Captive nation: black prison organizing in the civil rights era

Dan Berger reconsiders 20th century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration.

Throughout the civil rights era, radical black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in America.

Arguing that the prison was the central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s to the 1980s, the book traces the rich history of this struggle, which established prisoners as symbols of blackness at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux.