They Will Be Coming for Us Tonight: Letters
by James Baldwin and Angela Y. Davis, with
an introduction by Laura Preston
Angela Y. Davis awaiting the arrival of a judge in Marin County Court, San Rafael, California,
December 23, 1970
Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist,
academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of
Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at
Brandeis University, she also studied in Paris and Frankfurt
before earning a master’s degree from the University of
California, San Diego, and a doctorate in philosophy from
Humboldt University in East Berlin. In 1969, Davis became an
assistant professor in the philosophy department at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), but was soon
fired due to her membership in the Communist Party USA and
her association with the Black Panthers. It was because of her
relationship with the latter that she would quickly find herself
a political prisoner. In 1970, an attempt at a California
courthouse by a young man, Jonathan Jackson, to free the
Soledad Brothers (three African-American inmates at Soledad
State Prison in California accused of killing a prison guard)
resulted in three men and a judge being shot dead. Davis was
prosecuted for conspiracy and jailed for some eighteen
months before being acquitted in a federal trial.
During her time in prison, Davis wrote. She wrote of political
injustice in the United States and of the structural racism of
the American judicial system, which typecasts blackness and
renders the political act “criminal.” Her critical resistance is
addressed in an open letter from the Marin County Jail in May
1971, reprinted here. The prison letter is a marginalized genre
of literature that is both document and personal memoir, and
a means of keeping politicized while institutionalized. Fueled
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by necessity (raw ink to paper), the prison letter speaks to the
painful truth of an embodied state of captivity and, beyond, to
the systemic and oppressive factors that lead one to be
imprisoned. It may be penned with uncompromising
honesty—for what else is there to lose?
It also encourages public exchange. Davis’s address is
introduced here by James Baldwin’s open letter to her of 1970,
at a time when “one glance at the American leaders (or
figureheads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute
chaos”; an observation that could also have been written
today. Baldwin, the inimitable writer and activist, was twenty
years older than Davis. His relentless, brilliant wit charted the
way for a revolution in black consciousness in America. Yet he
found it necessary to do so at a distance, living most of his
adult life outside the United States, writing from Paris and
Istanbul, spending time in the U.K. and Germany. His letter to
Davis in prison was sent in solidarity and in respect for her
actions as well as her assessment and absorption of civil rights
histories. It was intended for others to read, as were the “one
million roses,” a youth-led campaign of postcards sent to
Davis from East Germany, from behind another wall, which
mobilized support for those that make up the “other America.”
In the late 1990s, Davis cofounded Critical Resistance, an
organization that works to focus social awareness on the
prison-industrial complex. She argues, persuasively, that the
prison system in the United States is a form of slavery, where
“criminality and deviance are racialized. Surveillance is thus
focused on communities of color, immigrants, the
unemployed, the undereducated, the homeless, and in general
on those who have a diminishing claim to social resources.
Their claim to social resources continues to diminish in large
part because law enforcement and penal measures
increasingly devour these resources.”* In the United States, as
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elsewhere, prisons have become big business, following the
trend of privatizing state-owned enterprise. Today more than
two million people are imprisoned in the United States, with
African-Americans incarcerated at a rate five times that of
whites; in five states, mostly southern, the disparity is more
than ten to one. The statistics are stark, and so is the
knowledge that a capitalist economy requires social
inequality—the prison extends beyond the penitentiary.
As Davis writes, “The prison is a key component of the state’s
coercive apparatus, the overriding function of which is to
ensure social control.” And this control is dictated by profit,
the control of criticality, language too. She writes from
example, using historical events and case studies to determine
a lucid prose that confronts the realities of racism as
institutional, and not simply as individual acts of attitudinal
bias. Nor is her letter narrowly focused on her own
circumstances or bound to its time. Indeed, her words of 1971
seem not far removed from our situation today. Davis wrote
then of the severe social crisis taking place and the need to
identify the incipient phases of the fascist, economically
driven network of oppression. Contemporary movements like
Black Lives Matter and its loose confederation inside and
outside the United States, and the words and deeds of political
prisoners worldwide, reveal, once again, this urgency. Her
letter, Baldwin’s too, reminds us of lessons left unlearned,
offering cross-generational affirmation that the pivotal
struggle, the place to begin, is in an “open, unreserved battle
against entrenched racism.”
—Laura Preston
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An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis
by James Baldwin
Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of
chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so
intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable
a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up
and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in
their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure
their safety in chains and corpses. And so, Newsweek, civilized
defender of the indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of
crocodile tears (“it remained to be seen what sort of personal
liberation she had achieved”) and puts you on its cover,
chained.
You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish
housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of
our ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed
for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only
criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I
can, here in Europe, on radio and television—in fact, have just
returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by
a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on
the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an
exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide.
I am something like twenty years older than you, of that
generation, therefore, of which George Jackson ventures that
“there are no healthy brothers—none at all.” I am in no way
equipped to dispute this speculation (not, anyway, without
descending into what, at the moment, would be irrelevant
subtleties) for I know too well what he means.
