Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader

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Frederick Douglass, and Crazy Horse, to Assata Shakur, Malcolm X, and Leonard Peltier, it also includes a previously unpublished communiqué from Angela Davis, written from jail at the time when she was forging the anti-prison critique that has since inspired a national movement.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.

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.