“We Are All Political Prisoners”: Martin Sostre, Biography, and the Political Uses of the Politicized Prisoner

In a 1974 documentary about Black Puerto Rican political prisoner Martin Sostre, he articulated what he saw as the difference between a political prisoner and a politicized prisoner. Having served a dozen years on a drug charge during which he converted to Islam and became a prolific organizer and jailhouse lawyer, Sostre saw himself as a politicized prisoner long before he was framed during the 1967 Buffalo uprising for owning a radical bookstore. Sostre’s contention that “we are all political prisoners” broadened an otherwise rarefied category to include all incarcerated people, regardless of their sentence. Yet his understanding of politicized prisoners as a more select group who matched their oppressed status with a political praxis signified the importance of political education at the center of his Black anarchist politics. This paper will explore the tensions and possibilities of biography as a genre when applied to a radical organizer who eschewed exceptionalism and individualism on one hand, yet also offered a framework for understanding his singular life as part of a mosaic of community organizing and broader international framework of state repression on the other.