My own state of health is certainly precarious enough. In
considering you, and Huey, and George and (especially)
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Jonathan Jackson, I began to apprehend what you may have
had in mind when you spoke of the uses to which we could put
the experience of the slave. What has happened, it seems to
me, and to put it far too simply, is that a whole new generation
of people have assessed and absorbed their history, and, in
that tremendous action, have freed themselves of it and will
never be victims again. This may seem an odd, indefensibly
impertinent and insensitive thing to say to a sister in prison,
battling for her life—for all our lives. Yet, I dare to say it, for I
think that you will perhaps not misunderstand me, and I do
not say it, after all, from the position of a spectator.
I am trying to suggest that you—for example—do not
appear to be your father’s daughter in the same way that I am
my father’s son. At bottom, my father’s expectations and mine
were the same, the expectations of his generation and mine
were the same; and neither the immense difference in our ages
nor the move from the South to the North could alter these
expectations or make our lives more viable. For, in fact, to use
the brutal parlance of that hour, the interior language of that
despair, he was just a nigger—a nigger laborer preacher, and
so was I. I jumped the track but that’s of no more importance
here, in itself, than the fact that some poor Spaniards become
rich bull fighters, or that some poor Black boys become rich—
boxers, for example. That’s rarely, if ever, afforded the people
more than a great emotional catharsis, though I don’t mean to
be condescending about that, either. But when Cassius Clay
became Muhammad Ali and refused to put on that uniform
(and sacrificed all that money!) a very different impact was
made on the people and a very different kind of instruction
had begun.
The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has
always been implicit—was to make Black people despise
themselves. When I was little I despised myself; I did not
5
know any better. And this meant, albeit unconsciously, or
against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my
father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black
people were killing each other every Saturday night out on
Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained
to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that
they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that
they should consider themselves no better than animals.
Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it:
and so one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be
treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors
came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation—
this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so
little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in
time to help you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than can
speedily be perceived and in all of this—groaning and
moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and
outwitting, some tremendous strength was nevertheless being
forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that particular
aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is
out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has
frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, “to life,” but
that is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced
people still cowering in their wagon trains and singing
“Onward Christian Soldiers.” The nation, if America is a
nation, is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day
which the Americans never expected or desired to see,
however piously they may declare their belief in progress and
democracy. Those words, now, on American lips, have become
a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people,
strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted
with the algebra of their history.
6
One way of gauging a nation’s health, or of discerning
what it really considers to be its interests—or to what extent it
can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition
of special interests—is to examine those people it elects to
represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or
figureheads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute
chaos, and also suggests the future to which American
interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear
willing to consign the Blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past
conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal)
countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon,
Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of
the Kings’ Row basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will
not hesitate for an instant to carry out what they insist is the
will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for
the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they
may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the
above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces
responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the
people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an
ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly
cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy
which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and
Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this
(though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger
for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take
refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to
walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow
millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be
manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will
think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long
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as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between
themselves and their own experience and the experience of
others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently
worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their
leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will
perish (as we once put it in our Black church) in their sins—
that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to
say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place
are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for
George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our
concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate
which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces
which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black
ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white
American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people
are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the
redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own
children, we, the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western
children, can expect very little help at their hands; which, after
all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a
war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is
not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is
not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites
are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows
we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and
save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic selfcontempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to
contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our
fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the
world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be
placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water
belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We
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know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be
the instrument of someone else’s profit. We know that
democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—
and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire
to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks,
have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is
greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this
system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know
that the system is doomed because the world can no longer
afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for
the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly
brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about
ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life,
and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which
has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the
beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black,
know how great a price has already been paid to bring into
existence a new consciousness, a new people, an
unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are
worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it
were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our
bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in
the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Brother James
November 19, 1970
Political Prisoners, Prisons and Black Liberation
by Angela Y. Davis
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Despite a long history of exalted appeals to man’s inherent
right of resistance, there has seldom been agreement on how
to relate in practice to unjust, immoral laws and the oppressive
social order from which they emanate. The conservative, who
does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in
history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to
legitimize his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order,
with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The
liberal articulates his sensitiveness to certain of society’s
intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of
resistance which exceed the limits of legality—redress through
electoral channels is the liberal’s panacea.
In the heat of our pursuit for fundamental human rights,
Black people have been continually cautioned to be patient.
We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to
the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will
eventually arrive when we will come into our own as fullfledged human beings.
But having been taught by bitter experience, we know that
there is a glaring incongruity between democracy and the
capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless
of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate
matrix of the laws and the system which govern them—
certainly not Black people and other nationally oppressed
people, but not even the mass of whites. The people do not
exercise decisive control over the determining factors of their
lives.
Official assertions that meaningful dissent is always
welcome, provided it falls within the boundaries of legality,
are frequently a smoke screen obscuring the invitation to
acquiesce in oppression. Slavery may have been unrighteous,
the constitutional provision for the enslavement of Blacks may
have been unjust, but conditions were not to be considered so
unbearable (especially since they were profitable to a small
10
circle) as to justify escape and other acts proscribed by law.
This was the import of the fugitive slave laws.
Needless to say, the history of the United States has been
marred from its inception by an enormous quantity of unjust
laws, far too many expressly bolstering the oppression of
Black people. Particularized reflections of existing social
inequities, these laws have repeatedly borne witness to the
exploitative and racist core of the society itself. For Blacks,
Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed people, the problem of
opposing unjust laws and the social conditions which nourish
their growth, has always had immediate practical
implications. Our very survival has frequently been a direct
function of our skill in forging effective channels of resistance.
