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 such organizing made prison walls porous
and influenced generations of activists that followed.