BY REAL YOUTH INITIATIVE Instagram: @realyouthinitiative Cover art & zine design: Jaime Dear Special thanks to Garrett Felber and Project NIA CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE THE ZINE FROM BURNING BOOKS OR CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD A PDF

BY GARRETT FELBER AND STEPHEN WARD In November 1974, the radical priest Daniel Berrigan sent a request to the philanthropists Carol and W. H. “Ping” Ferry for funding to support the political prisoner Martin Sostre.1 The Ferrys regularly supported grassroots movements and political activists, including George Jackson and Angela Davis. Berrigan, who himself had only recently been released from prison, was part of a growing effort to free Sostre from a forty-one-year sentence. Sostre was a revolutionary anarchist and accomplished jailhouse lawyer. In 1965, he opened a revolutionary bookstore in Buffalo, New York that became an important site during the summer rebellion of 1967. Two weeks later, he was framed for allegedly selling a fifteen-dollar bag of heroin to a police informant. Over the next eight years in prison, Sostre continued to appeal his case while winning landmark legal victories over political censorship, solitary confinement, and the rights of prisoners to due process. He also organized chapters of the Black Panther Party and prisoners’ unions, established radical study groups and lending libraries, and published several revolutionary newspapers. CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD A PDF

BY STEVIE WILSON The questions James and Grace Lee Boggs, Daniel Berrigan, and W. H. “Ping” Ferry raised regarding prisons, prisoners, and revolutionary struggle continue to stump activists and organizers. As stated earlier by Garrett Felber and Stephen Ward, “The questions raised and positions taken remain alive today.” These questions are most important: Who is behind bars? Who deserves support? What is the price of solidarity, or what must imprisoned people do or not do to receive support from outside allies? The answers to these questions help guide our movement and direct our energies. We need to take them seriously. CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD A PDF

BY GARRETT FELBER Martin Sostre had been appealing his case since the day he was convicted in 1968. He tried to hand his legal appeal to the judge on his way out of the courtroom. Five years later, after numerous protests and petitions, the state’s key witness—a police informant who helped to frame Sostre on heroin possession charges—finally prepared to recant his testimony. But between Sostre’s solitary confinement cell and the courtroom in Buffalo stood a group of seven guards insisting he submit to a mandatory rectal “examination.” Sostre resisted, as he had for years on principle, arguing that these were attempts by the state to destroy the last vestiges of his personhood and spirit. For this refusal, he was beaten and subsequently charged with assault himself. The attack was the first of eleven he sustained during his final three years of incarceration. Sostre was a revolutionary thinker, organizer, and community educator who outlined a radical vision of individual freedom and collective liberation from conditions of oppression and captivity. With clarity of purpose, he sought to create an egalitarian society free of coercion in which all people would enjoy the world in common. As an internationalist, he understood white supremacy, capitalism, militarism, and colonialism as interlocking global systems of power and regarded prison as a concentrated manifestation of the repressive state. Dismantling these structures, he believed, was necessary to bring a new world into being. At the height of his prominence during the 1970s, Sostre was one of the most well-known political prisoners in the country. On August 12, 2015, Sostre passed away at the age of ninety-two. In accordance with his wishes, his family did not publicly announce his death. Four years later, the New York Times belatedly eulogized him as a “pioneering fighter for prisoners’ rights.” But Sostre was also a key progenitor of contemporary Black anarchism and abolitionism, even though his contributions to these areas are virtually unknown today. Now at the centennial of Sostre’s life, it is important we understand his ideas and commitments through his actions. “A dynamic deed is something that really mobilizes people,” he said. One of the central principles of his unique political ideology, developed during nearly two decades in prison, was the relationship between collective struggle for liberation and each person’s fight to secure their own bodily autonomy and individual freedom. “The struggle for liberation,” he explained, “ultimately boils down to the individual exertion of his or her faculties to the fullest extent.” Sostre considered individual resistance to state violence the most concentrated form of revolutionary struggle, making his protests against sexual assault in prison and his assertions of bodily autonomy simultaneously necessary for his own personal freedom as well as symbolic of a worldwide struggle. His refusal to submit to state-sanctioned sexual assaults remains one of his most significant and lasting legacies. It is especially urgent, as millions held captive in prison and jail face similar routinized violations today. To appropriately assess and learn from Sostre’s life, we must recognize the relationship between the freedom of one person—or a single act of resistance—and the collective liberation of all oppressed people. READ MORE ON INQUEST

