Those Who Know Don't Say - (Justice, Power, and Politics) by Garrett Felber (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this ... 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. 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"--

Book Synopsis

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. 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.

Review Quotes

"A vital contribution to scholarship on the [Nation of Islam], the carceral state, and the Black Freedom Movement. Felber insightfully links the expansion of the carceral state and movements seeking to dismantle it through his concept of the 'dialectics of discipline' . . . [which] provides an analytical tool by which to understand both carceral expansion and resistance."--New York History

"Essential. . . . Felber insists--rightly--on reading prisons and courts as 'sites of activism, ' where the legitimacy of the state was challenged, locating litigation alongside hunger strikes, sit-ins, takeovers of solitary confinement, street protests, and prison uprisings as acts of resistance within a broader Black Freedom struggle--acts to which the state responded, often with crushing force."--American Religion

"Felber . . . examines how the Nation of Islam, and its growth during the civil rights era, impacted prisons, policing, school desegregation, and voting rights. Drawing on history, law, sociology, and politics, Felber looks at how the Nation impacted the modern carceral state. . . . One can find many books on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but Felber's is valuable for its interdisciplinary approach to possible solutions for the carceral state in the 21st century."--CHOICE

"Felber's excellent book broadens scholars' view of the Black freedom movement--widening its cast of characters, expanding its sites of struggle--and collapses false dichotomies between civil rights and Black Power."--Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

"Felber's political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam centers the Nation in the US Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state, seeking to capture the ambiguous place of the Nation--and Black nationalist organizing more broadly--during an era which has come to be deï¬x81ned by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism."--Law and Social Inquiry

"Shows that police departments steeped in cultures of bigotry, and a judicial system that promotes punishment over rehabilitation, were harsh in responding to black protest movements, many of them led by the Nation of Islam. . . . An impressive academic investigation and an appealing contribution to black American history."--Foreword