University of North Carolina Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
Scholar Brittany Friedman begins Carceral Apartheid with a black and white photograph of her maternal grandmother. The year is 1939, and the place is the side of a highway in Southeast Missouri. Friedman’s grandmother, a sharecropper, has been evicted and stands beside her worldly possessions holding a child in her arms. Not shown are the other Black families who suffered a similar fate and are protesting with the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. When a group of poor white sharecroppers joined the protest, local landlords, alarmed by the possibility of cross-racial cooperation, asked the highway patrol to step in and disperse the demonstrators.
In the seven decades between the end of Reconstruction and 1950, more than four thousand lynchings occurred in twelve southern states, killings that were part of a culture of intimidation and terror directed at Black citizens. Over the course of the Great Migration (1910-1970), more than six million Black people left the South. They headed north and west, often discovering the same racial animus, urban segregation and white supremacist violence they were attempting to leave behind.
With its booming wartime industries and need for blue-collar factory workers, California drew more than 300,000 African Americans in the 1940s. Because of discriminatory housing practices, this influx typically found themselves relegated to economically distressed areas of cities like Los Angeles and Oakland. Until the 1940s, the latter had been a predominately all-white city. Black newcomers to Oakland found their hopes for a better life stymied by the same racialized segregation and violence they had experienced for generations. But there was one significant difference: a generation coming of age outside the South was less inclined to accept second-class status, and by joining Black revolutionary struggles such as the Black Panther Party, or becoming involved in the civil rights movement, they found a way to push back against oppression.
This context is important. As Black political consciousness emerged it was perceived as a threat by government institutions at the local, state and federal level. Black civil rights activists routinely faced violence from white civilians given a tacit green light from law enforcement agencies dominated by white people. In 1956, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover began surveilling Black leaders under the auspices of the infamous COINTELPRO program. Among the intimidation tactics employed were IRS audits, illegal wiretapping, and threatening phone calls; early targets of this program included Stanley Levinson, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. During this era of agitation and activism for civil rights, voting rights, and economic rights, riots erupted in cities across the nation. In the backlash that followed, prisons became disproportionally populated with Black people. Blacks affiliated with “militant” organizations like the Nation of Islam or the Black Panther Party were portrayed as a threat to white America. Bringing Black radicals to heel was the intent of bipartisan, tough-on-crime policies at the state and federal level.
What Black inmates experienced inside California prisons in the 1960s and early 1970s forms the bulk of the book. As Friedman makes clear with numerous examples drawn from her research, the machinations of the prison hierarchy at San Quentin and Soledad mirrored society in the outside world. Black inmates faced harsher punishments, the most degraded cells, isolation, and beatings from white guards often acting in concert with members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Inside the walls “white above all” was a bright line that brought immediate retribution for anyone who dared to cross it. But the dangers at San Quentin extended beyond violence. For dozens of years, the prison’s Chief Surgeon, Dr. Leo Stanley, performed procedures on inmates including sterilization, castration, and injection with foreign or animal substances.
Friedman documents the formation of the Black Guerilla Family, the prison arm of the Black Power Movement. A key intellectual figure in the BGF was George Jackson, best known as one of the Soledad Brothers. At that time, George’s partner was the controversial University of California academic Angela Davis. In addition to offering a means of collective self defense, the BGF was a source of revolutionary education for other Black inmates, and a link to like-minded groups outside the prison walls, including the burgeoning anti-war movement. The BGF issued manifestos condemning their treatment by the Department of Corrections, and also organized prison strikes. For all these reasons, the organization’s leaders were targeted by prison officials and guards. Knowing that George Jackson was a marked inmate, the group organized an attempt to break him out. The plot was compromised by snitches and undercover correctional officers and George Jackson was shot and killed on August 21, 1970. Less than one month later, inmates of Attica Prison in New York State staged a massive uprising.
Most of this history has faded from public consciousness. Archival material has been lost or destroyed, though Friedman was able to access some long obscured records concerning Adjustment Centers — the first solitary confinement units in California’s penal system and the precursor to supermax facilities like Pelican Bay which opened in 1989. Prison conditions in America haven’t improved. Many are grossly overcrowded, dangerous and rarely provide adequate treatment, education or rehabilitation. As the Equal Justice Initiative reports on its website, “Corruption and abuse of power among correctional staff runs rampant because prison officials are not held accountable for failing to protect incarcerated people.”
What connects Jim Crow segregation, the Soledad Brothers, the murder of George Floyd, and a system of mass incarceration that disproportionately punishes Black people? Is it the inherent inferiority and otherness of Black people or the entrenched mindset of white America?
