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President Obama: Grant Clemency to Leonard Peltier

Greg Deal’s Leonard Peltier mural at the Albuquerque, New Mexico Peace and Justice Center, headquarters for the Peltier Defense Committee

“Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is a Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1977 he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment for first degree murder in the shooting of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents during a 1975 conflict on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Peltier’s indictment and conviction have been the subject of much controversy; Amnesty International placed his case under the ‘Unfair Trials’ category of its Annual Report: USA 2010.

Peltier is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Coleman in Florida. Peltier’s next scheduled parole hearing will be in July 2024. Barring appeals, parole, or presidential pardon, his projected release date is October 11, 2040.”

Indeed, Peltier is “considered by Amnesty International, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Congress of American Indians, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. Jesse Jackson, among many others, to be a political prisoner who should be immediately released. [….] Mr. Peltier has been in prison for over [39] years.”

What You Can Do:

• Call President Obama for Leonard Peltier: 202-456-1111 (White House Comment Line)  or 202-456-1414 (White House Switchboard); and send a text to these numbers if your cellphone provider allows for text-to-landline service (a fee may apply) .
• Email President Obama: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments.
• Post a comment on Obama’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/potus/?fref=ts&hc_location=ufi or message him at https://www.facebook.com/whitehouse (or https://m.me/whitehouse).
• Send a tweet to President Obama: @POTUS or @WhiteHouse and use hashtags #FREELEONARDPELTIER #LeonardPeltier and/or #FreePeltier.
• Write a letter: President Barack Obama, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.

Suggested Reading:

• Berger, Dan. The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014.
• Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1988.
• Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990.
• James, Joy, ed. Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
• Matthiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Viking Press, 1983.
• Peltier, Leonard (Harvey Arden, ed.) Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
• Wyler, Rex. Blood of the Land: The Government and Corporate War Against First Nations. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1992 [1982].

Islam and Muslims in the United States: A Select Bibliography

Islamic Cultural Center of New York

• Abdullah, Zain. Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Ammar, Nawal H., ed. Muslims in US Prisons: People, Policy, Practice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015.
• Austin, Allan D. African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook. New York: Garland Publications, 1984.
• Austin, Allan D. African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Breitman, George, ed. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Merit Publishers, 1965.
• Clegg, Claude Andrew, III. An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
• Curtis, Edward E., IV. Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Curtis, Edward E., IV. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
• Curtis, Edward E., IV. Muslims in America: A Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Curtis, Edward E., IV., ed. The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Dannin, Robert. Black Pilgrimage to Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Daulatzai, Sohail. Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
• Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2013 ed.
• Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. New York: Random House, 1999.
• Gardell, Mattias. Countdown to Armageddon: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. London: Hurst and Co., 1996.
• GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz. A History of Islam in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Gibson, Dawn-Marie. A History of the Nation of Islam: Race, Islam, and the Quest for Freedom. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2012.
• Gibson, Dawn-Marie. Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
• Gomez, Michael A. Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, Jane I. Smith, and Kathleen M. Moore. Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, ed. The Muslims of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and John L. Esposito, eds. Muslims on the Americanization Path? New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Islamic Ethics: a very select bibliography

“According to a new estimate in 2016, there are 3.3 million Muslims living in the United States, about 1% of the total U.S. population.” OK, that’s a sufficient “reason” for at least some of us to take an interest in Islamic ethics (as with other ethical traditions, it is both ‘lived’ and, as an ideal, aspirational), about which I suspect there’s abundant ignorance.

Here is a very select list of titles (you’re warmly invited to add more in the comments), in English, on “Islamic ethics.” Of course ethics in Islam cannot be discussed without—at the very least—a corresponding knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Still, and for comparative and philosophical reasons, we can make sense of “Islamic ethics” as such, much in the manner we speak of and write about other kinds of religious ethics (e.g., Christian, Buddhist…).

