The New Civil Rights Movement for Our Times: Ending Mass Incarceration

By Zebulon Miletsky, Ph.D.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I’m proud to talk about the Media & Marketing Internship programs we have undertaken at Stony Brook University. Martin Luther King said, “Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”  The UBFSF Marketing and Internship program is all about service.  We have had two interns successfully complete the experience through the career center and receive college credit through Africana Studies. They get great work experience while truly making a difference—in an important civil rights area—for today’s times. It has been a great experience and we are looking to expand it (possibly as a grant funded) internship in the future.

The internship program evolves out of a project, coordinated originally by Robert Chase of the Department of History, and myself, being from Africana Studies. It first evolving out of a reading group entitled “Global Carceral States and Networks: Racialized Policing, Mass Incarceration, and Migrant Detentions.”  Staring during the pandemic, the faculty reading group met via Zoom during Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 to discuss how racialized policing, mass incarceration, and migrant detentions and deportations constitute what the French theorist Michel Foucault named as a “carceral network.” We read and discussed emerging new work and followed contemporary, on-the-ground developments concerning the construction of carceral states and networks. 

For over two years, 16 faculty and graduate students gathered weekly to examine historical and theoretical perspectives on carceral systems and began to build a network of scholar-activists to address structural inequalities and systemic racism within the carceral ecosystem. Through these efforts, SBU developed the partnership with the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF), a non-profit founded by the incarcerated activist Ivan Kilgore, an incarcerated author who turned to writing and a life of the mind as an escape from his 23-hour-a-day isolation cell, with the mission “to create a culture of higher learning within these [incarcerated] communities.” In 2020-2021, Professors Chase and Miletsky worked closely with UBFSF to place a call for manuscript submissions from writers in prisons across the country. The response was truly amazing: over 100 manuscripts were gathered, including essays, poetry, articles, books, and pamphlets that reflect upon social, political, economic, and racial inequalities within underserved communities bound to the criminal justice system.

The project is also an outgrowth of a collaboration between Stony Brook University Professor of English, Susan Scheckel and a grass-roots organization known as HERSTORY, coordinated by Erica Duncan.  As stated on their website, “There has never been a time when Herstory’s founder and artistic director Erika Duncan wasn’t doing what she could to give voice to stories that might not otherwise have been heard.  Her early novels, A Wreath of Pale White Roses and Those Giants: Let them Rise, look at those who are trying to break out of silence and fear, while her portraits of writers (written when she was a contributing editor for Book Forum and collected in Unless Soul Clap its Hands: Portraits and Passages) touch on whatever brought each into voice. This search is picked up in her front page series for the New York Times Long Island Weekly, where for four years her portraits of Long Island writers, artists and musicians, thinkers, dreamers and doers appeared every month. She has published numerous articles in various journals and anthologies, among them explorations of mother/daughter and sister relationships, the art of effective listening and works about teaching writing.“ 

It is through their collection effort, and close collaboration with Scheckel, that we were able to offer so many works of incarcerated authors to the wider public.  All of these edited works will be available to the public sometime in 2024 in a digital “Living Archive” hosted by the Stony Brook University Library. The project was funded by a $224,000 grant from the American Council of Learned Societies “Sustaining Public Engagement Grant” which were “designed to repair the damage done to publicly engaged humanities projects and programs by the social and economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The project was coordinated within the Humanities Institute (HISB) at Stony Brook University (SBU), which serves as a vibrant hub for interdisciplinary collaboration, scholarship, teaching and public humanities initiatives at SBU. We were originally supported by a seed grant from the Center for Changing Systems of Power at Stony Brook University, but things didn’t really take off until Scheckel came on board. 

“What we’re trying to do with this project is to amplify the voices of people impacted by incarceration, to bring them into the conversation as we study, research and teach about topics related to incarceration in the US.”  Scheckel said. “These powerful writings have tremendous potential in the classroom, as they can create an emotional connection to the subject, convey a sense of urgency, increase empathy, and deepen our understanding of complex social issues.”

This public engagement project will have profound and long-lasting impact. For scholars and students of the humanities, it will further our understanding of mass incarceration and its collateral damage beyond the prison. The curricular component of the project supports the work of incarcerated writers while also bringing voices from the carceral ecosystem into diverse public arenas: new and existing courses at SBU; K-12 classrooms; community programs; training programs for social service and law enforcement agencies. The publication, curation, and dissemination of these narratives through our curriculum-building initiative will document today’s mass incarceration as a genuine crisis of American democracy, democratic practice, and racial equality.

