Hartmut Schmidt (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A demonstration in San Francisco in support of Martin Sostre and other prisoners, November 1970.
How much can a white college professor’s life have in common with that of a Black anarchist who spent the best of his adult years in prison? This is what I asked myself upon reading Garrett Felber’s A Continuous Struggle: The Extraordinary Life of Martin Sostre, which charts the life and political legacy of a jailhouse lawyer and prisoners’ rights activist, alongside the radical historian David Roediger’s memoir, An Ordinary White: My Racist Education. Though Sostre was a Black New Yorker who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, and Roediger, a white Midwesterner born in 1952, the courses of their lives each pivoted on the role of racism and Black self-expression and achievement within a society that claws back against every advance of Black Americans.
Roediger’s story is perhaps the more straightforward of the two. Born in 1952 in Southern Illinois, a few hundred miles from my own hometown, he was the only child of an alcoholic blue-collar father and a teachers’ union member mother. From a young age, he grasped the significance of living amid Southern Illinois’s “sundown towns”—white municipalities that ordered Black people to leave after a certain hour, sometimes signaled by a loud whistle.
Roediger excelled as a tennis star in his youth, and went on to play tennis at Northern Illinois University while also playing and coaching in St. Louis during summer breaks. After college, he landed in Chicago amid a curious political moment: The great movement energy of the 1960s had faded, but meanwhile, a huge push for radical education was emerging. He gravitated first to a post-Maoist collective, and then to another bookish crowd including youthful surrealists, ancient “Wobblies,” radical union veterans, and the like.
Roediger found a political home in 1980, when Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, a radical publisher that had been closely associated with Socialist Party circles during the 1910s, came back to life in new hands. He quickly became a jack-of-all-trades, printing flyers, taking stacks of books to public events, and ruminating with the mixed crowd there, young and old, about what to publish and how to get the books out to readers.
Inspired by the radical artistic and political project established in Paris by André Breton and others during the 1920s, the local surrealists mounted occasional exhibits of their work in Chicago and elsewhere, issued pamphlets and journals, and offered a general worldview to those interested.
Roediger’s niche lies in recovering vital memories of Chicago’s unique radical history, including the Haymarket Incident of 1886, the saga of the Industrial Workers of the World, and an assortment of local race-related political and cultural projects. He also has a unique perspective as a white member of a mixed race family, although he chooses to reveal very little about his personal life. Throughout his career, race has remained at the center of his concerns. He writes that Race Traitor, a now-defunct abolitionist journal by white radicals who sought to abolish whiteness itself, may be his favorite publication.
Martin Sostre, raised in far more difficult circumstances, had little good fortune throughout his life. Growing up with Puerto Rican-born parents in Harlem, he acquired his political education “on the street,” but notably also in and around East Harlem’s now-forgotten Club Mela—a social gathering spot which offered basic community support in addition to culture, cards, music, and dancing. Little more seems to be known about Sostre’s life until his forties, by which time he was in prison.
Author Garrett Felber seeks to fill in the blanks. A 1917 wartime provision of the Wilson Administration gave Puerto Ricans limited citizenship, thus making them eligible for Selective Service. They flocked to the mainland for jobs and assorted benefits, second only to African Americans during the extended moment of the Harlem Renaissance. Until his expulsion from the United States in 1927, the Black nationalist community leader Marcus Garvey led fellow Caribbeans to take part in the booming social and cultural upsurge. Sostre recalled being “too restless” to take part in the political activity, but he watched and listened. He claimed that the example of his own father, a “talking Marxist” who took no action, discouraged him politically. Instead, he said, it took a series of incarcerations on drugs and other charges in three New York State facilities to wake him up.
AK Press // Fordham University Press
Resisting mistreatment by prison guards evidently directed by administrators, Sostre was repeatedly subjected to various abuses, including stints in solitary confinement. In response, he became a Muslim. In the prison context, Felber writes, Muslim practices provided Sostre with self-discipline and the only available opportunity for political education. His study of Islam recalled to Sostre the Black nationalism on the streets of Harlem during his boyhood, with differences blurred over. He formally joined the Nation of Islam in 1956, though he insisted later that “the religious part” had never interested him. In 1964, after repeatedly appealing for parole while reading with other prisoners and practicing yoga, he was finally released after twelve years in prison, and moved to nearby Buffalo, New York.