Roberto Sirvent: You’re currently writing a book about Martin Sostre. What led you to pursue this project? Garrett Felber: A decade ago I was beginning research for my dissertation on the Nation of Islam’s organizing in prisons and I came across a letter to Malcolm X from a Muslim at Attica Prison. He was requesting Malcolm X testify as an expert witness in an upcoming trial concerning the religious rights of imprisoned Muslims. In the letter, he mentioned others being tortured in solitary confinement, one of whom was Martin Sostre. I looked up his name and found a barebones Wikipedia page documenting his frame-up and political imprisonment years later in Buffalo for running a revolutionary bookstore. But there was nothing about this earlier period or his life after getting out of prison in 1976. I wrote him a letter asking to interview him. What I got back blew me away. He sent an envelope full of documents, including a revolutionary Black newspaper he wrote from solitary confinement in 1971. Also enclosed was a newspaper article from twenty years later, with a photograph of Sostre and co-organizer Sandy Shevack seated with children at a daycare graduation in Paterson, New Jersey. “The enclosed documents contain more information than I could possibly convey to you via email or phone,” he wrote. We exchanged letters briefly, but he had a stroke shortly thereafter and was no longer able to write. I stayed in touch with his family after he passed away in 2015 at the age of 92, and continued to learn more about his life and the impact he had on prisoner organizing and Black anarchism. I began to appreciate what a unique political thinker and revolutionary strategist he was, one still little known even within many anarchist and abolitionist spaces. In the article about the daycare center he co-founded, Sostre is quoted: “People dream. Sandy and I objectified our dream.” Part of what struck me was his reluctance to narrate his life and his preference to let his actions speak for him. The more I learned about him, the more I understood the significance of what he sent me, and the act itself. It felt as if he had entreated me to do the labor of understanding his life through his work rather than simply his words about it. I hope this biography does justice to that life, which is no small task. RS: What influence did Martin Sostre have on the Black anarchism movement? GF: It would be difficult to overstate Martin Sostre’s influence on the development of Black anarchism. Virtually any genealogy of contemporary Black anarchism leads back to him. Sostre is the first self-identified anarchist that I know of who defined his anarchism principally through its meaning to Black liberation. He came to this political framework through his specific life experiences: as a Black Puerto Rican growing up in Depression-era Harlem; as a prisoner who was politicized by Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist Julio Pinto Gandía and helped launch the first organized prison litigation movement as a Muslim in the Nation of Islam; as the owner of a revolutionary bookstore that was targeted following the 1967 rebellion in Buffalo; as a plaintiff in landmark lawsuits against the state; and as prisoner of war organizing for revolution from solitary confinement. Although he did not identify as such until 1973, he traced his anarchism to the streets of Buffalo during the 1967 revolt. In fact, he later wrote that he saw himself as “an anarchist by nature all my life.” His Afro-Asian Bookshop on Jefferson Ave. was at the heart of the rebellion. It was a site of politicization and refuge for people in the streets during the uprising, and according to Sostre, a small group of anarchists met there each night to discuss what was happening outside. “The full impact of . . . how beautifully fulfilling anarchism is didn’t hit my consciousness till the long hot summer of 1967,” he reflected. Sostre understood anarchism as a natural human tendency towards spontaneous organizing that was crushed and coopted under hierarchal, dogmatic, party-line Marxist and Black nationalist formations. He regularly read, recommended, and gifted books by Berkman, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Voline, but he was still reluctant to identify himself with anarchism because he worried it would not resonate with poor young Black people, who he saw as the “detonators” of the revolution. He was also troubled by the apparent tension between anarchism and Black national liberation: “I am reluctant to categorize myself as an anarchist because although my philosophy of action and direct violence (along with other acts) against the State to seize and ‘liberate’ areas in various parts of the country and to use these ‘liberated areas (fortified communes?) as bases from which to ‘wage our war of liberation,’ the objective of this struggle is to establish a ‘black nation’—which negates anarchism.” Nevertheless, a year after writing this, he began calling himself a “revolutionary anarchist.” He seems to have settled on “revolutionary anarchist” (my emphasis) not because he thought there was some form of anarchism