Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.

Exhaustively researched, Felber illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways–Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder–while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is a halting reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black Muslim communities.