“Individual Acts of Resistance Can Lead to New Terrains of Struggle” Garrett Felber on the Life of Martin Sostre

In this conversation we talk with Garrett Felber about their latest book A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre. 

In discussing this new political biography, we cover Sostre’s ideological and political journey, history as a jailhouse lawyer, his forms of organizing practice, and the ways that people supported his campaign for freedom from political imprisonment. We talk about the influence of Great Depression era Harlem, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalism, Marxism-Leninism, national liberation movements, armed struggle, Women’s Liberation, and Anarchism on Sostre’s political thought and practice. Although much of what we know about Martin Sostre has to do with political letters and writings during the time of his incarceration, Felber also shares insights that few know about Sostre’s life, community organizing, and institution building on the outside.

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.

Yesterday we hosted Garrett Felber along with Russell Shoatz III on a livestream where we talked about some of the resonances between Martin Sostre’s life, political thought, and approaches to political prisoner defense work and that of Russell “Maroon” Shoatz and we also discussed CURBfest which is expanding to the West Coast for the first time this year. 

Tomorrow Thursday the 29th we will host a livestream on Sundiata Jawanza’s Freedom Campaign including a quickly approaching parole hearing. We encourage all of you to go to the website and send letters of support for his release. The website says that letters were due on May 19th, but there is still just a little time if you can get a letter in the mail today or at least submit one electronically or contribute to the legal support fund that would be great. 

There are a number of other initiatives we want to share related to this episode, the campaign to free the Mississippi 5 which Garrett Felber mentions in this episode and the exoneration effort for Martin Sostre and his codefendant who is still with Geraldine (Robinson) Pointer. Links for that are in the show description.

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