On the streets, he joined forces with a handful of other radicals to launch a radical bookstore called the Afro-Asian Bookshop. Through his work with the store, Sostre met with, taught, and learned from scores of different radicals in his own way. He soon opened a satellite store in another part of Buffalo, while the expanding New Left was surfacing at the University of Buffalo nearby. Just a year prior, in 1964, the visit of a House Committee on Un-American Activities had prompted University of Buffalo students to protest in large numbers for the first time in the university’s history. As was the case elsewhere, the teach-ins on the Vietnam War brought a new wave of enthusiasm, leading to the establishment of a new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter. But the wave of political mobilization brought police trouble Sostre’s way one night in June 1967—the “long, hot summer” of national unrest—when a Black protest erupted at his bookstore.
The defense of the store and of the formerly incarcerated Sostre gave white and Black activists something local to work on together. After weeks of large-scale protests, Sostre himself became an anarchist, as he recalled later. It wasn’t the talk-fest that organized people, he realized, but rather action that gave them a sense of something more being possible.
On July 14 of that year, police arrested Sostre on conspiracy charges, beat him with a blackjack, and sent him to the Erie County Jail, where he organized a massive protest of prisoners. After a much-publicized show trial and the subsequent formation of a large Free Martin Sostre Movement, he was sentenced to up to forty-one years in prison and sent to Attica Correctional Facility, where he had previously served time. During this time, the Afro-Asian Bookshop in Exile (AABE)—a pop-up continuation of Sostre’s bookstore—carried on his struggle for political education, while distinguished Black leftwing journalist William Worthy wrote regularly about Sostre for The Boston Globe. For perhaps the first time, Sostre became an important, recognized figure in the prisoners’ movement as well as the Black movement at large.
Meanwhile, the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party (WPP), which had been on the scene in Buffalo during the summer of 1967, led an initiative called the Martin Sostre Defense Committee, and in so doing, played an important role in his personal and political drama. The group’s alliance was a bit curious, as the WWP—a small group founded by former members of the Socialist Workers Party during the low ebb of the 1950s—had been increasingly looking to China and even North Korea for inspiration in the global struggle against capitalism. No one ever accused the WWP of being internally democratic or measured in their rhetoric—but they worked hard on behalf of prisoners and reaped the publicity.
Despite his relationship to Marxist groups, Sostre declared himself to be an anarchist, by which he meant that direct action—not education, or even propaganda—stirred ordinary people into believing that change could take place. In the context of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, it seemed to be so. Throughout the early 1970s, Sostre’s defense movement gained visibility and support from across the country, and in 1975, he was granted clemency after the state’s main witness against him recanted his testimony.
Seeking to build a nationwide prisoners’ movement, Sostre traveled and spoke widely, sometimes sharing the stage with Angela Davis. A short documentary film about his trials and incarceration, Frame-Up! (1979), was viewed by thousands among a new generation of activists. He worked to create the Juvenile Education and Awareness Project (JEAP), which actually succeeded in organizing more than a hundred young people in rehabbing structures in Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey. True to Marcus Garvey’s dictum that Black people must own land and property to free themselves, Sostre sought to transform the rehabbing initiative into a movement to rebuild neighborhoods shattered by suburbanization, including highway relocation and so-called urban renewal.
All this could be described as a later version of SDS’s 1960s-era, civil rights movement-based vision for community organizing and empowerment. But the barriers had, if anything, grown more formidable. While managing a building in Passaic, Sostre wrestled a gun away from a distraught tenant, and watched, horrified, as the gun went off. The incident did not result in any serious injuries, but it terrified him into going underground, until he was eventually charged with and acquitted on attempted murder charges in 1987.
He had married in the meantime, and seemed to be on his way to a happy personal life—something almost entirely lost to him until his legal vindication. Old age found him a regular in the Columbia Law Library, as some of his protégés continued community organizing, while others worked in grass-roots environmentalist organizations. Asked to speak at a public gathering in Buffalo in March 2005, only a few blocks from the site of his original Afro-Asian Bookstore, he appeared still lively at eighty-two. He died ten years later.
Sostre had lived as a prisoner, insightfully grasping that Black America was in a larger sense a prisoner, always under the watch of an unfriendly set of authorities. “Blackness” was for Sostre, as for David Roediger, the nut to be cracked, still.