Using the Laws of a Nation

In this episode we talk to author Garrett Felber about his book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, The Black Freedom Struggle, and the Carceral State which is out today, January 13th. 2020. The book is a political history of the Nation of Islam which centers the NOI and anticarceral organizing in the story of the postwar Black freedom struggle and the rise of mass incarceration.

Felber is an assistant professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American social movements, Black radicalism, and the carceral state. Felber was the lead organizer of the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference in December 2019, and is the Project Director of the Parchman Oral History Project (POHP), a collaborative oral history, archival, and documentary storytelling project on incarceration in Mississippi. 

Felber is also a co-founder of Liberation Literacy, an abolitionist collective inside and outside Oregon prisons. He also spearheaded the Prison Abolition Syllabus, a collaborative reading list published by Black Perspectives which highlighted and contextualized prison strikes in 2016 and 2018. Felber is also the coeditor of the Portable Malcolm X Reader with the late Manning Marable and is currently working on a biography of former political prisoner Martin Sostre.