Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

by Dan Berger

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469629797
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Series:	Justice, Power, and Politics
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dan Berger is assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Captive Nation is truly brilliant and innovative. This thoroughly researched book makes an important contribution to a number of historical and interdisciplinary fields. It is a well-written and well-researched exploration of the role prisoners played in global movements against racism. It will certainly assume its rightful place at the head of the line in the emerging field of prisoner rights and radicalism in the postwar United States.—Donna Murch, author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

'If prison walls could talk,' Dan Berger tells us, 'their stories would reveal profound and largely untapped reservoirs of politics and culture.' Captive Nation is a rich and systematic account of an inadequately understood front of the civil rights struggle: black prison organizers. Their theoretical and practical insights and activities shaped and were shaped by movement in the so-called free world against the giant triplets of racism, capitalism, and militarism. Berger leaves us with pressing questions for the United States now, where incarceration is far more intensive and extensive than at any time in history or anywhere on the planet.—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

No histories of post@–civil rights America can ignore this indispensable book.—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness

In this richly documented and powerfully told history, Dan Berger reveals how the seeds of mass incarceration were sown inside a larger war on black liberation movements.—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Editorial Reviews

Thanks to Dan Berger's illuminating book . . . we can no longer tell the history of the black freedom struggle—and the 20th-century United States more broadly—without taking into account the organizing tradition inside prisons.—Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation

Multidimensional analysis that takes into account feminist, queer, and multiethnic lenses.—Journal of American History

A provocative and compelling history of black activism in the US prison system." —CHOICE

Helps connect the broader scholarship on black freedom struggles with a largely taken for granted segment of the activist population, prisoners.—Journal of Social History

[An] impressive account of black prison activism.—Public Books

Demonstrates convincingly that historians in diverse areas and fields must reckon with [incarceration as a] defining feature of American life.—American Historical Review

Captive Nation is a bold reconsideration of the role of prisons and African-American prisoners spanning the southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s, Black Power and the New Left, and the Black Nationalist renaissance of the 1970s.—Against the Current

Dan Berger's analysis offers an opportunity to consider the ways that incarcerated African Americans, primarily during the 1970s, insisted that we consider the ways that prisons implicated state power in the production of racial inequality.—The Black Scholar

Berger undoubtedly achieves his overarching goal: to tell the story of the 'multifaceted rebellions that occurred in and through America's prisons.'—Punishment and Society

Finally affords the civil rights era the attention it deserves as a critical point on the historical arc of race and incarceration in America.—The Sixties

From the Publisher