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.