• Ali, Kecia. Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith and Jurisprudence. London: Oneworld, 2006.
• Brockopp, Jonathan E., ed. Islamic Ethics of Life: Abortion, War, and Euthanasia. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
• Brockopp, Jonathan E. and Thomas Eich, eds. Muslim Medical Ethics: From Theory to Practice. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.
• Cook, Michael. Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Fakhry, Majid. Ethical Theories in Islam. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991.
• Goodman, Lenn E. Islamic Humanism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Hourani, George F. Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of ‛Abd al-Jabbār. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Hourani, George F. Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Kelsay, John. Islam and War: The Gulf War and Beyond—A Study in Comparative Ethics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993.
• Kelsay, John and James Turner Johnson, eds. Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publ. Group, 1991.
• Khadduri, Majid. The Islamic Conception of Justice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
• Ramadan, Tariq. Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Ramadan, Tariq. Islamic Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Sachedina, Abdulaziz. Islamic Biomedical Ethics: Principles and Application. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Sajoo, Amyn B. Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.
• Sajoo, Amyn B., ed. A Companion to Muslim Ethics. London: I.B. Tauris, in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2010.

Hillary Clinton is the Change Candidate

From the New York Times to PBS, the media proclaims that Donald Trump is not stable, but he is the change candidate, and Hillary Clinton is not. In other words, she just stands for four more years of Obama.

In one sense this is true. It will not be possible to get legislation through the Republican House. At the same time, Trump would not be able to get anything through the Senate which is likely to be controlled by the Democrats. So on the domestic level, whoever is President will govern at the margins by executive order, although appointments to the federal departments are obviously important.

In terms of foreign policy, Trump is the change candidate. But change in the hands of an ignorant, reckless, thin-skinned, narcissist is hard to rally around.

But Hillary Clinton is the real change candidate. The Supreme Court has been dominated by Republicans since the 1970’s – more than 40 years. If the Democrats control the Court, the change will be huge. The Court will no longer be the lap child of the Chamber of Commerce. Citizens United will be a bad dream of the past. The rights of criminal defendants can be restored. Our cruel penal system can be reformed. The rights of dissenting voices can be given the protections they deserve. Voting rights restrictions will be rebuffed. Moreover, the Court has the power to address the system in which poor communities get less funds per student for education than wealthy communities.  Indeed, instead of being a tool of the rich and powerful, the Court can once again be a place of justice for those who are subordinated in today’s America.

This is the real change that can take place because of this election, and Hillary Clinton is the change candidate.

The Movement for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice

Elizabeth Catlett, Black Unity (1968)

At the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Clarence Lang explains why

“[f]raming symbols and discourses—rendered in the form of images, platforms and demands—are the most critical aspect of any movement-building effort. At their most effective, they bring political coherence and focus to an activist community, convey meaning and goals to supporters and potential participants, mobilize constituents to action, and equip adherents organizationally to contest for legitimacy (and power). Along these lines, framing discourses can communicate insurgent ideas about what changes are necessary, rather than simply what reforms are deemed possible.”

There are numerous historical exemplifications, some well-known, others less so, of such “framing” by social movements and political groups in the diverse struggles for black freedom and self-determination in this country. The end of legal institution of chattel slavery took place, first, with the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude (although the exception that established ‘punishment for crime’ has led to notoriously nefarious consequences for the criminal justice system: ‘From the very beginning, the slave narrative, in both fact and fiction, has shaped America’s approach to crime control and punishment’*). Lang provides us with some historical exemplars by of a vivid and inspiriting backdrop to the attempt by The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to continue this tradition of “transformative agenda setting:”

“The work of movement framing has been an enduring feature of struggles for black freedom, though each wave of struggle has imagined black freedom in historically specific ways. This history includes the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (1896), which promoted seven ‘Objectives’ for the education, economic welfare and social rights of women and youth during the early years of Jim Crow, and popularized the motto ‘Lifting as We Climb.’ It also encompasses the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s 1920 ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World,’ which globalized a Black Nationalist vision of self-determination in the wreckage of the First World War. Similarly, the ‘Ten-Point Program’ of Oakland’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (1966) reflected an anti-colonial consciousness prevalent among urban youth of color. As another example, the ‘Combahee River Collective Statement’ (1977) spoke to a growing intersectional approach to both analyzing and combating oppression on the bases of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Moreover, in its 1998 ‘Freedom Agenda,’ the Black Radical Congress reacted to the retreat from racial equality and economic justice that had occurred during the successive presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton, and offered a politically left alternative to the reactionary black conservatism of the 1995 Million Man March.”

