Sublime

the papers of the Southern Conference Education Fund, is my mother talking in 1974 about the indigenous prison struggle, meaning Black Southerners recognizing that locking people up was a tool of social control.

In 1979, police officers chased thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman Arthur McDuffie on his motorcycle, claiming he’d made a vulgar gesture at them. When McDuffie toppled off the bike, police removed his helmet, beat him to death, and then replaced the helmet. My father used to have a copy of a poem about this event on his wall, titled “Who Kil

Tapson Mawere, a revolutionary intellectual in the fight for Zimbabwean independence,

Nnamdi Azikiwe was a miner in West Virginia, and as an activist in Nigeria, he stood with miners against colonial authorities.

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished.