Busboys Books Presents: We Are Not Slaves
Date and Time
Feb 25, 2020 6:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Feb 25, 2020 6:00 pm
450K
This event is FREE and open to the public. Books will be available in the bookstore for purchase. Full menu and bar will be served inside the event.
In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave planta tions. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change.
Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as “slaves of the state” and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.
Robert T. Chase is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University.
Kenneth Nealy is Legislative Director for the office of Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson.
Charlie Sullivan is founder and director of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE) National.
Mary Ellen Curtain is associate professor in the Department of American Studies at American University. She is the author of Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865-1900.
