Awards

• Winner of Columbia University’s Major Armstrong Award (United States).
• Winner of Honorary Citizen in the city of Paris France (France).
• Winner of Honorary doctorate in Law New College (United States).

Overview

Essential radical texts by enslaved, jailed, and imprisoned Americans, edited by renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and activist-scholar Jennifer Black. ""Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people's understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out.""-Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography ""Martin Luther King told us what he saw when he went to the mountaintop....But there's also the foot of the mountain, and there are also the regions beneath the surface. I want to try to tell you a little something about those regions.""-Angela Y. Davis, author of Angela Davis: An Autobiography Beneath the Mountain is a reader's guide for understanding the evolution of anti-prison tenets. This essential core of primary texts provides an arc of insurgent writings by dissidents and revolutionaries who experienced incarceration and state terror first-hand. With contributions from John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Crazy Horse, to Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Leonard Peltier, it also includes a previously unpublished communiqu from Angela Davis, written from jail at the time when she was forging the anti-prison critique that has since inspired a national movement. Beneath the Mountain offers a record of the historic foundations for the contemporary abolition movement. What emerges from these texts is an emancipatory vision that inspires the work being done today, a vision centered on organizing and solidarity as an antidote to repression. An invaluable resource for readers on both sides of prison walls, this compendium of resistance and hard-won vision will be essential to all who seek to develop an abolitionist critique and to further an understanding of the nature of repression and liberation.

Full Product Details

9780872869264

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Praise for Beneath the Mountain: ""The book is one-of-a-kind, a stunning and impeccably curated intellectual and political brilliance gleaned directly from the pens of rebels who have worked toward liberation from the bowels of the U.S. prison system.""—Robyn Maynard, co-author of Rehearsals for Living “Like America’s dungeons, this book is full of caged freedom fighters, unfree radicals, and outlaw intellectuals, whose words, smuggled from behind prison bars and cages, offer a beautiful literary anti-canon of liberation.”—David Correia, author of Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police ""This collection gives a compelling sense of insurgent spirits and critical minds enduring imprisonment and even facing death at the hands of powerful oppressors. These contributions have much to tell us about past and present realities that must be confronted. Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black must be thanked for this precious gift – an inspiring resource for activists, scholars, and all who care about social justice and human rights.""—Paul Le Blanc, editor of Black Liberation and the American Dream Praise for Mumia Abu-Jamal: “Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination  “Mumia is a soldier in the war for the soul of America. He is fighting the good fight with the same weapons his ancestors fought with: words.”—Nikki Giovanni, author of Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement  “Mumia Abu-Jamal forces us to confront the burden of history.”—John Edgar Wideman, author of Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone  “Uncompromising, disturbing . . . Abu-Jamal’s voice has the clarity and candor of a man whose impending death emboldens him to say what is on his mind without fear of consequence.”—The Boston Globe"

Praise for Mumia Abu-Jamal: “Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination  “Mumia is a soldier in the war for the soul of America. He is fighting the good fight with the same weapons his ancestors fought with: words.”—Nikki Giovanni, author of Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement  “Mumia Abu-Jamal forces us to confront the burden of history.”—John Edgar Wideman, author of Look for Me and I’ll Be Gone  “Uncompromising, disturbing . . . Abu-Jamal’s voice has the clarity and candor of a man whose impending death emboldens him to say what is on his mind without fear of consequence.”—The Boston Globe

Author Information

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a writer, broadcast journalist, and internationally recognized human rights activist. The author of thirteen books, Abu-Jamal holds a Master's degree in Comparative Literature and is currently working on his PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at University of California Santa Cruz. He is a political prisoner serving a life sentence, incarcerated at SCI Mahoney State Prison, Frackville, PA. Jennifer Black holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University where she taught for 12 years. Her research focuses on high-risk activism, state terror, criminal injustice, mass incarceration, and social movement theory. Black hails from a background in both academia and activism and has been collaborating on these two fronts with Abu-Jamal since 1993. She is based in State College, PA.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available