In resisting, we have sometimes been compelled to openly
violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our
oppression. But even when containing our resistance within
the orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have
been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.
Under the ruthless conditions of slavery, the
Underground Railroad provided the framework for extra-legal
anti-slavery activity pursued by vast numbers of people, both
Black and white. Its functioning was in flagrant violation of
the fugitive slave laws; those who were apprehended were
subjected to severe penalties. Of the innumerable recorded
attempts to rescue fugitive slaves from the clutches of slavecatchers, one of the most striking is the case of Anthony
Burns, a slave from Virginia, captured in Boston in 1853. A
team of his supporters, in attempting to rescue him by force
during the course of his trial, engaged the police in a fierce
courtroom battle. During the gun fight a prominent
abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was wounded.
Although the rescuers were unsuccessful in their efforts, the
impact of this incident “… did more to crystallize Northern
sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of
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John Brown, ‘and this was the last time a fugitive slave was
taken from Boston. It took 22 companies of state militia, four
platoons of marines, a battalion of United States artillerymen,
and the city’s police force … to ensure the performance of this
shameful act, the cost of which, to the Federal government
alone, came to forty thousand dollars.’” 1
Throughout the era of slavery, Blacks as well as
progressive whites recurrently discovered that their
commitment to the antislavery cause frequently entailed the
overt violation of the laws of the land. Even as slavery faded
away into a more subtle yet equally pernicious apparatus to
dominate Black people, “illegal“ resistance was still on the
agenda. After the Civil War, the Black Codes, successors to the
old slave codes, legalized convict labor, prohibited social
intercourse between Blacks and whites, gave white employers
an excessive degree of control over the private lives of Black
workers, and generally codified racism and terror. Naturally,
numerous individual as well as collective acts of resistance
prevailed. On many occasions, Blacks formed armed teams to
protect themselves from white terrorists who were, in turn,
protected by law enforcement agencies, if not actually
identical with them.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the mass
movement, headed by Marcus Garvey, proclaimed in its
Declaration of Rights that Black people should not hesitate to
disobey all discriminatory laws. Moreover, the Declaration
announced, they should utilize all means available to them,
legal or illegal, to defend themselves from legalized terror as
well as Ku Klux Klan violence. During the era of intense
activity around civil rights issues, systematic disobedience of
oppressive laws was a primary tactic. The sit-ins were
organized transgressions of racist legislation.
All these historical instances involving the overt violation
of the laws of the land converge around an unmistakable
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common denominator. At stake has been the collective welfare
and survival of a people. There is a distinct and qualitative
difference between one breaking a law for one’s own
individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a
class or a people whose oppression is expressed either directly
or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be
called a criminal (though in many instances he is a victim),
but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in
universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political
prisoner.
The political prisoner’s words or deeds have in one form or
another embodied political protests against the established
order and have consequently brought him into acute conflict
with the state. In light of the political content of his act, the
“crime” (which may or may not have been committed)
assumes a minor importance. In this country, however, where
the special category of political prisoners is not officially
acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for
a specific criminal offense, not for a political act. Often the socalled crime does not even have a nominal existence. As in the
1914 murder frame-up of the IWW organizer, Joe Hill, it is a
blatant fabrication, a mere excuse for silencing a militant
crusader against oppression. In all instances, however, the
political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which
prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of
exploitation and racism. This unwritten law has been
contested by actually and explicitly breaking a law or by
utilizing constitutionally protected channels to educate,
agitate and organize the masses to resist.
A deep-seated ambivalence has always characterized the
official response to the political prisoner. Charged and tried
for a criminal act, his guilt is always political in nature. This
ambivalence is perhaps best captured by Judge Webster
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Thayer’s comment upon sentencing Bartolomeo Vanzetti to 15
years for an attempted payroll robbery: “This man, although
he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to
him, is never-theless morally culpable, because he is the
enemy of our existing institutions.” 2 (The very same judge
incidentally, sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death for a
robbery and murder of which they were manifestly innocent.)
It is not surprising that Nazi Germany’s foremost
constitutional lawyer, Carl Schmitt, advanced a theory which
generalized this a priori culpability. A thief, for example, was
not necessarily one who has committed an overt act of theft,
but rather one whose character renders him a thief (wer nach
seinem wesen ein Dieb ist). Nixon’s and J. Edgar Hoover’s
pronouncements lead one to believe that they would readily
accept Schmitt’s fascist legal theory. Anyone who seeks to
overthrow oppressive institutions, whether or not he has
engaged in an overt illegal act, is a priori a criminal who must
be buried away in one of America’s dungeons.
Even in all Martin Luther King’s numerous arrests, he
was not so much charged with the nominal crimes of
trespassing, disturbance of the peace, etc., but rather with
being an enemy of Southern society, an inveterate foe of
racism. When Robert Williams was accused of a kidnapping,
this charge never managed to conceal his real offense—the
advocacy of Black people’s incontestable right to bear arms in
their own defense.
