A Continuous Struggle
The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.
A Continuous Struggle is a political biography of one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years.
Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Felber (Those Who Know Don't Say) offers a vibrant biography of Martin Sostre, whose legal battles established the constitutional rights of prisoners. Born to Afro–Puerto Rican parents in 1920s Harlem, Sostre spent a significant portion of his life in prison. During his first prison stint in the '60s, he became affiliated with the Nation of Islam—which prison administrators viewed as a "criminal Muslim organization"—and participated in lawsuits that established religious freedom for prisoners. Upon release, he founded a chain of radical bookstores in Buffalo that brought together disparate activist groups, including the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party and Students for a Democratic Society. When next incarcerated (as part of what was later revealed to be a COINTELPRO frame-up), he worked with these and other groups to form the Martin Sostre Defense Committee, which evolved into a network of autonomous groups around the country that agitated for freedom for political prisoners. Sostre also organized his fellow inmates in hunger strikes while facing down brutal retaliatory measures—he spent nearly five years in solitary confinement. Felber paints Sostre as a bold figure who embraced anarchism after growing frustrated with white radicals, rigid Marxist-Leninists, and the slow pace of mainstream organizations like the NAACP. This brings the revolutionary spirit of the '60s and '70s alive in fascinating detail.
