[ONLINE] - Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say

Presented in partnership with Solid State Books.

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In Those Who Know Don’t Say, a 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, Those Who Know Don’t Say 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.

Speaker:

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

Moderator:

Theodore Johnson, @DrTedJ
2017 National Fellow, New America
Senior Fellow, Brennan Center for Justice

Please support our bookselling partner Solid State Books by purchasing a copy of Those Who Know Don't Say through this link. Thirty percent of each sale goes directly to support Solid State and independent bookstores across the country.