranged from immaculate dress and healthy eating to prayer, tithing, and a refusal to smoke, drink, or curse. Public displays of collective discipline included the Fruit of Islam's (FOT) military-style drills, security at rallies, and women's demands for separate seating in courtrooms. There were also methods of internal discipline within both the mosque and the prison, such as silencing, reprimand, and expulsion." (3)

"'Those who say don't know' described more than a form of cultural or political ignorance. In addition to being a source of physical harm, the carceral state was engaged in epistemic violence. Prisons and policing have long been central spaces for theorizing, articulating, and enacting critiques of the state. In these crucial sites of politicization, those who envisioned justice and freedom came face to face with those wielding coercive power. Well-known figures such as Malcolm X, and lesser-known such as Martin Sostre, both suffered the inhumane conditions of imprisonment and lived in a world governed by racial injustice and economic exploitation, yet spoke unyielding truth to power in the name of Black humanity and dignity." (14)

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

slim but powerful contribution that illuminates the central role played by the Nation of Islam in both the development of the modern carceral apparatus and the movement for its abolition within the larger black liberation struggle. dense but clearly articulated with interesting archival finds and analytical insights abounding on nearly every page. highly relevant to contemporary organizing, especially as relates to the politics of coalition building, the place of abolition within left movements, and the greater continuity of struggle that defined the civil rights and black power eras and their protagonists

[BookwormWithGoggles · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a pleasant surprise. Well researched !

[Lawrence Grandpre · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is good. It essentially argues that the contribution of the nation of Islam has been excluded from narratives of the civil rights movement. Jailhouse lawyering and resistance to police brutality have been inculcated in the NOI communities and have put pressure on mainstream civil rights organizations, who were in "united fronts" and ersatz coalitions with the so-called "Black Muslims" in multiple cities around the country. Their exclusion makes events like Watts and Attica look like "spontaneous outbreaks of nihilism", excluding these communities from the narrative of legitimate resistance politics, and their "irrational outbreaks of rage" are deemed the result of political nihilism and not the result of have years of activism rejects not just by white power structures, but by the respectable civil rights organizations. the author tries to capitulate into current academic politics, trying to put NOI politics into gender and theoretical debates, but overall, by centering the agency of the members of the nation of Islam and challenging both conversation colorblind orthodoxy and liberal/progressive/intersectional orthodoxy, it creates the impression of "they are going to fire this guy"...and sure enough this guy was denied tenure of flimsy grounds, ostensibly for other reasons but it goes to show just how excluded these narratives are from the mainstream academy. Well see if his next book hews closer to the liberal progressive orthodoxy to ingratiate him more deeply into the academic community, which is a very common outcome when someone finds their earlier academic works don't ingratiate them into the academic mainstream .