Competing Masculinities

This chapter provides a rhetorical analysis of Live From Death Row (1995), Death Blossoms (1997), and All Things Censored (2000), three of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s essay compilations since July 2, 1982, when he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Officer Danny Faulkner and sentenced to death by Judge Alberto Sabo. All three books were published from death row at SCI/Greene Correctional Facility, where Abu-Jamal remained until 2011. This chapter examines how Abu-Jamal’s use of the Black Power vernacular marshals the testimony of black intellectuals and his skills as a professional journalist to build his ethos as a Black Power leader, despite the use of the term “cop killer” to circumscribe his penetrating observations about mass incarceration. Where Rap Brown’s interventions into the Black Power vernacular often center on his aggressive rhetorical style (the bad badman), Abu-Jamal’s use of the vernacular centers much more on journalistic observation (the moral badman) as he finds new ways to express the economic and political disenfranchisement that characterize black life, especially for the imprisoned. In his texts, Abu-Jamal uses anecdotes to discuss the trajectory of police brutality and the tremendous violence and torture endured by men on death row as evidence of the on-going crisis of the prison-industrial complex. Additionally, he situates himself within a history of black leadership by turning to historical black (male) leaders to inspire new members for the work ahead.

Introduction

This introduction discusses the beginnings of the “jail, no bail” strategy in the southern civil rights movement, introduces the Black Power vernacular as a critical optic of the book, and charts the ways in which jailing and imprisonment were central features of the black freedom movement from Greensboro to Black Power. This chapter also introduces the writings of Rap Brown (Jamil Al-Amin), Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur as the central texts for this rhetorical analysis. Finally, the chapter suggests that these extremely popular, though understudied, writings are useful spaces to understand how imprisonment occupied a contested terrain, used simultaneously for black liberation and for state repression.

Producing the Black Badman

This chapter begins with an examination of the political context and rhetorical politics of urban rebellion as Rap Brown augmented the Black Power vernacular after the Cambridge riots and the subsequent passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. To understand Brown’s interventions into the Black Power vernacular, this chapter examines the mobile, embodied performativity of black masculinity in Brown’s autobiographical manifesto Die Nigger Die! (1969), authored while Brown was under house arrest. Die Nigger Die! was phenomenally successful (due, in part, to its unsettling title), going through seven printings before being re-released after Brown’s murder conviction in 2002 by publishers at Lawrence Hill in Chicago. But because Brown’s vernacular style actually spurred the mass incarceration of black liberation activists, his memoir isn’t as concerned with prison conditions or resistance like Mumia Abu-Jamal’s essays or Assata Shakur’s memoir. His experiences with incarceration and repression focus more macroscopically on the ways in which white power creates the conditions for black repression and imprisonment. This chapter highlights Brown’s style, his performance as a black badman in games like the dozens, his understanding of the fragility of black boyhood and the politics of black masculinity, and his interest in both self-defense and violence in the text to understand the production of Black Power vernacular. Finally, this chapter considers Brown’s descriptions as the problems with both white culture and “Negro culture,” which causes the self-hate that makes black communities willingly submit to the nation.

Prison Power

This chapter traces rhetorical and political history of imprisonment before and after the birth of Black Power, focusing on major moments of activist imprisonment as well as movement discourses written from prison. In charting the role of prison in the movement, the chapter also discusses the emergence and legitimacy of Black Power as a slogan, as a theoretical device, and as a series of rhetorical strategies designed to be a particularly historical intervention into the stagnating discourses of “civil rights” and “law and order.” This chapter contends that incarceration became a major strategy used by both black activists and white conservatives during the Black Power era; consequently, the period following 1966 marked a new phase of Jim Crow as Black Power became a rallying cry against state repression. This chapter suggests that the legitimacy of Black Power as a term of art, as a series of vernacular signs, and as an organizing principle in a new phase of the black liberation movement, hinged upon whether the state or the activists controlled the frame and how closely it became associated with violence. Because the Black Power slogan and ideology were articulated by activists with extensive rap sheets as the state circumscribed their activism, Black Power ideology took up the relationship between state repression and incarceration as a place to excavate new arenas for the black liberation struggle, particularly in the memoirs of movement activists.

Conclusion

This brief conclusion suggests that in refusing to die, disappear, or be silent, all of these Black Power intellectuals continue to offer a voice of reproach for mass incarceration in the U.S. and beyond, linking the history of slavery to American military occupation abroad and to a larger policy of imprisonment throughout the world. In examining the Black Power vernacular within the context of the War on Terror, scholars might consider other political contexts after 9/11 that continue to shape the relationship between black resistance and the politics of incarceration.

Recovering Black Identity and History, Feminizing and Regenerating Black Power

This chapter analyzes the poetry and prose of Assata: An Autobiography and contextualizes the memoir within the revolutionary aesthetics Black Power vernacular and the political realities of northern Blue Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It examines the feminized rhetorical strategies in Assata that help to circulate Black Power activism. Like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Shakur situates herself as a leader and as a martyr using nostalgia for Black Power leaders as inspiration for the activism ahead. She uses black history as a rhetorical resource for new political action and highlights the importance of cultural nationalism. In addition, she commits herself to self-defense and Third World solidarity through a gendered articulation of the Black Power vernacular. Shakur’s vernacular is mobile, flexible, and global as she uses the history of slavery in the U.S. and colonialism abroad to explain the BLA’s resistance to “law and order” culture. Finally, she explains the historical and contemporary exigencies that prompt continued action, including police brutality, the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, judicial corruption, and false accusations of cop killing. Still in print, Assata demands a place for Shakur’s narrative among the prison manifestos of the Black Power movement.