The offense of the political prisoner is his political
boldness, his persistent challenging—legally or extra-legally—
of fundamental social wrongs fostered and reinforced by the
state. He has opposed unjust laws and exploitative, racist
social conditions in general, with the ultimate aim of
transforming these laws and this society into an order
harmonious with the material and spiritual needs and
interests of the vast majority of its members.
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Nat Turner and John Brown were political prisoners in
their time. The acts for which they were charged and
subsequently hanged, were the practical extensions of their
profound commitment to the abolition of slavery. They
fearlessly bore the responsibility for their actions. The
significance of their executions and the accompanying
widespread repression did not lie so much in the fact that they
were being punished for specific crimes, nor even in the effort
to use their punishment as an implicit threat to deter others
from similar armed acts of resistance. These executions and
the surrounding repression of slaves were intended to
terrorize the anti-slavery movement in general; to discourage
and diminish both legal and illegal forms of abolitionist
activity. As usual, the effect of repression was miscalculated
and, in both instances, anti-slavery activity was accelerated
and intensified as a result.
Nat Turner and John Brown can be viewed as examples of
the political prisoner who has actually committed an act which
is defined by the state as “criminal.” They killed and were
consequently tried for murder. But did they commit murder?
This raises the question of whether American revolutionaries
had murdered the British in their struggle for liberation. Nat
Turner and his followers killed some 65 white people, yet
shortly before the Revolt had begun, Nat is reputed to have
said to the other rebelling slaves: “Remember that ours is not
war for robbery nor to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for
freedom. Ours must be deeds not words.” 3
The very institutions which condemned Nat Turner and
reduced his struggle for freedom to a simple criminal case of
murder, owed their existence to the decision, made a half
century earlier, to take up arms against the British oppressor.
The battle for the liquidation of slavery had no legitimate
existence in the eyes of the government and therefore the
special quality of deeds carried out in the interests of freedom
15
was deliberately ignored. There were no political prisoners,
there were only criminals; just as the movement out of which
these deeds flowed was largely considered criminal.
Likewise, the significance of activities which are pursued
in the interests of liberation today is minimized not so much
because officials are unable to see the collective surge against
oppression, but because they have consciously set out to
subvert such movements. In the Spring of 1970, Los Angeles
Panthers took up arms to defend themselves from an assault
initiated by the local police force on their office and on their
persons. They were charged with criminal assault. If one
believed the official propaganda, they were bandits and rogues
who pathologically found pleasure in attacking policemen. It
was not mentioned that their community activities—
educational work, services such as free breakfast and free
medical programs—which had legitimized them in the Black
community, were the immediate reason for which the wrath of
the police had fallen upon them. In defending themselves
from the attack waged by some 600 policemen (there were
only 11 Panthers in the office) they were not only defending
their lives, but even more important their accomplishments in
the Black community surrounding them and in the broader
thrust for Black Liberation. Whenever Blacks in struggle have
recourse to self-defense, particularly armed self-defense, it is
twisted and distorted on official levels and ultimately
rendered synonymous with criminal aggression. On the other
hand, when policemen are clearly indulging in acts of criminal
aggression, officially they are defending themselves through
“justifiable assault“ or “justifiable homicide.“
The ideological acrobatics characteristic of official
attempts to explain away the existence of the political prisoner
do not end with the equation of the individual political act
with the individual criminal act. The political act is defined as
criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary
16
movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in
order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing
order. In a revealing contradiction, the court resisted the
description of the New York Panther 21 trial as “political,“ yet
the prosecutor entered as evidence of criminal intent,
literature which represented, so he purported, the political
ideology of the Black Panther Party.
The legal apparatus designates the Black liberation fighter
a criminal, prompting Nixon, Agnew, Reagan et al. to proceed
to mystify with their demagogy millions of Americans whose
senses have been dulled and whose critical powers have been
eroded by the continual onslaught of racist ideology.
As the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive
struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial
system and its extension, the penal system, consequently
become key weapons in the state’s fight to preserve the
existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism,
poverty and war.
In 1951, W. E. B. Du Bois as Chairman of the Peace
Information Center, was indicted by the Federal government
for “failure to register as an agent of a foreign principle.” In
assessing this ordeal which occurred in the ninth decade of his
life, he turned his attention to the inhabitants of the nation’s
jails and prisons:
What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainty that
thousands of innocent victims are in jail today because they
had neither money nor friends to help them. The eyes of the
world were on our trial despite the desperate efforts of press
and radio to suppress the facts and cloud the real issues; the
courage and money of friends and of strangers who dared
stand for a principle freed me; but God only knows how many
who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell.
They daily stagger out of prison doors embittered, vengeful,
17
hopeless, ruined. And of this army of the wronged, the
proportion of Negroes is frightful. We protect and defend
sensational cases where Negroes are involved. But the great
mass of arrested or accused Black folk have no defense. There
is desperate need of nationwide organizations to oppose this
national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the
poor, friendless and Black. 4
Almost two decades passed before the realization attained by
Du Bois on the occasion of his own encounter with the judicial
system achieved extensive acceptance. A number of factors
have combined to transform the penal system into a
prominent terrain of struggle, both for the captives inside and
the masses outside. The impact of large numbers of political
prisoners both on prison populations and on the mass
movement has been decisive. The vast majority of political
prisoners have not allowed the fact of imprisonment to curtail
their educational, agitational and organizing activities, which
they continue behind prison walls. And in the course of
developing mass movements around political prisoners, a
great deal of attention has inevitably been focused on the
institutions in which they are imprisoned. Furthermore the
political receptivity of prisoners—especially Black and Brown
captives—has been increased and sharpened by the surge of
aggressive political activity rising out of Black, Chicano and
other oppressed communities. Finally, a major catalyst for
intensified political action in and around prisons has emerged
out of the transformation of convicts, originally found guilty of
criminal offenses, into exemplary political militants. Their
patient educational efforts in the realm of exposing the
specific oppressive structures of the penal system in their
relation to the larger oppression of the social system have had
a profound effect on their fellow captives.
