Records
A Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant
A defendant support handbook from the Tilted Scales Collective written by experienced legal-support activists. The guide draws on the wisdom of dozens of people who have weathered trials and incarceration in political cases — covering pretrial decisions, plea negotiations, cooperation pressure, mental and physical health under indictment, family and communit...
Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement
Foundational 1988 movement history by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (South End Press). Documents the FBI's COINTELPRO and post-COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, drawing on Bureau records released under FOIA, court records, and movement testimony. Part I covers the FBI as political police, the COINTEL...
An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle
Sundiata Acoli's primary essay on the history of the New Afrikan Prison Movement — the political and organizational tradition of Black political prisoners in U.S. state and federal custody developed from the late 1960s onward. Covers the 1960s-1970s prison rebellions (Attica, San Quentin, Folsom), the BLA-era prisoner cohort, the founding of the Republic of...
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...
Arm the Spirit: A Woman's Journey Underground and Back — Diana Block (2009)
Memoir by Diana Block — a longtime PFOC member and one of the four women (with Donna Willmott, Claude Marks, and Robert McBride) who lived underground in the 1980s after being named as material witnesses in the 1986 Chicago grand jury investigating the FALN-PRO/PFOC alleged conspiracy to free Oscar López Rivera. The most detailed first-person account of PFOC...
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...
August Spies' Autobiography (1887)
Autobiography of August Spies — German-American anarchist, labor organizer, editor of the Chicago Arbeiter-Zeitung, and one of the Haymarket Martyrs hanged by the State of Illinois on November 11, 1887 for the May 4, 1886 Haymarket Affair bombing. Spies wrote the autobiography in his cell at the Cook County jail in 1887 prior to his execution, alongside the...
Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution — Arthur Eckstein (2016)
Arthur Eckstein's history of the Weather Underground, drawing heavily on FBI files. Covers the 1976 split and the emergence of PFOC, the May 19th Communist Organization, and the Resistance Conspiracy formation.
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...
Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era — Dan Berger (2014)
Dan Berger's history of Black prison organizing from the 1950s through the 1980s — the political base of the political-prisoner support tradition that PFOC's *Breakthrough* magazine covered most consistently. Includes substantial treatment of the BLA, the RNA, the Black Panther Party prisoner support work, and the Attica uprising.
Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman — Susan M. Reverby (2020)
Susan Reverby's biography of Dr. Alan Berkman — the May 19th Communist Organization / Resistance Conspiracy defendant, longtime PFOC ally, and movement physician who treated Marilyn Buck after the 1981 Brink's/Nyack action and went underground himself before being captured in 1985. One of the most detailed accounts of the political world Breakthrough magazin...
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...
Helen Keller, Her Socialist Years: Writings and Speeches
1967 International Publishers collection of Helen Keller's socialist writings, edited by Philip S. Foner. Reproduces the political speeches, articles, and letters Keller wrote across her four-decade career as a member of the Socialist Party of America (joined 1909) and later supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World — material systematically suppresse...
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...
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
Peter Matthiessen's landmark 1983 (Viking) book-length investigation of the FBI's war against the American Indian Movement on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in the 1970s, the 1975 Oglala firefight that left FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams and AIM member Joseph Stuntz dead, and the federal frame-up of Leonard Peltier. Held off bookstore shelves f...
Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left — Emily K. Hobson (2016)
Emily Hobson's history of the U.S. gay and lesbian left from the 1970s through the 1990s, with substantial treatment of the Lesbians Against Police Violence, the Lavender & Red Union, and the gay-and-lesbian organizing inside PFOC and the broader white anti-imperialist solidarity movement.
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...
Letters From Exile — Raymond Luc Levasseur (Marion Prison writings)
Collected Marion-prison-era writings of Raymond Luc Levasseur, United Freedom Front / Sam Melville–Jonathan Jackson Unit prisoner held in U.S. federal custody from 1984 to 2004 (and earlier in Tennessee state custody 1969–1971). Includes 'The Uprising' and Levasseur's letters from Marion, where he was held in the federal control-unit prison's special housing...
No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today's Movements — Hilary Moore & James Tracy (2020)
Hilary Moore and James Tracy's history of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC) — the late-1970s through 1990s anti-fascist formation that grew out of PFOC's tradition of anti-imperialist solidarity work and that became one of the most consistent U.S. anti-Klan and anti-Nazi organizing vehicles of the period.
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...
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Nick Estes's 2019 Verso history of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the longer arc of Lakota / Dakota / Nakota sovereignty struggle. Combines reporting from the 2016–2017 #NoDAPL water-protector camps with deep historical narrative running from the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty through Wounded Knee 1890, the 1973...
Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity — Dan Berger (2006)
Dan Berger's history of the Weather Underground and its post-1976 successor formations, including extensive treatment of PFOC's role as the above-ground political organization of the anti-imperialist white left. Indispensable for understanding PFOC's place in the broader anti-imperialist solidarity tradition.
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...