that was not revolutionary, but because he understood “the word ‘revolutionary’ is in” and wanted something that Black and Latinx youth could identify with. The foundation of Sostre’s anarchism was his experiences within the Black radical tradition, particularly in prison. It should not surprise us, then, that the two most important bridges between Sostre and contemporary Black anarchism are Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and Ashanti Alston, both of whom Sostre impacted both directly and indirectly from inside. Sostre mentored Ervin directly over a two-week period in 1969 when the two overlapped in federal detention in Manhattan, after which Ervin became an anarchist, a jailhouse lawyer, and even modeled his defense committees after Sostre’s. Alston read Sostre’s writings, seeking them out at the Tamiment Library after he was released in the 1980s; he later organized on behalf of political prisoners with Sostre in the 1990s. Both emphasize how important it was for them to come across an anarchism rooted in Black liberation. “I did not need the traditional canon on anarchism,” Alston said. “I needed to hear it from some Black folks who I had a lot of respect for.” All three—along with Kuwasi Balagoon—became important forebears for contemporary Black anarchism. It was no coincidence that all of these revolutionaries—Sostre, Ervin, Alston, and Balagoon— were political prisoners who moved through the Black Panther Party and/or the Black Liberation Army (BLA) at some point. I think persuasive arguments can be made for the influence of both organizations in this lineage as well, as well as the centrality of the prison as a crucial site of Black anarchic formations. RS: How did Sostre connect everyday forms of individual resistance to larger collective struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and anti-Blackness? GF: This question immediately brought to mind a passage from a letter Sostre wrote a year before he got out of prison: “The line is drawn: either you are a cooperator with the oppressor in your own oppression and dehumanization, or you are a resister. If you won’t stand up for your own personal liberty, human dignity, and self-respect, all that rhetoric about liberating other people is just bullshit rhetoric. The struggle for liberation begins with the individual whenever and where she or he is oppressed.” Sostre believed everywhere was a site of struggle. He organized wherever he was. When imprisoned, he sued the state, formed prisoners’ unions, helped people with their legal paperwork, and organized study circles. When outside, he opened a revolutionary bookstore, transformed abandoned buildings into affordable housing and community spaces, and organized tenants against landlords. For liberation to begin with the individual, as he suggested, individual resistance must be connected to the liberation of all oppressed people. Here is one example from Sostre’s life: For six years at least, Sostre refused rectal “examinations” when leaving or entering solitary confinement. Prison officials claimed these “cavity searches” protected against contraband. Sostre understood they were meant to dehumanize and degrade, and he resisted to maintain his dignity and personhood. But his defiance was also linked to collective liberation. He organized strikes against these sexual assaults, raised consciousness about them through lawsuits and in courtroom testimony, and linked his individual resistance to global national liberation struggles. Drawing a parallel to North Vietnam, Sostre described his refusals as a one-person version of the National Liberation Front (NLF): “Mine is on a personal level, whereas the Vietnamese were fighting on a national level. They were fighting against the strongest and most developed and richest country in the whole world. That’s equivalent to me fighting against the whole goon squad in the solitary confinement unit at Clinton prison. I want to show the forces and powers that I use—physical, mental, political, and legal—in order to eventually subdue the enemy and register victories, and at the same time keep from getting killed.” He considered his resistance to sexual assault and assertions of bodily autonomy and identity as simultaneously necessary to his own personal freedom as well as symbolic of the worldwide struggle. RS: Can you please share a little about the upcoming “Martin Sostre at 100” event taking place in March? GF: Thank you for highlighting this. The event is a celebration of Martin Sostre’s life and legacy on what would have been his hundredth birthday, hosted by the New York Public Library on March 22-23, 2023. The first evening will be held at the Harry Belafonte 115th Street Library, which was Sostre’s neighborhood branch growing up. We’ll be screening the short documentary film Frame-Up! The Imprisonment of Martin Sostre (Pacific Street Films, 1974) and hosting a discussion with some of Sostre’s comrades and defense committee organizers—Jerry Ross, Antonio and Sylvia Rodríguez, Sandy Shevack, and more—moderated by William C. Anderson. The second night, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, will feature a keynote conversation between abolitionist educator and organizer Mariame Kaba and imprisoned intellectual and prison (dis)organizer Stevie Wilson. We’ll also hear a panel on