Essential radical texts by enslaved, jailed, and imprisoned
Americans, edited by renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and
activist-scholar Jennifer Black.
“Martin
Luther King told us what he saw when he went to the mountaintop….But
there’s also the foot of the mountain, and there are also the
regions beneath the surface. I want to try to tell you a little
something about those regions.”–Angela Y. Davis
Beneath
the Mountain is a
reader’s guide for understanding the evolution of anti-prison
tenets. This essential core of primary texts provides an arc of
insurgent writings by dissidents and revolutionaries who experienced
incarceration and state terror first-hand. With contributions from
John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Crazy Horse, to Assata Shakur,
Malcolm X, and Leonard Peltier, it also includes a previously
unpublished communiqué from Angela Davis, written from jail at the
time when she was forging the anti-prison critique that has since
inspired a national movement.
Beneath
the Mountain offers a
record of the historic foundations for the contemporary abolition
movement. What emerges from these texts is an emancipatory vision
that inspires the work being done today, a vision centered on
organizing and solidarity as an antidote to repression. An invaluable
resource for readers on both sides of prison walls, this compendium
of resistance and hard-won vision will be essential to all who seek
to develop an abolitionist critique and to further an understanding
of the nature of repression and liberation.