The Movement for Black Lives is a coalition of over 50 groups and organizations that “engaged in a year long process of convening local and national groups to create a United Front,” united so as to articulate its “common aspirations” and formulate a “Platform” statement with “demands,” including the outline of some 30-plus policies. The “Policy Demands” revolve around the following topics: “the war on black people,” “reparations,” “investments and divestments,” “economic justice,” “democratic community control,” and “independent Black political power and Black self-determination.” In Lang’s words,

“On a bigger canvas, these ‘Policy Demands’ speak to the effects of a current neoliberal landscape characterized by, among other things, a denigration of social welfare expenditures and ideas of the public good; an emphasis on fiscal austerity and the punitive functions of the state; the deregulation of capital; widening gaps of wealth and privilege; the reduction of all social relations to private market exchanges; and the resulting atomization of the individual.”

Elizabeth Catlett, Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968)

Please read Lang’s post, and click on the links above for the specific policy demands. This is an impressive, timely and radical document that deserves wide circulation, discussion, and endorsement.

* Donald F. Tibbs, From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 181.

Alain Locke: Critical Pragmatist, Cultural Pluralist, and “Father of the Harlem Renaissance”

Painting by Betsy Graves Reyneau

Today is the birthday of the philosopher, Alain Locke:

“Alain LeRoy Locke (September 13, 1885 – June 9, 1954) was an American writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. Distinguished as the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke was the philosophical architect —the acknowledged ‘Dean’— of the Harlem Renaissance.”

The following is from the introduction to the entry on Locke in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Jacoby Adeshei Carter:

“Alain LeRoy Locke is heralded as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’ for his publication in 1925 of The New Negro—an anthology of poetry, essays, plays, music and portraiture by white and black artists. Locke is best known as a theorist, critic, and interpreter of African-American literature and art. He was also a creative and systematic philosopher who developed theories of value, pluralism and cultural relativism that informed and were reinforced by his work on aesthetics. Locke saw black aesthetics quite differently than some of the leading Negro intellectuals of his day; most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom he disagreed about the appropriate social function of Negro artistic pursuits. Du Bois thought it was a role and responsibility of the Negro artist to offer a representation of the Negro and black experience which might help in the quest for social uplift. Locke criticized this as ‘propaganda’ and argued that the primary responsibility and function of the artist is to express his own individuality, and in doing that to communicate something of universal human appeal.

Locke was a distinguished scholar and educator and during his lifetime an important philosopher of race and culture. Principal among his contributions in these areas was the development of the notion of ‘ethnic race,’ Locke’s conception of race as primarily a matter of social and cultural, rather than biological, heredity. Locke was in contemporary parlance a racial revisionist, and held the somewhat controversial and paradoxical view that it was often in the interests of groups to think and act as members of a ‘race’ even while they consciously worked for the destruction or alteration of pernicious racial categories. Racial designations were for Locke incomprehensible apart from an understanding of the specific cultural and historical contexts in which they grew up. A great deal of Locke’s philosophical thinking and writing in the areas of pluralism, relativism and democracy are aimed at offering a more lucid understanding of cultural or racial differences and prospects for more functional methods of navigating contacts between different races and cultures.

Locke, like Du Bois, is often affiliated with the pragmatist philosophical tradition though somewhat surprisingly—surprising because Locke’s actual views are closer substantively to pragmatist thinkers Like Dewey, James, and Royce than are Du Bois’s—he does not receive as much attention in the writings of contemporary pragmatist philosophers as does Du Bois. Regardless, he is most strongly identified with the pragmatist tradition, but his ‘critical pragmatism’ and most specifically his value theory, is also influenced by Hugo Münsterberg, F.S.C. Schiller, Alexius Meinong, Frantz Brentano, and Christian von Erhenfels. From early on in his education at Harvard University, Locke had an affinity for the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. Locked developed his mature views on axiology well in advance of many leading pragmatists—e.g., Dewey and James. Among pragmatists, Locke has arguably the most developed and systematic philosophy of value, and offers many critical insights concerning democracy.”

