Garrett Felber w/ M. Aziz, A CONTINUOUS STRUGGLE

About the Book

A Continuous Struggle is a political biography of one of the most important—if since forgotten—revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years.

Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. He is the author of Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.

Dr. M. Aziz, PhD, is a Black, Muslim writer, community member, researcher, and safety instructor. They are a scholar of movement and movements hailing the historically Black parts of South Jersey. A grandchild and student of the Black Power Era, they believe we need a vast toolkit to get free, from gardening to martial arts to therapy. They advocate for a future where our minds, bodies, and spirits are freerer. And they love hoagies, their Ummi, and the Princess of R&B, Aaliyah. An award-winning pedagogue, Dr. Aziz is currently an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Washington. Aziz’s first manuscript book project asks how martial arts contributed to Black Power organizing and shifting ideas about liberation, empire, and gender norms. Their future research projects include a choreographic text on Willi Ninja and a meditation on the weaponization of the term “safety” against young activists.

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