Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader

(Paperback)

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Essential radical texts by enslaved, jailed, and imprisoned Americans, edited by renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and activist-scholar Jennifer Black.

Martin Luther King told us what he saw when he went to the mountaintop....But theres also the foot of the mountain, and there are also the regions beneath the surface. I want to try to tell you a little something about those regions.Angela Y. Davis

Beneath the Mountain is a readers guide for understanding the evolution of anti-prison tenets. This essential core of primary texts provides an arc of insurgent writings by dissidents and revolutionaries who experienced incarceration and state terror first-hand. With contributions from John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Crazy Horse, to Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Leonard Peltier, it also includes a previously unpublished communiqu from Angela Davis, written from jail at the time when she was forging the anti-prison critique that has since inspired a national movement.

Beneath the Mountain offers a record of the historic foundations for the contemporary abolition movement. What emerges from these texts is an emancipatory vision that inspires the work being done today, a vision centered on organizing and solidarity as an antidote to repression. An invaluable resource for readers on both sides of prison walls, this compendium of resistance and hard won vision will be essential to all who seek to develop an abolitionist critique and to further an understanding of the nature of repression and liberation.

Reviews

Praise for Mumia Abu-Jamal:

Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era.Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Mumia is a soldier in the war for the soul of America. He is fighting the good fight with the same weapons his ancestors fought with: words.Nikki Giovanni, author of Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement

Mumia Abu-Jamal forces us to confront the burden of history.John Edgar Wideman, author of Look for Me and Ill Be Gone

Uncompromising, disturbing . . . Abu-Jamals voice has the clarity and candor of a man whose impending death emboldens him to say what is on his mind without fear of consequence.The Boston Globe

Author Bio

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a writer, broadcast journalist, and internationally recognized human rights activist. The author of thirteen books, Abu-Jamal holds a Masters degree in Comparative Literature and is currently working on his PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at University of California Santa Cruz. He is a political prisoner serving a life sentence, incarcerated at SCI Mahoney State Prison, Frackville, PA.

Jennifer Black holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University where she taught for 12 years. Her research focuses on high-risk activism, state terror, criminal injustice, mass incarceration, and social movement theory. Black hails from a background in both academia and activism and has been collaborating on these two fronts with Abu-Jamal since 1993. She is based in State College, PA.