The Alain Locke Society was founded by Leonard Harris, with Jacoby Adeshei Carter serving as Executive Director.

A Select Bibliography:

• Cain, Rudolph Alexander Kofi. Alain Leroy Locke: Race, Culture, and the Education of African American Adults. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2003.
• Carter, Jacoby Adeshei and Leonard Harris, eds. Philosophic Values and World Citizenship: Locke to Obama and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
• Harris, Leonard, ed. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989.
• Harris, Leonard, ed. The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
• Harris, Leonard and Charles Molesworth. Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
• Locke, Alain. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures of the Theory and Practice of Race. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1916
• Locke, Alain (Charles Molesworth, ed.) The Works of Alain Locke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925.
• Stewart, Jeffrey, ed. The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Collection of His Essays on Art and Culture. New York: Garland Publishing, 1983.
• Washington, Johnny. Alain Locke and Philosophy: A Quest for Cultural Pluralism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
• Washington, Johnny. A Journey into the Philosophy of Alain Locke. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Steve Biko: 18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977

Steve (Stephen Bantu) Biko (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977), “leader of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) and pioneer of the Black Consciousness philosophy, died in police custody at the age of thirty. Biko was arrested in the outskirts of Grahamstown on 18 August 1977. During his detention in a Port Elizabeth police cell he had been chained to a grill at night and left to lie in urine-soaked blankets. He had been stripped naked and kept in leg-irons for 48 hours in his cell. A blow in a scuffle with security police led to him suffering brain damage. Realising to a certain extent the seriousness of his condition, the police decided to transfer him to a prison hospital in Pretoria, which was 1133 km away. He died shortly after his arrival there. His death was confirmed by the commissioner of police, General Gert Prinsloo.”

This following is a small portion of an extract from Biko’s giving of evidence in the SASO/BPC [South African Students’ Organisation/Black People’s Convention] trial (1975-76, almost two full years!) of nine student leaders who “were found guilty under the Terrorism Act and sentenced to periods of imprisonment, three for six years and six for five years. The next day they were driven from Pretoria to Cape Town in the back of a police van, and from there taken to Robben Island.” Biko was queried by the defence lawyer, Advocate David Soggot (assistant counsel for Defence), Mr. L. Attwell, assistant counsel for the Prosecution, and the trial judge, Judge Boshoff.

“We try to get blacks in conscientisation to grapple realistically with their problems, to attempt to find solutions to their problems, to develop what one might call an awareness, a physical awareness of their situation, to be able to analyse it, and to provide answers for themselves. The purpose behind it really being to provide some kind of hope; I think the central theme about black society is that it has got elements of a defeated society, people often look like they have given up on the struggle. Like the man who was telling me that he now lives to work, he has given himself to the idea. Now this sense of defeat is basically what we are fighting against; people must develop a hope, people must develop some form of security to be together to look at their problems, and people must in this way build up their humanity. This is the point about conscientisation and Black Consciousness.”— Steve Biko: I Write What I Like—Selected Writings (University of Chicago Press, 2002; first published in London: The Bowerdean Press, 1978): 114.

Suggested Reading:

• Arnold, Millard, ed. Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South Africa. New York: Random House, 1978.
• Gerhart, Gail M. Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978.
• Gibson, Nigel. “Black Consciousness, 1977-1987: The Dialectics of Liberation in South Africa,” Durban, South Africa: Centre for Civil Society, Research Report 18.
• Lodge, Tom. Black Politics in Africa since 1945. Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan, 1983.
• Murray, Martin. South Africa: Time of Agony, Time of Destiny. London: Verso, 1987.
• Seekings, Jeremy. The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000.
• South African Democracy Education Trust, ed. The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 2: 1970-1980. Pretoria: Unisa Press, University of South Africa, 2nd ed., 2010.
  
• Woods, Donald. Biko. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 3^rd, 1991 (1978).

