Join us in partnership with New America welcoming Garrett Felber and Ted Johnson discussing Felber’s book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, The Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State
In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.
By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.
About the Author:
Garrett Felber, @garrett_felber
Asst. Prof. of African American history, University of Mississippi
2021 Fellow, Hutchins Center
Author, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State
About the Moderator:
Theodore Johnson, @DrTedJ
2017 National Fellow, New America
Senior Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice
Theodore (Ted) R. Johnson is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. His work explores the role that race plays in electoral politics, issue framing, and disparities in policy outcomes. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Politico, among other publications.
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