Leading the Movement from Behind Bars: Rewriting the Struggle for Racial Equality in the United States, 1965–75

By looking closely at the American prisoner rights movement, and at iconic events such as the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, this paper will offer scholars an opportunity to rethink how they define and characterize the struggle for greater racial equality that arose in the U.S. after WW II and really came of age in the 1960s. To date scholars have wholly unappreciated the extent to which prisons were the site of some of America’s most important and most effective battles against racial injustice during this period. Time and again prisons were  the battlegrounds on which inmates fought feverishly and successfully to make the protections offered by the 1^st, 8^th, and 13^th amendments more meaningful and to make sure that Section 83 of the Civil Rights Statute of 1871 as well as the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1964, and 1965 were in fact enforced. Because prisoners were at the very forefront of the struggle for racial equality in the U.S., and not but a fringe element of it, this paper suggests the importance of writing them into broader narratives of that struggle. It turns out that prisoners were central players in this struggle and they offered it crucial leadership and vision even as it met increasingly formidable opposition. Focusing new attention on to the activism of inmates also allows scholars to rethink the wisdom that the American struggle for greater racial equality was largely over, for all intents and purposes gutted, by 1980. Although the movement had certainly lost momentum as well as much of its grassroots energy by this year, it hardly had died. Indeed it had merely changed venue. As this paper will illustrate, in key ways inmates actually inherited leadership of the American civil rights movement and became its standard bearer well into the 1990s.