The Attica Prison Uprising, September 9 - 13, 1971

“The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwacking of the two prisoners Sept. 8, 1971 but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year.

WE are MEN! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison population has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United State. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.” – “L.D.” (Elliot James) Barkley, reading aloud from the introductory paragraphs of The Five Demands in the prison’s D-Yard

Today marks the 45^th anniversary of the start of the revolt (to reduce it to a ‘riot’ is misleading and tendentious, thus inaccurate) by prisoners of the Attica Correctional Facility. Thirty-nine individuals were killed by corrections officers and state troopers in the armed assault of the prison, nine of which were hostages, one, a civilian, and the remaining twenty-nine persons, inmates (several deaths occurred prior to re-taking control of the prison). As Heather Ann Thompson notes in her new book on the uprising (see below), numerous others were “wounded, maimed, tortured, and scarred” at the prison on September 13, 1971.

The New York Times has an archival page with helpful material covering the various historical, sociological, and political dimensions of the Uprising. See too this interview with Joseph “Jazz” Hayden at Jacobin (first published in the Socialist Worker).

Today is also the date chosen for a nationwide “prison strike” (a ‘Nationally Coordinated Prisoner Work stoppage’): “This September 9, we may witness the largest prison strike in US history. Potentially thousands of inmates across both state and federal prisons in as many as 24 states plan to engage in a coordinated strike and protest in an attempt to bring attention to the daily injustice of their lives. The strikers are calling for an end to ‘slave-like’ working conditions, illegal reprisals, and inhumane living conditions.

Planned for the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising, the actions of September 9 will shed light on the often decrepit conditions suffered by the 2.4 million people in what is the largest carceral system in the world. They will also mark a new point in the fight against mass incarceration, and likely stand as a harbinger for further actions and strikes to come. Malik Washington, an inmate in the H. H. Coffield Unit in Texas and the chief spokesperson for the End Prison Slavery in Texas movement, wrote to me in a letter: ‘Prisoners in Amerikan prisons are sick and tired of being degraded, dehumanized, and exploited.’—From John Washington’s September 7^th article in The Nation.

Essential Reading:

• Berger, Dan (2014) Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Berger, Dan (2014) The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
• Berkman, Ronald (1979) Opening the Gates: The Rise of the Prisoners’ Movement. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
• Breitman, George (1967) The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York York: Pathfinder Press.
• Cummins, Eric (1994) The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press. [After acknowledging this book as ‘[o]ne of the first scholarly histories of prison protest,’ Berger points out that its ‘valuable research...remains troublesomely antagonistic to prison activism. He sees the prison movement as a violence-obsessed phenomenon premised on naive white fascination with dangerous black criminal men.’]
  
• Irwin, John (1980) Prisons in Turmoil. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
• Irwin, John (2004) The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publ.
• Jackson, George L. (1970) Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Coward-McCann.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2007) Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Thompson, Heather Ann (2016) Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Tibbs, Donald F. (2012) From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisons’ Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Wicker, Tom (2011) A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books (first published by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975).

For further, extensive reading and research, please see my bibliographies on the Black Panther Party and Punishment and Prison.

A Fearful Deference to the “Order of Things” Confronts Melville’s Billy Budd

I want to share this extraordinarily profound and eloquent (not ‘eloquent’ in the sense that a Trump supporter on CNN confidently described a recent campaign speech by Trump as ‘eloquent’) passage from Tom Wicker’s book, A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt (Haymarket Books, 2011; first published by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975). It comes at a point in the micro-historical narrative of events surrounding the Attica Uprising when “negotiations” with the prisoners in D-yard appear to have ended and Wicker has just gotten off the phone with Governor Nelson Rockefeller in a futile, last minute effort to persuade him to meet with the “Observers Committee” (which consisted of 14 individuals invited by the rebelling inmates and an additional 23 other members) so as to, among other things, buy time in order to enhance the probability that a “massacre,” as an otherwise predictable result of the effort by authorities to re-take control of the prison, would not occur. In short, Wicker was “hoping the governor would become alarmed from his descriptions of the violence he thought impending and would be encouraged by the possibility of reassuring the inmates with his presence:”

“He wondered if the trouble was not, rather, that to the Rockefellers of the world, those institutions, processes, and arrangements by which humans had sought to order their affairs had become, finally, more important than the people who had erected them and sought to live by them.

