Records
Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's foundational text linking anarchism with Black liberation, written and revised across the late 1970s and 1980s while Ervin was a Black Panther Party-aligned political prisoner in U.S. federal custody following his hijacking conviction. Originally circulated as a movement pamphlet and republished in expanded book form (most recently by...
Assata: An Autobiography
Assata Shakur's 1987 autobiography (Lawrence Hill Books / Zed). Black Liberation Army member, former Black Panther Party member, convicted in 1977 of the May 2, 1973 killing of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster on the New Jersey Turnpike after a confrontation that left Assata wounded and fellow BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur dead. Sentenced to life in N...
Bits N Pieces, by Sundiata Acoli
Collected shorter writings, letters, and political statements of Sundiata Acoli — Black Liberation Army member and longtime political prisoner held by New Jersey state corrections from 1973 to 2022. Acoli was convicted in 1974 alongside Assata Shakur for the May 1973 New Jersey Turnpike incident that killed State Trooper Werner Foerster. He was released on p...
Can't Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S. — A Collection of Biographies
Biographical compendium of US political prisoners compiled and published by the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML) in 1985. Organized into sections on Native American, New Afrikan/Black, Puerto Rican, North American (white anti-imperialist), and Irish prisoners — including AIM defendants, Black Liberation Army and MOVE prisoners, FALN and Macheteros...
Coming of Age: A New Afrikan Revolutionary
Autobiographical and political writings of a New Afrikan revolutionary documenting the generation that came of age inside U.S. federal and state custody during the Black liberation prosecutions of the 1970s and 1980s. The text articulates the New Afrikan political identity — separate Black national consciousness, anti-imperialist commitment, prison-organizin...
Hauling Up the Morning / Izando la Mañana: Writings & Art by Political Prisoners & Prisoners of War in the U.S.
Bilingual (English/Spanish) anthology of writings and visual art by approximately 80 U.S.-held political prisoners and prisoners of war, edited by Tim Blunk and Raymond Luc Levasseur — themselves political prisoners at the time (the Resistance Conspiracy and Ohio 7 cases). Published in 1990 by Red Sea Press / Jacobin Books. The book opens with the declaratio...
Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion
2003 anthology (Rowman & Littlefield) edited by political philosopher Joy James. Collects essays, letters, and theoretical writings from incarcerated U.S. political prisoners across the Black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, American Indian Movement, white anti-imperialist, and Black-feminist generations — including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis, Georg...
Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners
900+ page omnibus edited by Matt Meyer and published by PM Press / Kersplebedeb in 2008, with a foreword by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and an afterword by Ashanti Alston. The single most comprehensive published anthology of statements, letters, prison writings, support-committee documents, and movement-historical essays on U.S. political prisoners — covering the...
On the Black Liberation Army
Movement-published reader on the Black Liberation Army — historical and theoretical writings on the BLA's formation, its political program, the trial cohort of its prisoners, and the post-1981 BLA-era prosecutions including the Brink's-1981 case that landed Mutulu Shakur, Marilyn Buck, Sekou Odinga, and others in federal custody. Compiled and distributed by...
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism — The Political Statement of the Weather Underground
1974 political statement of the Weather Underground Organization, produced clandestinely and distributed via the U.S. radical-left press during the group's underground period. The 156-page manifesto sets out the WUO's analysis of U.S. imperialism in the wake of Vietnam, the Watergate-era state-crisis, the Indochinese revolutions, the Black liberation movemen...
Revolutionary Suicide
Huey P. Newton's 1973 autobiography (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), written in part from inside the Alameda County Jail. Co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (Oakland, October 1966), Newton wrote the book during and after his 1968–1970 imprisonment on charges arising from the October 28, 1967 shooting that killed Oakland police officer John Fr...
The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States
Companion volume to Agents of Repression (1988). Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's 1990 South End Press compilation reproduces hundreds of pages of FBI COINTELPRO documents — released under FOIA — covering the Bureau's operations against the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the New Left and the anti-war...
Voice of the Voiceless: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Case-history and movement-statement collection on Mumia Abu-Jamal — journalist, former Black Panther Party member, longtime MOVE supporter, and U.S. political prisoner held by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania since 1981 on a conviction arising from the December 9, 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Combines case documents, trial-rec...
You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows (1969)
The founding political document of the Weather Underground Organization, presented at the June 18, 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) National Convention in Chicago by the faction that called itself the Revolutionary Youth Movement. Co-authored by Karen Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim...