I own the photograph below depicting a Michigan prisoner in 1981. For several years now, I have collected original press photos depicting various forms of resistance (especially resistance against the carceral state). This original photo comes from the archives of the Detroit News which covered the “1981 Jackson Prison Riot.” The photograph speaks for itself and does not need any commentary from me.

On this 4th of July, I am thinking a lot about the concepts of “freedom” and “abolition.” If you don’t usually do so, please take a moment on this day to read Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” If you don’t want to read the entire speech, though I really think that you should, here is a great essay by Kai Wright about the meaning(s) of the speech for all Americans.

Today I think of Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist in his time, and wonder what he would have to say about our current prison industrial complex. I don’t have to imagine too much. Here are some key words from the 1852 speech that can easily be applied to our current mass incarceration epidemic:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

Millions of our brothers and sisters are currently locked in cages all across our country. We must create a new abolition movement for the 21st century. I believe that Douglass were he alive today would be leading this charge. We should be asking today: What, to the American prisoner, is your 4th of July? Quoting again from the speech:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Consider these words, though written against slavery, to be an equally appropriate indictment of our current practice of incarcerating masses of black and brown bodies. I leave you with the words of the great Bob Dylan today from his amazing song “George Jackson.” These lyrics, I believe, define the stakes for our current prison abolition struggle:

“Sometimes I think this whole world
is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.”