the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition with Laura Whitehorn, Jose Saldaña, and Masia Mugmuk, moderated by Orisanmi Burton. Finally, we’re organizing an exhibition on Sostre’s commitment to radical political education which will include a life-size replica of the Afro-Asian Bookstore-in-Exile (AABE). The AABE was a continuation of Sostre’s revolutionary bookstore in Buffalo during his incarceration and lasted for nearly three years at the University of Buffalo student union and in various iterations on college campuses across the country. Keep an eye out all March—which we at the Martin Sostre Institute (MSI) will be commemorating as “Martin Sostre Month”—for other ways to learn about his life and work. RS: As you were conducting research for the book, what were some ways that people described the influence Sostre has had on them? GF: I love this question! Before I answer, I want to acknowledge what an incredible experience it has been to learn from so many people about Martin Sostre’s life and its lasting impact on them. I’ve conducted around 70 interviews over the last three years, and it has profoundly changed my thinking and organizing. I am grateful to them in so many ways. One striking continuity across Sostre’s many decades of organizing on both sides of prison walls was his emphasis on young people’s revolutionary capacities. Part of the reason I was able to interview so many of his comrades is that many of the people he impacted were half his age when he knew them. From their stories, a portrait emerges of someone dignified, uncompromising, and magnetic with a disarming smile, sense of humor, and gentle humility. The impact he had varies depending on the stage of life and context in which people knew him. But one of the things that stood out is how much influence he had despite sometimes brief interactions. Ervin is one example. Through just two weeks together in prison, Sostre changed the trajectory of his life. Many young defense committee members also remember learning from his example despite only meeting in the courtroom or corresponding sporadically due to censorship. While many referred to him as a symbol, they did so in an embodied way. He was a living example to them of what it meant to lead a life of continuous struggle. Sandy Shevack said Sostre taught him the difficult, daily work of revolution. It is not just showing up to a protest or engaging in an action; it means being there day after day to do the unglamorous labor necessary to build the world we want within the shell of the old. Sostre believed that only through demonstrating material structures and tangible results could people be won over to struggle. He often summed this up through a phrase I love for its simplicity: “If we do it right, it will end up right.” There are no shortcuts to liberation. READ MORE FROM BLACK AGENDA REPORT

BY STEPHEN WILSON Prior to my incarceration, I had never heard of Martin Sostre. Despite his being one of the most well-known prisoners in the US during the early 1970s and being the first US political prisoner to have his case adopted by Amnesty International, he was unknown to me. And most imprisoned people today. This should not be. As Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, former political prisoner and mentee of Martin Sostre wrote: “He almost singlehandedly won democratic rights for prisoners to receive and read revolutionary literature; write books; worship alternative faiths; to not be railroaded in unfair disciplinary hearings and held indefinitely in solitary confinement; and to have cultural studies programs.” As a currently incarcerated prison (dis)organizer and abolitionist who is deeply involved in political education and mutual aid work, I have benefited greatly from the struggles Martin spearheaded, the battles he fought and the victories he achieved. My first encounter with Martin was via a zine: The Prison Letters of Martin Sostre. After reading this zine, I was angry and disappointed that I had never heard of him before. But more importantly, I was inspired. I found a role model, someone who had effectively organized and built community behind the walls. Martin was a practitioner, a person of action. He lived his theories, correcting them as he walked. This fact is not only an inspiration, but also a challenge. As my knowledge of his work and life increases, my abilities and capacities as a (dis)organizer do too. Martin has taught me to always be a student, a noticer. His continued openness to change and growth significantly impacts my praxis. He was never dogmatic. Throughout his life, he embraced different philosophies, imbibing what was beneficial to the struggle and discarding what wasn't. He had been a member of the NOI, a Black nationalist, and anarchist, and remained a practitioner of yoga. Like another inspiring Black political prisoner, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Martin taught me to remain humble, to never believe I have it all figured out. He taught me to always be a student. This is how one remains open to growth. Along with always being a student, Martin has shown me how to be a good noticer. He has shown me how to enter a community, find out what is going on, what the people need, what they want and how they are currently meeting those needs and wants. He taught me to look around and take in the scene before diving into