The prison is a key component of the state’s coercive
apparatus, the overriding function of which is to ensure social
18
control. The etymology of the term “penitentiary” furnishes a
clue to the controlling idea behind the “prison system” at its
inception. The penitentiary was projected as the locale for
doing penitence for an offense against society, the physical
and spiritual purging of proclivities to challenge rules and
regulations which command total obedience. While cloaking
itself with the bourgeois aura of universality—imprisonment
was supposed to cut across all class lines, as crimes were to be
defined by the act, not the perpetrator—the prison has actually
operated as an instrument of class domination, a means of
prohibiting the have-nots from encroaching upon the haves.
The occurrence of crime is inevitable in a society in which
wealth is unequally distributed, as one of the constant
reminders that society’s productive forces are being channeled
in the wrong direction. The majority of criminal offenses bear
a direct relationship to property. Contained in the very
concept of property crimes are profound but suppressed social
needs which express themselves in antisocial modes of action.
Spontaneously produced by a capitalist organization of
society, this type of crime is at once a protest against society
and a desire to partake of its exploitative content. It challenges
the symptoms of capitalism, but not its essence.
Some Marxists in recent years have tended to banish
“criminals” and the lumpenproletariat as a whole from the
arena of revolutionary struggle. Apart from the absence of any
link binding the criminal to the means of production,
underlying this exclusion has been the assumption that
individuals who have recourse to antisocial acts are incapable
of developing the discipline and collective orientation required
by revolutionary struggle.
With the declassed character of lumpenproletarians in
mind, Marx had stated that they are as capable of “the most
heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest
banditry and the dirtiest corruption.” 5 He emphasized the fact
19
that the Provisional Government’s Mobile Guards under the
Paris Commune—some 24,000 troops—were largely formed
out of young lumpenproletarians from 15 to 20 years of age.
Too many Marxists have been inclined to overvalue the second
part of Marx’s observation—that the lumpenproletariat is
capable of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption—
while minimizing or indeed totally disregarding his first
remark, applauding the lumpen for their heroic deeds and
exalted sacrifices.
Especially today when so many Black, Chicano, and
Puerto Rican men and women are jobless as a consequence of
the internal dynamic of the capitalist system, the role of the
unemployed, which includes the lumpenproletariat, in
revolutionary struggle must be given serious thought.
Increased unemployment, particularly for the nationally
oppressed, will continue to be an inevitable by-product of
technological development. At least 30 percent of Black youth
are presently without jobs. In the context of class exploitation
and national oppression, it should be clear that numerous
individuals are compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a
result of conscious choice—implying other alternatives—but
because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of
subsistence and survival to this level. This recognition should
signal the urgent need to organize the unemployed and
lumpenproletariat, as indeed the Black Panther Party as well
as activists in prison have already begun to do.
In evaluating the susceptibility of the Black and Brown
unemployed to organizing efforts, the peculiar historical
features of the United States, specifically racism and national
oppression, must be taken into account. There already exists
in the Black and Brown communities, the lumpenproletariat
included, a long tradition of collective resistance to national
oppression.
Moreover, in assessing the revolutionary potential of
20
prisoners in America as a group, it should be borne in mind
that not all prisoners have actually committed crimes. The
built-in racism of the judicial system expresses itself, as Du
Bois has suggested, in the railroading of countless innocent
Blacks and other national minorities into the country’s
coercive institutions.
One must also appreciate the effects of disproportionally
long prison terms on Black and Brown inmates. The typical
criminal mentality sees imprisonment as a calculated risk for a
particular criminal act. One’s prison term is more or less
rationally predictable. The function of racism in the judicialpenal complex is to shatter that predictability. The Black
burglar, anticipating a 2- to 4-year term may end up doing 10
to 15 years, while the white burglar leaves after two years.
Within the contained, coercive universe of the prison, the
captive is confronted with the realities of racism, not simply as
individual acts dictated by attitudinal bias; rather he is
compelled to come to grips with racism as an institutional
phenomenon collectively experienced by the victims. The
disproportionate representation of the Black and Brown
communities, the manifest racism of parole boards, the
intense brutality inherent in the relationship between prison
guards and Black and Brown inmates—all this and more cause
the prisoner to be confronted daily, hourly, with the
concentrated, systematic existence of racism.
For the innocent prisoner, the process of radicalization
should come easy; for the “guilty’’ victim, the insight into the
nature of racism as it manifests itself in the judicial-penal
complex can lead to a questioning of his own past criminal
activity and a re-evaluation of the methods he has used to
survive in a racist and exploitative society. Needless to say,
this process is not automatic, it does not occur spontaneously.
