I have been working for the past six months on a long essay about how policing and prisons figure into the modern black freedom movement. I often use this blog as a way to work out what I think about certain issues. This is one of those times so please forgive the disjointed nature of this post. I am thinking out loud…

Police, prisons, and jails (basically the apparatus of the carceral state) figure prominently across the history of the black freedom movement. Since slavery, black people in the U.S. have found themselves in conflict with the instruments of state power which have sought to control our bodies, our labor, our families, and our very freedom.

I have been reading quite a bit about the modern civil rights movement again (1945 to 1975) and am struck by how prominently police brutality and prison/jail figure in the narratives of that struggle. Police harassment consistently triggers riots in Harlem, Chicago, Rochester, Watts, & L.A just to name a few cities. People fed up with unrelenting police brutality find ways to lash out and/or to resist.

I have written about how the Black Panther Party centered the problem of police violence in their analysis and in their organizing. Their Ten Point Program titled “What We Want, What We Believe” advocated an end to police harassment and a reliance on self-defense to counter the brutality that people of color were subjected to on a daily basis.

Aside from the centrality of police violence in narratives of black protest, I am struck too by the prominent leaders in the movement who find themselves repeatedly jailed during this period: Martin, Malcolm, Bayard, Diane, Fannie, Rosa, Huey, Stokely, H. Rap, James Farmer, John Lewis… The list is so long as to seem interminable. In fact, Malcolm makes the point in a speech that:

“You can’t be a negro in America and not have a criminal record. Martin Luther King has been to jail. James Farmer has been to jail. Why you can’t name a black man in this country who is sick and tired of the hell that he’s catching who hasn’t been to jail.”

It’s important to say that Malcolm went to prison for criminal activities as a young man. He experienced his incarceration as oppressive and was radicalized by the experience. He was not, however, a political prisoner. While some of the Panthers were imprisoned for political reasons, others were incarcerated for criminal activities ranging from fraud, robbery to sexual violence. These experiences of incarceration were qualitatively different from the direct action and intentional strategy used by Dr. King and other black activists to dramatize the injustice that black people experienced daily.

Henry David Thoreau is credited with having said that: “In an unjust state the only place for a man is in jail.” Bayard Rustin reinterpreted that concept and wrote that “it is an honor to face jail for a just cause.” Dr. King embodied this idea in his repeated trips to jail from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. In his famous “Letter from A Birmingham Jail,” he wrote:

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

This is not to say that Dr. King enjoyed the experience of being locked up. Quite the contrary. In fact, I have written previously about Dr. King’s fear of solitary confinement. For King, Parks, and the young people from SNCC and CORE, going to jail was about civil disobedience. It was a strategy for gaining public support for the cause. For King, it was critical that his direct action be nonviolent in nature even when he was met with violence. This enraged other black activists including Malcolm X who frustrated by the images of police violence against peaceful protestors in Birmingham uttered the following words in his famous speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet:”

Whenever you demonstrate against segregation…the law is on your side, and anyone who stands in the way is not the law any longer. They are breaking the law, they are not the representatives of the law. Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I’m telling you, kill that dog. I say it, if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill—that—dog. Then you’ll put a stop to it. Now, if these white people in here don’t want to see that kind of action, get down and tell the mayor to tell the police department to pull the dogs in.

I am thinking more deeply about all of these cross-currents in the history of the modern black freedom movement. I am left with a couple of over-arching questions: 1. How did the centrality of the carceral experience impact our community during that period? 2. What is different today in the era of hyper/mass incarceration?

As I continue to read, think and learn more, I hope to develop some satisfactory answers to these questions. It is a work in progress…