A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre

Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Garrett Felber for the virtual release event for the long-awaited biography of Martin Sostre—the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.

Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967.

Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey.

Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”

Get the book: https://www.akpress.org/a-continuous-struggle.html

Speakers:

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she served as Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014-2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California 2007). Recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), and a foreword to the English translation of Making the World Clean by Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths and MIT Press 2024). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) features her internationalist work. Honors include the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis) and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and AK Press.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuu8ylfmak

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org