Captive Nation

Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

paperback, 424 pages

English language

Published Jan. 4, 2014 by University of North Carolina Press.

ISBN:
978-1-4696-2979-7
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4 stars (1 review)

In this pathbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux. Showing that the prison was a central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s through the 1980s, Berger traces the dynamic and dramatic history of this political struggle. The prison shaped the rise and spread of black activism, from civil rights demonstrators willfully risking arrests to the many current and former prisoners that built or joined organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Grounded in extensive research, Berger engagingly demonstrates that …

3 editions

Review of 'Captive Nation' on Goodreads

4 stars

Simultaneously a detailed history of George & Jonathan Jackson and Angela Davis, a wide-ranging overview of prison's central role in black national identity and resistance organizing of the 60s and 70s, and a strong case for the revolutionary marxist view of black power / black nationalist movements. Left in my head a lot of the powerful analogies these groups used to connect prison to the general black experience; between colonization and incarceration (in migration, resistance, nations-within-nations); with prison and judicial changes/legitimacy as Jim Crow laws receded and black-as-criminal took their place, both in black expressions of self-determination and white expressions of law-and-order. Berger ends on a strong discussion of state violence under neoliberalism and the state-empowering militarizing effects of attempting to achieve freedom through violence.

Subjects

  • Prisoners
  • Civil rights movements, united states
  • United states, race relations

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