Epilogue

This epilogue connects mid-century Black nationalist anti-carceral activism and the state’s response to the longer history of punitive policing and Islamaphobia.

Shades of Mississippi

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam deployed a series of tactics to fight for rights for incarcerated people. They used litigation, as well as They used direct action tactics such as sit-ins, hunger strikes, and occupations of solitary confinement, which anticipated the “Jail, No Bail” efforts of southern civil rights activists. These actions sought not only to neutralize the power of the cell but also to draw public attention to these groups struggles by eliciting violent reprisals from the state. These two simultaneous streams of activism—appeals to the Constitution and direct-action protest—operated as effective parallel strategies to win protections for prisoners under the law while challenging white supremacy and incarceration more broadly. The state responded with tactics such as prison transfers, confiscation of religious literature, solitary confinement, and loss of good time credit.

We’re Brutalized Because We’re Black

Although civil rights historiography has largely focused on the role of the courts in changing federal jurisprudence, the Nation of Islam used the courtroom as a political arena to build Black unity on the issue of police violence and across religious and political divides within Black and Latinx communities. Unlike the efforts of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund or the cases brought forth by Muslim prisoners, these trials did not seek policy changes or promote civil rights legislation. The Nation of Islam sought to shift the discourse of the trial through political theater and community organizing around a united platform against police brutality. This narrative of the Ronald Stokes trial, in which the LAPD indicted 14 members of the Nation of Islam on 40 counts of assault and resisting arrest, explores the relationship between the trial and both local anti-carceral activism and the national civil rights struggle.

Introduction

Describes how Those Who Know Don’t Say uses the NOI as a vehicle to explore forgotten sites and forms of Black struggle that confronted the carceral state during the mid-twentieth century. Reconsidering the place and scope of the NOI within the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in this way expands the boundaries of Black liberation struggles by revealing a more dynamic freedom movement in which objectives and strategies were always contested and debated within communities themselves, changing who we see as political theorists and agents of change, and expanding our spatial lens to include prison yards and courtrooms as sites of activism.

The State the State Produced

In most histories of Black Power, as the Black Nationalist, anticolonial, and anticarceral frameworks developed by the Nation of Islam throughout the civil rights period shifted from margin to center, the Nation of Islam itself inexplicably recedes from view. This chapter highlights the continuity between these ideas, formations, and strategies and the period in which they flourished and spread belies state narratives of nihilism, rupture, and disorder, which served to justify further carceral buildup. From the creation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, to Watts, to the mysteries surrounding the assassination of Malcolm X, the chapter looks to the longer history of activism and anti-carceral thought launched by the Nation of Islam during the 1960s and afterward.

Whose Law and What Order?

Throughout the 1950s, the Nation of Islam encountered increasing surveillance and harassment from local and state police on the streets as well as inside prisons. As Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam became a force within the Harlem community, they seemed poised to submerge their political and religious differences in the interest of forming a local Black united front. An alliance of Black Nationalists, liberals, and labor activists was forging an ambitious and sweeping political coalition in Harlem around a platform of Black unity. Though the resulting Emergency Committee would not last long, it raises lasting questions about postwar Black social movements and the development of the carceral apparatuses that suppressed them.

The Making of the “Black Muslims”

The idea of the “Black Muslims” as a hate group, or an example of the emergent falsehood of reverse racism, was facilitated and propagated by carceral officials. It was pliable enough that law enforcement could suppress Muslim practice in prisons and police local mosques by claim- ing that the NOI was a subversive political group in the guise of religion while offering civil rights organizations the language to dismiss it within the Black freedom struggle. But this suppression and surveillance often helped grow the organization, and Muslims found creative ways to practice Islam and express Black self-determination and anticolonial solidarity, even in the state’s most repressive spaces.