The persistent educational work carried out by the prison’s
political activists plays a key role in developing the political
21
potential of captive men and women.
Prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos, and Puerto
Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they
are political prisoners. They contend that they are political
prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an
oppressive politico-economic order, swiftly becoming
conscious of the causes underlying their victimization. The
Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and AntiOppression Platform attests to a lucid understanding of the
structures of oppression within the prison—structures which
contradict even the avowed function of the penal institution:
“The program we are submitted to, under the ridiculous title
of rehabilitation, is relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring
water on the drowning man, in as much as we are treated for
our hostilities by our program administrators with their
hostility as medication.” The Manifesto also reflects an
awareness that the severe social crisis taking place in this
country, predicated in part on the ever-increasing mass
consciousness of deepening social contradictions, is forcing
the political function of the prisons to surface in all its
brutality. Their contention that prisons are being transformed
into the “fascist concentration camps of modern America,”
should not be taken lightly, although it would be erroneous as
well as defeatist in a practical sense, to maintain that fascism
has irremediably established itself.
The point is this, and this is the truth which is apparent in
the Manifesto: The ruling circles of America are expanding
and intensifying repressive measures designed to nip
revolutionary movements in the bud as well as to curtail
radical democratic tendencies, such as the movement to end
the war in Indo-China. The government is not hesitating to
utilize an entire network of fascist tactics, including the
monitoring of congressmen’s telephone calls, a system of
“preventive fascism,” as Marcuse has termed it, in which the
22
role of the judicial and penal systems loom large. The sharp
edge of political repression, cutting through the heightened
militancy of the masses, and bringing growing numbers of
activists behind prison walls, must necessarily pour over into
the contained world of the prison where it understandably
acquires far more ruthless forms.
It is a relatively easy matter to persecute the captive
whose life is already dominated by a network of authoritarian
mechanisms. This is especially facilitated by the indeterminate
sentence policies of many states, for politically conscious
prisoners will incur inordinately long sentences on their
original conviction. According to Louis S. Nelson, warden of
San Quentin Prison, “... if the prisons of California become
known as ‘schools for violent revolution,’ the Adult Authority
would be remiss in their duty not to keep the inmates longer”
(S. F. Chronicle, May 2, 1971). Where this is deemed
inadequate, authorities have recourse to the whole spectrum
of brutal corporal punishment, including out and out murder.
At San Quentin, Fred Billingslea was teargassed to death in
February, 1970. W. L. Nolen, Alvin Miller, and Cleveland
Edwards were assassinated by a prison guard in January, 1970
at Soledad Prison. Unusual and inexplicable suicides have
occurred with incredible regularity in jails and prisons
throughout the country.
It should be self-evident that the frame-up becomes a
powerful weapon within the spectrum of prison repression,
particularly because of the availability of informers, the
broken prisoners who will do anything for a price. The
Soledad Brothers and the Soledad 3 are leading examples of
frame-up victims. Both cases involve militant activists who
have been charged with killing Soledad prison guards. In both
cases, widespread support has been kindled within the
California prison system. They have served as occasions to
link the immediate needs of the Black community with a
23
forceful fight to break the fascist stronghold in the prisons and
therefore to abolish the prison system in its present form.
Racist oppression invades the lives of Black people on an
infinite variety of levels. Blacks are imprisoned in a world
where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out a decent
existence, if we are able to find jobs at all. When the economy
begins to falter, we are forever the first victims, always the
most deeply wounded. When the economy is on its feet, we
continue to live in a depressed state. Unemployment is
generally twice as high in the ghettos as it is in the country as
a whole and even higher among Black women and youth. The
unemployment rate among Black youth has presently
skyrocketed to 30 percent. If one-third of America’s white
youth were without a means of livelihood, we would either be
in the thick of revolution or else under the iron rule of fascism.
Substandard schools, medical care hardly fit for animals,
overpriced, dilapidated housing, a welfare system based on a
policy of skimpy concessions, designed to degrade and divide
(and even this may soon be cancelled)—this is only the
beginning of the list of props in the overall scenery of
oppression which, for the mass of Blacks, is the universe.
In Black communities, wherever they are located, there
exists an ever-present reminder that our universe must
remain stable in its drabness, its poverty, its brutality. From
Birmingham to Harlem to Watts, Black ghettos are occupied,
patrolled and often attacked by massive deployments of
police. The police, domestic caretakers of violence, are the
oppressor’s emissaries, charged with the task of containing us
within the boundaries of our oppression.
The announced function of the police, “to protect and
serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of
protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and
serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate
24
Blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are
powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are
frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder
human beings with little or no pretext, aside from the
universal intimidation they are charged with carrying out.
Protection for drug-pushers, and Mafia-style exploiters,
support for the most reactionary ideological elements of the
Black community (especially those who cry out for more
police), are among the many functions of forces of law and
order. They encircle the community with a shield of violence,
too often forcing the natural aggression of the Black
community inwards. Fanon’s analysis of the role of colonial
police is an appropriate description of the function of the
police in America’s ghettos.