We also worked with graduate students, who became “Graduate Fellows”–Ph.D. and MA  students from English, History and Africana Studies who worked actively on the project. Through their editing and wiring, they analyzed the relationship between marginalized communities, the archives, and the scholar by exploring how incorporating silenced voices in the curriculum can act as a form of resistance to ongoing oppression. This aligns with Ivan’s philosophy and vision of cultivating the reality that prisoners have the capacity to work in the professional areas of Higher Education.  The fellows, along with the co-directors presented at several conferences around the country.  Some of the topics they covered include: violence in the archives and the potential for historical violence against the subjects of our studies; citational ethics and the teacher-scholar duty to marginalized communities in diverse spaces like the traditional and non-traditional classroom; the power dynamics between people situated in academia and people impacted by incarceration and the role of activism in academia; creative approaches to the archive as a form of mediation and education; racial capitalism and the prison industrial complex; and the process of creating a grassroots “living archive” organized by people who are in prison today.

One of our first public events, “Teaching Beyond the Prison,” a pedagogy workshop provided a glimpse of the range of writings in the “Living Archive” — including poetry, fiction, autobiographies and essays — and illustrated how these writings can energize teaching in diverse disciplines. As stated in an article covering the event, “Graduate students Sarah Ahmedani, History; Anthony Gomez, English; Kara Pernicano, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Alexandra Velez, History, shared model assignments that incorporate manuscripts from the “Living Archive.” These students were selected as Carceral Research and Teaching Fellows, and their work on this project was supported by the CAS Center for Changing Systems of Power.”

To maximize the impact of our project among diverse audiences, we held three public-facing events. First, we held a community event with Long Island-based Youth Strong that brought the project directly to the impacted communities and encouraged their active engagement in the project. Second, a student symposium in December 2022 showcased the work of students who used the Living Archive in course-related or faculty-mentored research projects to provide a model of how the archive furthers student research and educational development. Our capstone conference, held in April 2023, brought together scholars, community organizers, writers (from the carceral ecosystem) to create a lasting network of scholars, activists and writers of carceral literature who shared ideas on the (scholarly and community) import of the project and its future directions. 

As stated in our final report, “Like the Federal Writers’ slave narrative archive held at the Library of Congress, our Living Archive will preserve testimonies of those living within today’s carceral ecosystem. As a digital public humanities project, the Living Archive provides a unique research resource for scholars and students of the carceral state. More than simply presenting the work of incarcerated authors, we have interacted with their written works in the archive through curatorial blogs written by our Carceral Studies Fellows that provide historical context, analysis, and societal import to make these writings more meaningful as a humanities initiative. This archive of the modern-day experience of mass incarceration will have tremendous value far beyond the grant period. To ensure lasting impact and longevity, the Stony Brook University’s special collections division of the library will maintain an open-access archive of the manuscripts.

One of the imperatives of this work is giving people who are incarcerated “a seat at the table”  by highlighting prisoners’ stories and engagement. We’ve had Career center support. We look forward to bringing in more faculty for media & marketing. Kilgore’s vision in founding the UBFSF was “to create a culture of higher learning within these [incarcerated] communities.”  This makes our initiative very much in sync with the pioneering ethos of Black Studies which sought to bring scholars into the prisons of America. This has also brought about a new way of thinking in the sprit of Dr. King who as a theologian and Pastor was quite concerned with America’s incarcerated.  

This has driven much of my won work and writing in my book, Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle, which enabled me to serve as a historian for the recent PBS American Experience film “The Boston Battleground.”  Although many consider the American South as the place where the struggle against Jim Crow laws, school segregation and civil rights took place, I argue that racism was just as deeply rooted in the North—and in Boston. Despite its reputation as the historic “cradle of liberty” and headquarters of the abolitionist movement, racial conflict exploded in Boston in 1974 in protest against a court order that desegregated schools by busing students in and out of previously segregated districts. As I have stated elsewhere, “Boston is a city of myths. It’s the nation’s cradle of liberty. Places like Boston Latin School, the first public high school, and Harvard, America’s oldest college, take on mythic power. And there’s the myth of northern liberalism that Martin Luther King Jr. talked about.”

In summary, we believe the “Writing Beyond the Prison” project will have lasting and far-reaching impacts as it empowers incarcerated authors and their families to illuminate, though their own voices and experiences, how we are all bound up in the wider carceral ecosphere—and how our awareness of that fact can bring us all closer to the ideals of justice and inclusion that are fundamental to a strong democracy. We do this at all levels within the university—faculty, graduate, and now with the addition of the internship program which I run, with undergraduates as well. For us, it’s all about “The Personal relationship” which we are able to cultivate between students, volunteers and the incarcerated themselves. The Media & Marketing internship program, working through the career center, helps develop career experience for students as we broaden horizons–building a bridge between students and America’s incarcerated. 

As Martin Luther King said in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And we believe the work we’re doing is helping to eradicate America’s continuing and ongoing struggle with racial justice. We hope you’ll join us.