the work. Too often, organizers enter communities believing they already know the problems and solutions. They create top-down solutions and don't listen to the people. Martin has taught me that we must put the people first. Get to know them. Listen to them. Take direction from them. We are there to assist, to empower the people. He taught me the value of noticing and learning from the people. This lesson has made my work more impactful and effective. Another lesson Martin has taught me is to make things easy for the people. The populations we are building with are often struggling to survive, struggling to make ends meet. When Martin opened his bookstore in Buffalo, he created a space for people to learn and build community. Money wasn't an issue for the people. They would sit for hours and read without purchasing materials. He made sure the materials were accessible and provided a learning space. All one had to do was show up. He made political education easy for the people. I try to do the same. The most impactful lesson Martin taught me was the power of collectivity, the importance of community. He knew that our strength was in our relationships. Wherever he was, whether in general population or solitary confinement, Buffalo or New Jersey, he was always building community. He was continually reaching out and bringing people in. He knew, like J. Sakai said, you can be the best firefighter in the world, but you cannot put out the fire alone. It was the strength of his relationships that won his freedom. He created community on both sides of the walls. None of us will singularly create a world we can all thrive in. As Audre Lorde wrote, "Without community, there is no liberation." Each day, I have to answer to Martin's ghost. I have to ask myself if what I am doing would make him proud. As I said before, Martin was a practitioner, a person of action. He knew that revolution isn't something you feel, it is something you do. I hear him asking me: What are you doing? A major part of my work is extending his legacy. And the best way to do that is to practice what he has taught me, being an example for future revolutionaries. READ MORE FROM THE BLACK AGENDA REPORT

BY ALEXANDRIA SYMONDS Martin Sostre was jailed twice on drug charges and spent nearly 20 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. In that time, he transformed himself from “a street dude, a hustler,” as he described himself, to a pioneering fighter for prisoners’ rights. “For the first time, I had a chance to think, and began reading everything I could — history, philosophy, and law,” he once said, as quoted in a 2017 NPR report that detailed his life. He taught himself the law, organized inmates and challenged harsh prison conditions, filing lawsuits from behind bars in the 1960s and ’70s — a decade before the prisoners’ rights movement began growing — that led to legal decisions ensuring greater protection for inmates. He successfully sued for the right to practice Islam while incarcerated, which his jailers had denied him and other prisoners. And he protested some standard prison practices as dehumanizing, including censorship of inmates’ incoming mail, rectal examinations and the use of solitary confinement as punishment. By the 1970s, Sostre’s activism while incarcerated on a drug-sale charge, which he maintained was a police setup, would make him an international symbol. He garnered the support of Jean-Paul Sartre, prominent civil-rights advocates and Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “He was raising issues of solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment long before anyone was even granting that prisoners have a constitutional right to anything,” Garrett Felber, a historian at the University of Mississippi who is editing a collection of Sostre’s writing, said in a telephone interview. READ MORE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY PETER JAMES HUDSON For many on the Black left there is an enduring ignorance concerning the theory and practice of anarchism. This ignorance is born of two grotesque but resilient caricatures–a caricature of anarchism, and one of anarchists. In the first instance, anarchism is viewed less as a positive political philosophy than as an anti-political practice, one whose language is violence and whose ideology is chaos, mayhem, terrorism, and the wholesale annihilation of formal, bourgeois society. In the second instance, anarchists are seen as invariably, unrepentantly, and insufferably white. These caricatures of anarchism and anarchists find brute form in contemporary discussions and discourse surrounding Antifa. The representative of Antifa (commonly referred to through the Trumpist pronunciation “AnTEEfa,” rather than “Anti-FA”) is portrayed as a cartoonish arch-villain: a black-masked, graffiti spraying, Molotov-cocktail throwing white boy—the hoodie-wearing white street punk of nihilistic religion whose ritualistic ceremony marries wanton destruction of private property with irregular sneak attacks on the police. This vision of Antifa, and of that mysterious cult known as Black Bloc , is shared by both liberal and conservative commentators, both of whom conveniently forget that Antifa stands for “antifascist,” while neglecting to mention that the opposite of anti-fascist is, of course, fascist. The association of anarchism and anarchists