It goes without saying that the police would be unable to
set into motion their racist machinery were they not
sanctioned and supported by the judicial system. The courts
not only consistently abstain from prosecuting criminal
behavior on the part of the police, but they convict, on the
basis of biased police testimony, countless Black men and
women. Court-appointed attorneys, acting in the twisted
interests of overcrowded courts, convince 85 percent of the
defendants to plead guilty. Even the manifestly innocent are
advised to cop a plea so that the lengthy and expensive process
of jury trials is avoided. This is the structure of the apparatus
which summarily railroads Black people into jails and prisons.
(During my imprisonment in the New York Women’s House of
Detention, I encountered numerous cases involving innocent
Black women who had been advised to plead guilty. One sister
had entered her white landlord’s apartment for the purpose of
paying rent. He attempted to rape her and in the course of the
ensuing struggle, a lit candle toppled over, burning a
tablecloth. The landlord ordered her arrested for arson.
Following the advice of her court-appointed attorney, she
25
entered a guilty plea, having been deceived by the attorney’s
insistence that the court would be more lenient. The sister was
sentenced to three years.)
The vicious circle linking poverty, police, courts and
prison is an integral element of ghetto existence. Unlike the
mass of whites, the path which leads to jails and prisons is
deeply rooted in the imposed patterns of Black existence. For
this very reason, an almost instinctive affinity binds the mass
of Black people to the political prisoners. The vast majority of
Blacks harbors a deep hatred of the police and are not deluded
by official proclamations of justice through the courts.
For the Black individual, contact with the lawenforcement-judicial-penal network directly or through
relatives and friends, is inevitable because he is Black. For the
activist become political prisoner, the contact has occurred
because he has lodged a protest, in one form or another,
against the conditions which nail Blacks to this orbit of
oppression.
Historically, Black people as a group have exhibited a
greater potential for resistance than any other part of the
population. The ironclad rule over our communities, the
institutional practice of genocide, the ideology of racism have
performed a strictly political as well as an economic function.
The capitalists have not only extracted superprofits from the
underpaid labor of over 15 percent of the American population
with the aid of a superstructure of terror. This terror and more
subtle forms of racism have further served to thwart the
flowering of a resistance, even a revolution which would
spread to the working class as a whole.
In the interests of the capitalist class, the consent to
racism and terror has been demagogically elicted from the
white population, workers included, in order to more
efficiently stave off resistance. Today, Nixon, Mitchell and J.
Edgar Hoover are desperately attempting to persuade the
26
population that dissidents, particularly Blacks, Chicanos,
Puerto Ricans, must be punished for being members of
revolutionary organizations; for advocating the overthrow of
the government; for agitating and educating in the streets and
behind prison walls. The political function of racist
domination is surfacing with accelerated intensity. Whites,
who have professed their solidarity with the Black Liberation
Movement and have moved in a distinctly revolutionary
direction, find themselves targets of the selfsame repression.
Even the anti-war movement, rapidly exhibiting an antiimperialist consciousness, is falling victim to government
repression.
Black people are rushing full speed ahead toward an
understanding of the circumstances which give rise to
exaggerated forms of political repression and thus an
overabundance of political prisoners. This understanding is
being forged out of the raw material of their own immediate
experiences with racism. Hence, the Black masses are growing
conscious of their responsibility to defend those who are being
persecuted for attempting to bring about the alleviation of the
most injurious immediate problems facing Black communities
and ultimately to bring about total liberation through armed
revolution, if it must come to this.
The Black Liberation Movement is presently at a critical
juncture. Fascist methods of repression threaten to physically
decapitate and obliterate the movement. More subtle, yet not
less dangerous ideological tendencies from within threaten to
isolate the Black movement and diminish its revolutionary
impact. Both menaces must be counteracted in order to ensure
our survival. Revolutionary Blacks must spearhead and
provide leadership for a broad anti-fascist movement.
Fascism is a process, its growth and development are
cancerous in nature. While today, the threat of fascism may be
primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement27
judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latentrevolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people,
tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and
eventually even moderate democrats. Even in this period,
however, the cancer has already commenced to spread. In
addition to the prison army of thousands and thousands of
nameless Third World victims of political revenge, there are
increasing numbers of white political prisoners—draft
resisters, anti-war activists such as the Harrisburg 8, men and
women who have involved themselves on all levels of
revolutionary activity.
Among the further symptoms of the fascist threat are
official efforts to curtail the power of organized labor, such as
the attack on the manifestly conservative construction workers
and the trends toward reduced welfare aid. Moreover, court
decisions and repressive legislation augmenting police powers
such as the Washington no-knock law, permitting police to
enter private dwellings without warning and Nixon’s “Crime
Bill” in general—can eventually be used against any citizen.
Indeed congressmen are already protesting the use of policestate wire-tapping to survey their activities. The fascist
content of the ruthless aggression in Indo-China should be
self-evident.
One of the fundamental historical lessons to be learned
from past failures to prevent the rise of fascism is the decisive
and indispensable character of the fight against fascism in its
incipient phases. Once allowed to conquer ground, its growth
is facilitated in geometric proportion. Although the most
unbridled expressions of the fascist menace are still tied to the
racist domination of Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians,
it lurks under the surface wherever there is potential
resistance to the power of monopoly capital, the parasitic
interests which control this society. Potentially it can
profoundly worsen the conditions of existence for the average
28
American citizen. Consequently, the masses of people in this
country have a real, direct and material stake in the struggle to
free political prisoners, the struggle to abolish the prison
system in its present form, the struggle against all dimensions
of racism.