Perhaps that was why the state for all its good intentions and the system for all its idealistic trappings—democracy and representation and due process—so often produced injustice and myopia and indifference and rigidity. Perhaps that is why men like Tom Wicker [in the Preface, Wicker explains his use of the third person] could perceive the system as basically sound, the state as fundamentally well-meaning, the people as mostly decent—yet stumble time and again on the inequities and callousness and brutalities wrought in the name of society. Perhaps the fault lay not in any system but in men’s profound instinct to establish and maintain, at all costs, an order of things.

Never mind, if so, the intrinsic value of Attica, the ‘institution’ then in question, its palpable responsibility for the injustices and wastage happening within it. The state could sustain Attica, even call it a ‘correctional facility,’ because it was an institution, and official at that, a part of the order of things, serving that order against the frightening possibilities of unruly humanity, undisciplined conduct. Re-opening it, restoring the order, was more important than that many lives might have to be sacrificed to do it. Captain ‘Starry’ Vere could see no higher duty or obligation than maintenance of the King’s established naval code. Indeed, he told his brother officers that ‘in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents.’ So it was not only they who condemned Billy Budd to death, but only ‘martial law operating through us’—the order of things.

Similarly, neither Rockefeller nor any of his officials wanted to cause loss of life. But the order of things was operating through them. Institutions and processes required of them a way of doing and believing, a system of behavior, to which they gave allegiance, sometimes passionately, sometimes pragmatically, usually without question. ‘Tell me whether or not, occupying the position we do,’ Captain Vere demanded to know, ‘private conscience should not yield to that imperial one formulated in the code under which alone we officially proceed?’ Rockefeller could have put the question to Wicker as dispassionately.

Institutions must not only function, whatever the end result; the order of things must be preserved. The powerful must not be at the beck and call of the powerless even when suddenly the powerless wield momentary power, for the powerful are obliged to meet great responsibilities to the order of things. That order gives them their power and must survive the moment. Governors must not deal as equals with lawbreakers; that would endanger the order of the things. Amnesty must not be granted to offenders; they must pay a debt to the order of things. If policemen and armies, being human, sometimes go too far, use unusual force, that is deplorable, but still they are the necessary enforcers of the order of things, what is the alternative? Only the unimaginable—that the order of things be sacrificed to life.”

 

William Kunstler: July 17, 1919 - September 4, 1995

William Kunstler at New York City rally protesting the carnage at Attica that led to the deaths of 29 inmates and 10 hostages killed by corrections officers and state troopers (recalling with James Forman, Jr., that ‘[t]he most sadistic crimes took place after state officials had full control of the prison’).

Today is the 21st anniversary of the death of William Kunstler (July 17, 1919 - September 4, 1995), the indefatigable Left-activist (‘cause’) lawyer and WW II U.S. Army veteran. Here is his Wikipedia entry, which is tolerable, all things considered, although it fails to mention that Kunstler was among those asked to negotiate on behalf of the rebelling inmates at Attica Correctional Facility, September 9 -13, 1971. Kunstler’s efforts in solidarity with the prisoners in D-yard is discussed in Tom Wicker’s (also invited by the prisoners to assist in negotiations and a member of the ‘Observers Committee’) A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt (Haymarket Books, 2011; originally published by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975) and Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy  (Pantheon Books, 2016). Kunstler also represented one of the “Central Park Five” defendants, all of whom had their convictions vacated by New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada on December 19, 2002 (they had completed their prison sentences at the time of Tejada’s order).*

William Kunstler at the Attica Correctional Institute, Saturday, September 11, 1971

In 2009, two of his four daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler, completed a documentary about their late father, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe.

* Let’s not forget that Donald Trump, “in early May, 1989, took out a full-page ad in the Daily News to say what he thought he knew about the case.”  There is, no doubt, consistency of character here.