with both whiteness and violence has its roots in anarchism’s origins in nineteenth century Europe. Yet it was only the latter category, that of violence, that received any notice at that time. As with other radical critiques of and alternatives to capitalism, anarchism came into being in response to the great societal transformations wrought by the emergence of industrial capitalism and, with it, the grim arrival of the European working classes. Anarchism’s fundamental principles are found in the root of the word itself, from the Greek anarchos, meaning “without a ruler.” Figures like Pierre-Joseph Prudhon in France and Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin in Russia wrote against class hierarchy, the authoritarian, exploitative, and anomic forces of capitalist society, and the violent, dispossessive tendencies of private property. The anarchists advocated libertarianism as the free and creative expression of the individual made possible by the removal of the restrictive and oppressive forces of church, state, and capital. This is not the present-day version of libertarianism associated with right-wing free market individualism lost in the fever dreams of crypto-currency speculation. It is a libertarianism whose ethical foundation is conjoined with mutuality, communalism, non-hierarchical social relations, and cooperative economics. Indeed, anarchists often drew inspiration from their view of the autonomous and collectivized pre-capitalist social worlds of the European peasant and they envisioned a world of shared abundance, excess, and wealth. READ MORE FROM THE BLACK AGENDA REVIEW

The Nation of Islam’s Prison Organizing, the Carceral State, and the Black Freedom Struggle BY GARRETT FELBER In October 1962 the New York Amsterdam News ran a shocking photograph of a black man, with his arms and legs in shackels, carrying a stack of books into a courtroom. The headline read “Shades of Mississippi!” A press release with a similar title excoriated the hypocrisy of Nelson Rockefeller and other northern white liberals for publicly criticizing Mississippi governor Ross Barnett while silently condoning the chaining of prisoners in New York: “Sir, do you really think that other Negroes in this state are dumb enough to believe that you and these other white so-called liberals are really for the civil rights of Negroes in the South, while the HUMAN RIGHTS of Negroes here in YOUR state are being trampled underfoot?” If “Ross Barnett is to be blamed for civil rights violations in Mississippi, Nelson Rockefeller must take the blame for human rights violations in New York!” CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD A PDF ALSO AVAILABLE AS A ZINE

BY LORRIN ROSENBAUM AND JUDITH KOSSY One man's courageous struggle against censorship and the inequities of the American legal system recently ended in victory. Martin Sostre, a black man sentenced in 1967 to 35-41 years for allegedly selling $15 of heroin finally received executive clemency. Tried in the aftermath of race riots and amid public furore, Sostre contends that he was framed for his political views and the literature he sold as the owner of the Afro-Asian Bookstore in Buffalo, State of New York. Few cases in recent history raise as many crucial questions of jurisprudence for courts in the United States. The issues involved — pre-trial publicity, jury selection, bail, recantation by the prosecution's chief witness, and brutal treatment in prison — make Sostre's experience a paradigm of judicial problems. CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD A PDF

BY MARIAME KABA When I mention the name Martin Sostre, what comes to mind? For many, his name will conjure no images or words. Yet he was a man who made a real impact in terms of prisoner rights in the United States. Martin Sostre was the owner of the Afro-Asian Bookstore in Buffalo, New York. On July 14, 1967, the police raided his store and arrested Sostre on “narcotics, riot, arson, and assault charges.” After the riot and arson charges were dropped, Sostre was tried by an all-white jury and convicted of selling $15 worth of heroin. He was given a sentence of 31 to 41 years in prison. This short summary does not of course do justice to Martin Sostre nor to his legacy. Prior to the 1967 police raid, Sostre had already spent a dozen years between 1952 and 1964 locked inside Attica prison on a narcotics conviction. He was known to the police in Buffalo and suspicion surrounded him because he had converted to Islam (in the 50s while he was incarcerated) and was also outspoken against the injustices of racial and class oppression. READ MORE FROM PRISON CULTURE

BY DIANE HOPE AND WARREN SCHAICH On July 14, 1967, Martin Sostre, owner of an Afro-Asian bookstore in Buffalo's Black ghetto, was arrested and charged with inciting to riot, arson, and possession and sale of narcotics. Unable to raise $50,000 in bail (later reduced to $25,000), Sostre remained locked in the County Jail until his trial. On March 7, 1968, eight months later, the arson and riot charges had been dropped; he was convicted by an all-white jury for selling $15 worth of heroin and sentenced to prison for 31 to 41 years. One hour later he was in prison, where he remained until Governor Hugh Carey of New York State granted clemency to Sostre on Christmas Eve, 1975. CLICK BELOW TO DOWNLOAD A PDF