No one should fail to take heed of Georgi Dimitrov’s
warning: “Whoever does not fight the growth of fascism at
these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the
victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory”
(Report to the Seventh Congress of the Communist
International, 1935). The only effective guarantee against the
victory of facism is an indivisible mass movement which
refuses to conduct business as usual as long as repression
rages on. It is only natural that Blacks and other Third World
peoples must lead this movement, for we are the first and
most deeply injured victims of fascism. But it must embrace
all potential victims and, most important, all working-class
people, for the key to the triumph of fascism is its ideological
victory over the entire working class. Given the eruption of a
severe economic crisis, the door to such an ideological victory
can be opened by the active approval or passive toleration of
racism. It is essential that white workers become conscious
that historically, through their acquiescence in the capitalistinspired oppression of Blacks, they have only rendered
themselves more vulnerable to attack.
The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of
the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle
against entrenched racism. The white worker must become
conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson,
Black autoworker, member of UAW, and a political prisoner
presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a
job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of
monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down
the very same path of desperation. No potential victim of the
29
fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the
greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!
Marin County Jail
May, 1971
Street scene with billboard in support of Angela Y. Davis, Cuba, early 1970s
* Angela Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex” Colorlines,
September 10, 1998. Online: www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-prisonindustrial-complex.
1 Herbert Aptheker quoted in William Z. Foster, The Negro People in American History (New
York: International Publishers, 1954), pp. 169–70.
2 Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The History of Class Violence in America (Gloucester, MA: Peter
Smith, 1963), p. 312.
3 Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 45.
According to Aptheker these are not Nat Turner’s exact words.
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International
Publishers,1968), p. 390.
5 Karl Marx, "The Class Struggle in France," in A Handbook of Marxism (New York:
International Publishers, 1935), p. 109.
30
Instructor: K. Magargal
“Enter the Conversation”
Esssay One Prompt
Overview: After reading and pondering on the letters from Baldwin and Davis, choose one of the letters
and prepare to break down the argument. Your main points should relate to the claims made in the letter.
Consider three or four claims for an essay of this size and choose based on ones you have a strong
opinion.
Purpose: There are two goals for this assignment: rhetorically analyze the evidence choices by the author
and to explore the arguments and spend some time “in conversation with the main points” made by the
author and how your beliefs and ideas fit into them. Consider how this assignment matters to the world
outside of our learning community. What do you think might be gained from interaction with the letter
you have choseb and its messages? Why do you feel more progress has not been made? Do you feel
progress has been made? If you are unsure of topics, lets brainstorm together
•
•
Body Paragraphs One and Two: will analyzie the argument, rhetorically.
o This allows us to consider why the author may made the choices he/she made in order to
convince their autdience.
Body Paragraphs Three and Four: will allow you the opportunity to engage in the content of
theletter. You are asked to enter the conversation and add your voice to the argument using two
outside sources to support your points. (no need for academic)
Task List (due dates are listed on Canvas under: Essay One Timeline and Handouts”
1. Read and choose one of the letters to explore
2. Consider three or four main points the author makes and take a stand – use textual eivdence from
the letter and the outside source to support your take on the claims
3. For paragraphs three and four please use two outside sources (popular – academic not necessary
for this paper)
4. Brainstorm: will allow you to flush out ideas and claims
5. Outside Source Discussion Board: this is a place to explain how you might use the outside
sources and share with the class (geat place to “borrow” a source you connect with). ☺
6. Outline and work cited: Begin mapping out the order of the claims and pull evidence that will be
used.
7. Introduction and two body paragraphs of draft for review: I will make some suggestions and
comments on this draft that may help with the writing process.
8. Final Draft: This is the only draft that earns a letter grade (all the above is prep)
Consider as you proceed:
Relate the claims made in the letter to our current aspect of society and include your opinions into the
conversation:
Consider in Baldwin’s Letter:
• American Triumph
• A Nation’s Health
• Will of the People
• Intended Fate
• Victims of the System
Instructor: K. Magargal
• Any others that stand out to you or are of interest to you
Consider in Davis’ Letter:
• Human Rights
• Democracy vs Capitalism
• Unjust Laws
• “Collective Welfare and Survival of a People”
• Political Prisoner
• Legal Apparatus
• Prison Complex
• Any others that stand out or are of interest to you
Criteria:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1000-1200 words
MLA format
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_f
ormatting_and_style_guide/mla_formatting_and_style_guide.html
Clear introduction and conclusion paragraphs)
Clear paragraph structure (will discuss in office hours and see handout in
Canvas, “Quotes.”
Use the letter of choice at least one time per main point/claim/topic
Present clear transitions between topics and evidence (See Transition
Handout)
Be creative with your active verbs (See Dazzle Verbs Handout)
Rubric:
10%
10%
10%
10%
10%
50%
Introduction and Conclusion
Grammar, Punctuation
Clear Thesis and Topic Sentences
MLA (in text and work cited)
Transitions between topics and sources
Paragraph Organization and Clarity of Argument
We will spend time looking at all this together via recorded discussions, Zoom office hours, and email
interactions.
Purchase answer to see full
attachment