I Cannot Submit to Injustices - by Martin Sostre (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Critical works by legendary Black radical and political prisoner Martin Sostre

I Cannot Submit to Injustices is a collection of works by Black Puerto Rican revolutionary Martin Sostre. As a founding figure of both the prison abolition movement and contemporary Black anarchism, Sostre's eminence as a political thinker and tireless activist continues to gain wider recognition.

These texts represent decades of Sostre's work as an agitator, teacher, and intellectual in the face of intense state repression, including years in solitary confinement as punishment for his activism. While in prison, Sostre established radical study groups and lending libraries, published several revolutionary newspapers, organized chapters of the Black Panther Party, and fought for the rights of incarcerated workers. A self-taught lawyer, Sostre's strategy was to struggle on the offensive, pressing legal battles that established the constitutional rights of prisoners and refusing to submit to body searches by guards he deemed state-sanctioned sexual assault, for which he was beaten nearly a dozen times. With never-before-published interviews and speeches alongside powerful essays reproduced for the first time since their original publication, this volume offers readers overdue access to Sostre's ideas about anarchism, armed struggle, and Black liberation in his own words.

A foreword by Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin (Anarchism and the Black Revolution), who was introduced to anarchism by Sostre while they were imprisoned together, in conversation with William C. Anderson (Nation on No Map), reflects on Martin Sostre's teachings on Black revolutionary organizing and on his enduring legacy in the Black radical tradition.

"If Attica fell to us in a matter of hours despite it being your most secure maximum security prison-fortress equipped with your latest repressive technology, so shall fall all your fortresses, inside and out. Revolutionary spirit conquers all obstacles." --Martin Sostre, "The New Prisoner" (1973)

Review Quotes

"Martin Sostre was a giant of a human being who did not allow the dehumanization of the penal slave system to deny his sense of purpose and humanity. As a jailhouse lawyer, I used many of the legal precedents he established fighting the penal system's dehumanizing practices. Long live the spirit of resistance of Martin Sostre!!!" --Jalil Muntaqim, former political prisoner and member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, and author of Escaping the Prism

"'What must a Black revolutionary do to command the allegiance of the militant Black youth? I believe I have the answer, ' sez Martin Sostre. His anarchist impulse in this collected works is definitely a road less traveled. That may be hauntingly so. Or a challenging reconsideration? For reading while Black organizing! Garrett Felber, fist-bump!" --Ashanti O. Alston, author of Anarchist Panther

"Martin Sostre's name was forgotten, as Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin notes in the foreword. Once the most famous political prisoners in the United States, he was, until recently, mostly unknown in activist and radical circles. Garrett Felber is part of a community of activist scholars that have fought against such erasures and made it their mission to amplify Sostre's ideas. Sostre was a man of action, and his ideas were collected in letters, some pamphlets, and interviews. I Cannot Submit to Injustices offers an archive of Sostre's political thought which was forged through his lived experiences and grassroots organizing. The writings collected in this book not only serve as a window into the mind of one of the forerunners of the Black anarchist tradition but also serve as a blueprint for liberation and abolition today, tomorrow, and always." --Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, author of The Lettered Barriada and Puerto Rico: A National History

"This volume could not arrive soon enough--we need Martin Sostre's wisdom and insight now more than ever. This collection brings Sostre's organizing inside and outside prison vividly to life, providing essential understanding of his contributions to contemporary Black anarchist, anticapitalist, and abolitionist thought. Because so little of Sostre's writing has been published, it took Garrett Felber's careful, dedicated labor to bring to light the important contributions of this pivotal figure from whom we have so much to learn." --Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid and Love in a F*cked-up World

About the Author

Martin Sostre (1923-2015) was a revolutionary anarchist political prisoner and one of the most successful jailhouse lawyers of the twentieth century, winning landmark cases over political censorship, solitary confinement, and the rights of prisoners to due process. Over the course of his life, Sostre was a radical bookseller, anti-rape organizer, youth mentor, teacher, and housing justice activist.

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre (AK Press 2025); Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (UNC Press 2020); and co-author of The Portable Malcolm X Reader with Manning Marable (Penguin 2013). Felber is a co-founder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is a writer, activist, and Black anarchist. He is a former member of SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and Concerned Citizens for Justice. Framed on weapons charges and for threatening the life of a Ku Klux Klan leader, Ervin escaped to Cuba in 1969 and later to Czechoslovakia. He was captured by the CIA in Eastern Europe and sentenced to life in prison in 1970 but was released after fifteen years. Ervin is the author of the landmark text Anarchism and the Black Revolution and co-host of the Black Autonomy Podcast.

William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has appeared in the Guardian, MTV, British Journal of Photography, Logic(s) Magazine, and Prism, where he's a monthly columnist. He is the author of The Nation on No Map (AK Press 2021) and co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018). He's also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast. His writings have been included in the anthologies Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend (Mariame Kaba 2014).