Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar
Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual
history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in
the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In
doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as
much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting
rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots
coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the
carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It
captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and
Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has
come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns,
and racial liberalism.
By provocatively
documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim
communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim
organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the
contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively
researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political
struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and
used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This
history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the
courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition
builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file
activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account
is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and
police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black
communities during the mid-20th century.